@DabeDotCom@social.linux.pizza
2026-08-21 13:07 UTC
Here's the latest in my continuing tirade of Examples of Apple's UI Decline (iOS Edition)
I saw a post that included a picture with a snippet I wanted to capture... Say it was a group photo, and I wanted to crop out everything but my own face.
The fastest process would have been to screenshot (volume+power) and crop there, but then the resolution would have been degraded to the level of my device screen, and the crop would have made the resulting image even smaller; I naturally wanted to preserve as much detail as possible.
So instead, I did "Long-Press » Save Photo" and opened it in Photos... When I went to "Edit » Crop" it defaulted to "Preserve Aspect Ratio" — now, there's the little "Rectangles" button to open the "Original / Freeform / ..." selector, but its button was neutral-colored, which to ME should suggest "Aspect Ratio Control" is *OFF* (I suppose it meant, "The Aspect Ratio Control UI Element is hidden." But you don't really need to report that state, because if it's open, I can plainly *SEE* it, but I digress.)
Anyway, one click to toggle Aspect Ratio— er, visibility of the Aspect Ratio control. But it's still locked! Now I have to target Yet Another region of the screen to switch to "Freeform"
Screenshots default to freeform (which can make sense; screen sizes are all over the map), but have no way to lock/select a given aspect ratio; Photos default to locked, and require a non-trivial combination of buttons and side-scrolling menus to unlock.
So much for Consistency and Intuitiveness... «sigh»
IMHO, Freeform should be the default. But maybe long-pressing the disclosure button could open a drop-down menu, for One-Touch control; and maybe make a long-press on the crop handles (or, while dragging, Double-Back-Tap) to engage/toggle Aspect Lock.
Lastly, say I "Freeform" a particular region, then want to lock that *NEW* custom aspect ratio? "Original" isn't right, and there's no "Current"
The UI fails Larry Wall's Perl Principle: "Make the Easy Things Easy, and the Hard Things Possible"
Replies (0)
No replies.