Annoying Technology

The reason I dug into the translation settings in the first place was this popup – it keeps coming up after dismissing it. Not every time, but frequently enough to be really annoying. There appears to be no way to disable it.

Your browser does not support the video tag. I never again want to hear a single word about the Windows settings mixing different generations’ UI styles. (This is in the as-of-writing latest macOS version 27.0.1, which is still an inexcusable crime against taste. [The weird artifacts in the video are courtesy of macOS’ screen recording functionality – it’s not in the actual UI.])

A story in three screenshots: What a weird requirement. Of course the two “different” languages were “English (US)” and “English (UK)”, despite me never having explicitly configured the latter – I assume that Apple just presumes this based on geo-location when you set Siri to English while in Europe? Five minutes later, first hurdle overcome: how big is this download? How long will it take? How fast is it downloading? Five and a half hours later, absolutely zero indication if anything is…

Your browser does not support the video tag. Got it, thanks.

I couldn’t use the app, so I followed their instructions and clicked “Update WhatsApp.” But no! I got that horrible pop-up, urging me to “try again later”! So which is right? I quit the app in frustration and lo, when I tried again later, I found it had updated. At least it was free (what a bizarre disclaimer)! I also really like the capitalization on the “native” dialog. “Check For Updates process is already running”, beautiful. Thanks to long-time reader Benji for the submission!

I signed in to the App Store but not iCloud on my iPad. When I opened the Settings app and tapped iCloud in the sidebar, I was greeted with the blank screen shown in the attached screenshot. OS version: 27.0.1 (latest as of now). I reentered this page / reopened the Settings app / restarted the device many times and it always behaved the same. Thanks Fuchen for the submission!

I guess iPadOS didn’t get the memo about menu icons yet. Thanks Fuchen!

Why?! At least it shows an actual error message in case of just hiding the toggle, or flipping itself back on. But just saying that it’s not possible is such a terrible user experience. Explain to me why this dependency exists. Is it somehow using the contacts to verify who manages the Screen Time settings? Surely that must just be using the iCloud Family data and not something as unreliable and user-changable as the address book? Of course I’m the only person on this iCloud account, family,…

Now that I already wrote about Backblaze for another reason, I’ll also finally take a moment for a different rant related to their software. This screenshot is almost a year old, because I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this post – it can’t really be visualized. (In the time I procrastinated on this post, there’s been a different shitstorm that I luckily don’t need to care about personally.) As already indicated in my last post, Backblaze very much has a “hide the details” approach to…

Speaking of Backblaze and System Settings, though: this beauty is fresh of the presses in 27.0.1 – probably more Backblaze’s “fault” than Apple’s, given how extremely non-native their Java app is, but still. What a mess. The Backblaze preferences themselves also had this highlight: You might not even see it at first, but this window has tabs on top. Six of them, actually, each with a full word as title. When you click into this black hole of UI elements, they unfold and show up normally (until…

All these screenshots are a couple of weeks old – I took them while my personal laptop was still holding out on 15.8, when reproducing something I had encountered on my work machine which had already been forced into macOS 26’ ugliness. The header photo above is a bonus bug which I only encountered while trying to reproduce the actual problem I wanted to highlight here. I can’t say that I encountered this again since, but what a bizarre stroke of “luck” that exactly when I specifically needed…

Thanks to the power of Apple Intelligence I’m not missing any phishing emails from a bank I’ve never communicated with and a @gmail.com address.

I’m not sure what’s sillier, asking for the Date and Time, or having the user submit the App version, in an unknown format while you are in the in-app browser of said app with no way to look up the version string. At least they didn’t validate the format, so I could submit “I’m using the in-app browser and can’t check” there.

Every time Claude Code uses the Chrome MCP it adds a new tab group, but it never cleans up after itself. This was of course already reported many times in the 5000+ open issues Claude’s GitHub.

Trying to give Apple money is not always easy. I’ve later found out (Through Reddit of course, not through some helpful error message from Apple) that the your Apple Account’s 2FA phone number needs to be of the same country as your developer account…which doesn’t make any sense.

I’ve started seeing this more and more (using the latest version of iOS 26) lately. It happens across various apps, so it is probably an OS issue: The area where the keyboard would be is completely opaque with a solid color. Tapping there doesn’t do anything, and the rest of the UI just scrolls behind it as it would with the actual keyboard. Oddly it does not seem to happen when leaving a screen with the keyboard open (i.e. a failure to properly hide the keyboard when it should go away), but…

For more than a year now 1Password has a bug where it auto-locks itself every ~10 seconds on the machine you are connected to via screen sharing…but only if “High Performance” screen sharing is selected. This has also been discussed on the 1Password Forums already. I almost don’t want to know what kind of weird macOS edge case that bug hits.

Even when the tab bar is collapsed, the thumb is still inexplicably un-grabbable if it’s below a certain threshold in the viewport. Although it’s hard to be sure if it’s actually broken or just a “skill issue” when the visible touch target is less than half a millimeter wide. (As it is on my 13 mini…) This is hard to show, I tried recording a video – but without seeing the finger itself it’s just nothing happening or the UI jumping around as the phone misinterprets it as dragging the entire…

It’s almost impressive what a miserable, useless piece of crap the Shortcuts app remains. First off: No actual concept of versioning or upgrades for shared shortcuts. Sharing shortcuts happens via weird iCloud URLs rather than being an actual aspect of the system. So to update a shortcut, do you just add it again? No indication of what that will do before you press the button. Will it error out? Will it create a duplicate? Will it update/replace the existing one? Alright, just risk it – now iOS…

Your browser does not support the video tag. Hold up. I thought Liquid Glass was supposed to make UI elements not be in the way of my ✨content✨?

Setting aside the fact that I needed to sign up for an account before I was even able to enable Bluetooth on my new Denon speaker, this screen in its app was funny: The Update Later button remained disabled. I waited for several minutes, switched to other apps and back a few times to give it a chance to update (the button state, I mean) but no dice. Not a big deal because I could just update later by… not updating now. If I had actually needed the app as opposed to just using the speaker as a…

The two cardinal sins of displaying image attachments on social media or instant messengers – cropping and overlays. Even my most normie friends these days have learned to send a “might be cropped” warning alongside photos or screenshots where important details are not right in the center. Because we’ve all been burned often enough by some smart algorithm that had to shave 20 pixels off, just so the result fits the beauty ideals of some idiotic design instead of being actually useful in the r...

Call me crazy, but isn’t Siri is kinda… suggesting… that I do in fact have Slack, YouTube and Overcast on my phone? Meaning that those should be search terms that have results? (Search was actually just completely broken until I rebooted – nothing showed any results.)