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Dear Steve Lemay

Dear Steve Lemay,

Please consider paying some attention to fixing the user interface problems Jony Ive and Alan Dye have made during their years.

This list is a mix of general interaction problems, performance issues, inconsistencies, missing feedback, data-loss bugs, and seemingly minor annoyances. These are the things I happen to encounter in my own workflows every day. Another user would produce another list, and that’s what worries me. No single person can even keep track of all the problems anymore. User interface quality has decayed at every level, from fundamental interaction design to tiny details that used to be polished.

A matter of honour:

Fix scrolling and interaction during drag and drop. Mac has been famous for its great drag and drop support: everything stayed interactive during drag and drop. Now it works only sometimes. In Music, if I drag a new song and try to scroll the list to put the song in a particular place, it would not scroll. In Finder, if I drag a file, it usually lets me scroll, but no longer lets me press Space to open folders.

Fix drag and drop to the Dock according to Fitts’ Law. After the Dock has been moved from the screen edge, clicking the Dock icons at the very edge still works, but drag and drop to the Dock icons now requires precise aiming. The very fact that clicking still works means that somebody hard-coded this sloppily instead of actually architecting the hit area to extend to the screen edge.

In Liquid Glass, stop providing feedback on touch when the touch is not actually doing anything.

Text input on Mac:

When a typing suggestion appears, and I continue typing the very suggested text, the suggestion should not disappear. Let’s say I mean to enter the word “something”. I type “som”, the system suggests “ething”. If I miss the suggestion and continue typing “e”, the suggestion disappears. This happens all over the system including email and Safari address bar.

Fix text selection, where pressing ↑, ↓, Shift ↑, or Shift ↓ would sometimes stop extending selection for no reason.

Keyboard layout switching should be instantaneous on Mac. It has been painfully slow forever, this one is not Ive’s fault. When you switch layouts and start typing, a few characters may get entered in the previous layout.

Keyboard layout switching order should be predictable on iPhone. It makes no sense and feels even worse than random. When you have three layouts installed, layout 1 is active and you want to switch to layout 2, it somehow “guesses” to switch to 3 (why?), then back to 1 (why!?) and only afterwards, to 2.

Text input on iPhone:

iPhone Keyboard has been slow to open and slow to type for many years. Sometimes it gets slightly better, sometimes slightly worse, but there is no reason for it not to be absolutely instant all the time.

When moving the text caret freely with the Space bar, it would sometimes land in a completely random place after I had positioned it exactly where I wanted. The same with adjusting selection.

When you select a piece of text (usually in Notes app) while the keyboard is not visible, there is no way to delete or cut it. So you have to tap to reveal the keyboard, which resets the selection.

When I tap in a text field, show the Cut / Copy / Paste controls immediately, instead of randomly between “immediately”, “in 1 second”, “never”, or “show some other set of controls”.

When pasting with Universal Clipboard, stop showing the dialog box with fake “pasting” progress bar after the text has already been pasted anyway.

Finder:

Fix space bar not opening folders during drag-and-drop, as mentioned earlier.

Fix free space not updating for hours in the Status Bar.

Fix displaying “0 items” in the Status Bar when there are actually items.

Fix “Loading” sometimes displaying in folders right over the item which have long loaded.

Fix preview pane forgetting to show or update file measurements.

Fix the Enter key not working in the “Rename files” dialog.

Fix Search not finding files that are in iCloud, while displaying them without any problem.

When I rename a file, don’t rename it back to its previous name for a second and then rename to what I wanted, while animating the file around the screen like crazy. Just immediately rename to what I wanted and don’t animate anything for God’s sake.

When I drag a file from Safari or Mail onto the Desktop, show it there immediately, not after a three-second delay.

Safari:

When I type an address, then press Enter, then change my mind and press Escape, don’t erase the whole address, just stop loading! I just want to fix a typo and press Enter again. How could any sane person come up with the idea to erase the address on Escape?

Just always remember what I typed into the address bar. Even if the website is not responding, or I try to move the tab to another window, or whatever happens. Don’t be confused, it’s just...