dewme

There’s plenty of questionable content on YouTube but the good and very useful content far outweighs the not so great stuff by a huge margin. I’ve found YouTube to be an excellent source of how-to videos that describe how to put things together and take things apart when it comes to a lot of tech gear, automotive, audio components, etc. I’m also very fond of things like music videos and concert recordings from the 1960s to the present day. 

The Settings app has always been challenging. While Apple has made much needed improvements over several releases, it is still quite baffling and lacking a common schema or recognizable hierarchy. Are all settings organized by functionality like Connectivity, Storage, Passwords, Peripherals, etc. Yes and no. There is some notion of functional organization for things like Notifications, Accessibility, and Privacy & Security, but then there's a bunch of stuff organized by feature such as Focus, Siri and Spotlight, Touch ID and Password, and Game Center. The General settings hierarchy appears to be a dumping ground for putting settings that don't fit the weird mix of hierarchies that exists at the uppermost levels. The same can be said of pretty much everything under the User/Apple ID (soon to Account) tree. It's simply a mess, especially at the levels below iCloud. It's half organized by features activated through subscription.

Why aren't all connectivity related settings placed under a common root called something like Connectivity? Why aren't Wi-Fi, Network, Bluetooth, and Private Relay all placed underneath a common connectivity root? Yeah, Private Relay is a paid enhancement with iCloud+, so just gray it out if the user isn't entitled to it. Don't hide it under Account related settings. Is Wi-Fi not considered a network? 

Why is Advanced Data Protection not part of the Security & Privacy hierarchy? Same thing with Hide My Email.

Why is Touch ID and Password not under Account settings or Security and Privacy? Plus, there's a second root called Passwords only two spots away. Hey, why not leave that banana peel right there where it be stepped on so easily? 

I'll stop here because there are way too many points of confusion and randomness to pick on each and every one. One blanket statement I would add is because the Settings app is so convoluted, confusing, and disorganized Apple could, as an act of mercy for its current users, consider allowing more than one sortation option to organize settings in the UI. I'd take a peek at 1Password's sorting options as a pretty good example. Every trip down the Settings path should not be a journey into the unknown. Things like most recently used, most frequently used, and date of access provide a way for users to implicitly establish breadcrumb trails to where they have been before. Things like this won't solve every problem and may be pig lipstick, but they may reduce some of the confusion for some users a little bit, which is a tiny step in the right direction.

I've been faced with very similar issues to what we see in Settings in applications that I have developed and worked on. This is a common challenge. As an engineer and architect I learned that software development engineers and coders are, as a group, often not particularly good at creating excellent user experiences and user interfaces for non-engineer users. This is not derogatory in any way whatsoever. Through experience you need to learn when to wave the white flag and call in the experts. I have no qualms about waving that flag. Common challenges require the expertise of those who know how to go about solving problems in the domain of interest because they keep facing similar problems time and again. This applies to pretty much every problem domain, from carpentry to neurosurgery. The Settings app is exposed to a massive number of users from all walks of life. Being "good enough" or "not bad" or "it doesn't suck" is not acceptable at Apple's position in the world. I'd say that Settings today is in the "it doesn't' suck" category, which is a step up from where it was. But everyone has their own opinion.

Settings needs the attention of UX/UI experts or a team of UX/UI experts who have intimate knowledge of how users interact with user interfaces, workflows, tasks, etc., that are presented in the Settings app on every Apple product that has human interaction. The UX/UI experts should have the final say on what's acceptable and what is not by applying their knowledge, skill, expertise, connections with other members of the development, sales, and product support teams, and by applying verification methods, with feedback, to solving problems of this nature, knowing that perfection is unachievable. While Apple has made significant improvements to Settings over the years, it's still nowhere near where it needs to be, and I'm not talking about cosmetics or aesthetics at all. A great UX/UI team will always find a way to blend the user experience, look & feel, and aesthetics of an app together in a way that make sense and truly connects better with a greater number of users. 

dee_dee said:

dewme said:

The AI based ad blocker sounds like a compelling feature. However, I fully expect that those who benefit from selling ads will come up with their own AI to block the ad blockers. Blocker versus anti blocker. Full on AI wars lie ahead. This should come as no surprise since none of the ad blockers I've tried over the years, including 1Blocker, are fully effective. Plus, a number of websites are already detecting the presence of an ad blocker and refusing to show the content. 

Maybe this is the time for Apple to reconsider building their own gateway/router. If they built their own gateway/router they could put their Eraser technology at the head of your WAN connection where it can serve as a supercharged Apple Pi-hole. Besides being a tasty sounding network appliance It could also be a convenient place to stick a HomeKit gateway with support for all of the networks support by Matter and Thread. No more need to hide matter/thread support in things like Apple TVs and HomePods, where it's always seemed like a weird mix of functional responsibilities. Speaker is a gateway too? Okay.

That going to pretty tough considering Apple controls the browser.  As long as Apple is not manipulating the DOM is going to be impossible for the website to know if anything is being blocked. 

It depends on how and where the ad blocking takes place. If it's built into the browser then yes, the websites won't know that they're being blocked. But if the blocking is done in an extension like AdGuard the website can detect the blocker.  Here's an article that describes how some websites detect ad blockers:  https://tms-outsource.com/blog/posts/how-do-websites-detect-adblock/

I've been generally impressed with the built-in ad blocking in Vivaldi, which is built on Chromium. There are sites that are littered with blank blocks in Safari when my ad blocker extension is turned on. The ads may be blocked but the real estate area where they would be hosted is sometimes still occupied with blank content. With Vivaldi and other browsers that have built-in ad blocking that actually works, there are no blank areas and the page renders normally and free of blocked ads. 

Ad blockers like Pi-hole operate based on DNS resolution to block certain IP addresses. In the case of Pi-hole there is a community of contributors who maintain and update the list of IP addresses that resolve to ad content and the Pi-hole has a script to periodically get the updated block lists. You could do much then same thing yourself by editing the Hosts file on your computer, but you'll be stuck in a permanent game of whack-a-mole, much like we are now doing with phone number and email address blocking on our Apple devices.

ihatescreennames said:

Which is another example of how, for all that the EU says it demands choice for users' sake, the whole Digital Markets Act is more choice for choice's sake. Ultimately, the changes forced on Apple will be of more benefit to businesses than to users. 

Read on AppleInsider

Right. People are always saying things like “more choice is a good thing!” until they need to shop for paint. Who doesn’t love having to go back and forth looking at samples that are so close to each other that if they are held 5 feet apart the differences are indecipherable?

Remember the good old days of going into a place to buy a stereo and having to choose between 25 different receivers, choosing a CD player from a handful of different vendors that each had multiple options of CD players available, deciding on an amp and then listening to your choice of music on the plethora of speakers that were available all while being told there were more they could provide that weren’t currently in stock? What a great time!

Personally, I don’t know anyone that has mentioned they wished there was more choice in the web browser market. As the article mentions l, most people will make that choice once and never think about it again. 

I loved the HiFi listening rooms and having knowledgeable sales people who knew something what they were selling. Personally, I think everything should just settle on gray paint for everything, haze gray to be more precise, but I do get your point about focusing on things where choice really matters and makes a real difference that is meaningful to real consumers. Last time I checked, grand dad wasn't going on a slather inducing rant about being locked into WebKit. 

But this gets back to the point that these EU regulators are creating a synthetic little world where all these esoteric things that normal humans don't give a rip about are establishing the pretense for a preemptive nuclear strike for stuff that only matters to themselves, their bankrollers, and their little fiefdoms where they are King for a day. They are taking huge leaps of self created faith trying to tell us what we want when we are quite content and happy to keep on keeping on with what we've got. We have lives to live. This crap doesn't even register on our give-a-crap-o-meter.  

Notice how those who are identified as being grievously impacted by their contrived transgressions are never asked to weigh in on the issues in question? Sure, they'll cozy up to some little man-troll like Epic's hermit kingdom leader to get their finger on the pulse of the nation and react based on a minute sample taken from those who have a bone to pick with Apple, Google, etc. Totally open loop and without scrutiny, feedback, rationale, or tapping into actual public sentiment that would largely kick all of these regulators and their special little friends to the curb. I just hope they never have to deal with actual problems that affect the masses. Their synthetic little world of self importance will crumble. 

jimh2 said:

VictorMortimer said:

Apple's 30% is highway robbery.

Once Apple is forced to allow normal software installation on iDevices, I won't care what they charge.  As far as I'm concerned, they can charge 99% on their app store, and I wish they would, it would encourage developers to pull their apps off of it and distribute from their own websites.

But since Apple still doesn't let us install software normally, I'm looking forward to the EU punishing them.

You really have no clue as to how the selling of anything works. With your logic Walmart would not be permitted to apply their overhead costs (taxes, insurance, rent/mortgages, compliance, employees, travel, maintenance, training, etc.) to their items. If Walmart can buy a bike for $50 they should have to sell it for $50, which would at a loss.

Apple will win as the software tools to create an App are not free and $99 is a token amount that assumes they will make money off of the App Store. 

It is safe to assume if Apple added a setting to block 3rd party app stores the vast majority of users would select it. The EU is catering to a bunch of grifters with Spotify being the largest. Were I Apple I would drop the price of Apple Music to $0 and choke Spotify out of business.

Apple’s $99 per year fee for developers is the deal of the century for anyone who has done professional software development on Windows. I recall spending north of $1500 USD for individual MSDN professional versions. The lowest subscription price for MSDN professional is around $45 USD per user per month. Enterprise subscriptions are $250 USD per user per month.