• Arne Mart (unregistered)

    Not to mention the iOS bug where a recurring local notification would send your device into a reboot loop, because someone didn't realize that there is no month 13.

  • Me (unregistered)

    Troll bait? Watched the video, don't understand the problem. Yes, the plus key didn't respond at times. It didn't make the click sign and didn't update the display. Wouldn't call that broken. Seen similar issues in other places. Can't move forward before the animation plays out.

  • Oliver Jones (google)

    Tough crowd, these WTFers!

  • Foobar (unregistered)

    This word "honorable", I do not think it means what you think it means.

  • Josie (unregistered)

    I'm still on iOS 10.3.3 and the bug exists. I wonder if it's been around since inception

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    "when they saw odd results, they started chucking some sleep() calls in there until the errors went away. " -- Alas, an all too common WTF.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    What makes you think it's the junior dev that created the calculator app is to blame rather then the senior dev that wrote the UI toolkit?

    I would need to slow down the video but I wonder if the + button has "released" by the time it's pressed again. If this theory is correct then I assume (never having worked with iOS devices or their frameworks) the application would never see the + button click/press between 2 and 3 and thus it's not the apps fault.

  • What? I'm not giving you my name. (unregistered)

    You should buy the "Calculator PRO Version" which allows you to input values 10x faster.

  • Quite (unregistered) in reply to TheCPUWizard

    Well what they do here, if the autotests fail, is disable the tests, and leave it up to the beta testers, sorry, I mean the customers, to find the bugs.

    And then of course it's the developers' fault for not finding all the bugs in their code.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Bob

    It's possible to trigger the bug by tapping the calculation with just one finger, so from the user's perspective, yes, of course the + has been released. And ultimately the bug is not that the UI is slow, but that it re-orders or drops some of the events received from the display.

    • tap-start on "1"
    • tap-stop on "1"
    • tap-start on "+"
    • tap-stop on "+"
    • tap-start on "2"
    • tap-stop on "2"
    • tap-start on "+"
    • tap-stop on "+"
    • tap-start on "3"
    • tap-stop on "3"
    • tap-start on "="
    • tap-stop on "="

    becomes:

    • tap-start on "1"
    • tap-stop on "1"
    • tap-start on "+"
    • tap-stop on "+"
    • tap-start on "+" (or dropped, it's impossible to tell)
    • tap-stop on "+" (or dropped, it's impossible to tell)
    • tap-start on "2"
    • tap-stop on "2"
    • tap-start on "3"
    • tap-stop on "3"
    • tap-start on "="
    • tap-stop on "="

    If you slow down a little, it gets all the events AND in the right order.

    Addendum 2017-12-06 08:57: nodebb sucketh donkey balls. Where did the stars in front of those lines go?

  • JiffyPop (unregistered)

    I am fascinated that there is more than one way to get the answer: 1+23+45+6 = 12+3+4+56 = 75

  • Simon Clarkstone (unregistered) in reply to Bob

    From what I can see (right-click video and set playback speed to 0.5), the button doesn't register a tap while its fade-out animation is still playing. The "+" between the 4 and 5 is a bit off-centre and might have missed the button but the "+" between the 2 and 3 just plain got lost.

  • Chronomium (unregistered) in reply to Simon Clarkstone

    Ugh fading animations. What happened to just binary "on"/"off" iconography? Now everything has to move in a fancy way. It makes things seem less responsive, not more.

  • Patozo (unregistered)

    Another big contender for the most absurd calculator nowadays is on Windows.

    When my computer was new I needed to do some calculations. When starting the calculator somehow the .NET Framework was optimizing my experience... and it took about 2 minutes for the calculator to even start. During that time the app only showed some kind of calculator logo.

    I did all my calculations by hand on paper... and was finished before the windows calculator even started accepting input.

    Today I tried to start the Windows calculator again (to have some material for commenting on the absurd GUI-Design) Result: "The calculator can't be started from an administrator account..."

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    I wonder if this is the first time Apple has had a WTF entry?

  • Mark (unregistered)

    The real WTF is the kooky diet Jobs decided to go on instead of getting proper cancer treatment. He might still be churning out third rate gadgets at first rate prices otherwise.

  • Carl Witthoft (google)

    FWIW, my view is that TRWTF is a calculator GUI that doesn't display the operators as well as the operands. What is this, 1975 or something? You've got a whole dang 4k Retina display there but for some reason the designer decided it had to look like a calculator that your great-grandfather used?

    There's really no excuse for continuing a weak (aka "Bad but best we could do in 1975") display paradigm. Show the equation. don't calculate ANY result until you hit the "=" button. This zero-stack approach of "+" means "= then new number +" is horrible.

  • Submitted this to Slashdot. Go upvote it!!! (unregistered)

    I think it would be fun to do this contest as a base 9 calculator that had no 9 key. numbers 0 through 8. We'd also ship a companion app to convert from base 16 to base 9. Why base 16? We are software engineers! Base 10 is for commoners.

  • Submitted this to Slashdot. Go upvote it!!! (unregistered)

    Or implement this for square root: https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fast-inverse-square-root/

    It's almost always close.

  • Ross Presser (google)

    TRWTF is misspelling in the HTML code:

    <input id="1" name="accordian" type="checkbox" />
  • K. (unregistered) in reply to Chronomium

    Now everything has to move in a fancy way. It makes things seem less responsive, not more.

    Yes!

    Finally, somebody says it!

  • WTF? (unregistered)

    WTF!? No cornify?

  • masonwheeler (github)

    By iDiots, for iDiots.

    It's important to bear in mind that Apple has historically only ever had two modes of operation: successful as Steve Jobs's own private cult of personality, or flailing and failing dismally without him at the helm. With him gone, for good this time... well, this happens.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Carl Witthoft

    If you put the phone in "upright" / portrait format, it looks like an ordinary pocket calculator of the type people are familiar with, with a tiny array of huge buttons that exhibit some unpleasant behaviour(1) but apart from that mostly(2) works like that pocket calculator.

    If you put the phone in "horizontal" / landscape format, it switches mode to a huge array of tiny buttons that still exhibit some unpleasant behaviour.

    (1) The operators remain lit until you type the next number, and then fade. While fading, they don't accept input.

    The emphasised part is the bug. If they accepted input as soon as you started typing the second number, it wouldn't matter that they fade.

    (2) It applies proper BODMAS(3) ordering rather than "last operator" ordering. Most "four function" pocket calculators use "last operator" ordering. In BODMAS ordering "1+2x3" is 7 ("1+(2x3)"), but in "last operator" ordering it is 9 ("(1+2)x3").

    (3) Brackets Otherwise Division and Multiplication then Addition and Subtraction.

  • Alex (unregistered) in reply to Quite

    At an old job a senior executive once said "Automated tests never catch any bugs, we'll stop working on them" and proceeded to lay off half of the QA team. Looks like he's working for Apple now.

  • Klimax (unregistered) in reply to Patozo

    I don't think you are trying to use either original Calc nor new Calc (UWP). Both will start under admin account, and likely both are native apps. Either something replaced it or you got malware masquerading as Calc, because what you describe is simply no true for either of original applications.

  • Alan (unregistered)

    The Windows 10 calculator is also absurd. Launching it using the keyboard calculator button will open it not in the foreground. Then clicking on it does not give keyboard focus to the number entry, so typing does nothing. You need to click exactly in the number entry area and then you can start typing. Ridiculous.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Carl Witthoft

    Show the equation. don't calculate ANY result until you hit the "=" button. This zero-stack approach of "+" means "= then new number +" is horrible.

    Except that the average person used to a real calculator (the basic kind you get for free with stuff, not the expensive graphic types) doesn’t expect a calculator to work like that. They want to type 1 × 2 and see the outcome is 2 before adding 3 to get to 5.

  • Karl Bielefeldt (github)

    Actually, calculators are unexpectedly complex, when you have to create the entire app and not just a toy example. They have a lot of tricky corner cases. I actually hit the exact same bug in a desktop calculator I wrote, except mine required typing faster than 8 keys per second because it was due to a 125 ms non-thread safe timer.

  • Patozo (unregistered) in reply to Klimax

    In fact I'm talking about the new Calc from Windows10.

    New Windows apps (Metro/universal,..) sometimes can't run under admin accounts. https://superuser.com/questions/963919/how-to-make-all-apps-run-as-administrator-in-windows-10 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-windows_store/cant-open-metro-apps-with-a-built-in-administrator/38734e57-22de-42b7-9ddf-1159969a3271

    The WTFs I counted so far are:

    1. App took 2 Minutes to start the first time I needed it (I used a stopwatch). The computer used wasn't anything slow or old - in fact it was a brand new high end development machine...
    2. App won't run for some Administrators (sometimes... probably depending on UAC-setting, group policy, OS-patch level, ...) Some admin here told me that it was a "known" problem and they have workarounds in place.
    3. The "modern" Windows GUI uses only border-less buttons. This makes sense for Websites, because hunting for gray buttons on gray background makes you stay longer on the site and therefore increases chances for the ads to leave an impression/generate clicks. But using this in Desktop Apps is not especially clever.
    4. I read an article telling me that Microsoft uses this (crap) as an example to show off how wonderful their new GUI-technology is.

    I expect the future to hold even more WTFs...

  • Inigo Montoya (unregistered) in reply to Foobar

    I got that one!

  • CrushU (unregistered)

    What a save! What a save! What a save! Chat has been disabled for 2 seconds Calculated Chat has been disabled for 2 seconds Calculated

  • HpFanboy (unregistered)

    Can confirm the bug is still present on iOS 11.2. As for the order-of-operations issue, I've been using RPN calculators for 15 years: and now my RPN calc broke with the latest iOS update. Thanks Apple.

  • Parametamolcil (unregistered) in reply to Alan

    Does the windows calculator still do that thing where hitting Enter DOESN'T show you the result? I have iOS 11.1.999999999999999999999 on my iPhone and can confirm the weird calculator problem. Anyway, my iPhone 6 is getting to the same point my android phone was when I jettisoned it - the keypad is too unresponsive to able able to use it as a phone.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to Arne Mart

    "...because someone didn't realize that there is no month 13."

    Sure there is, Smarch.

  • Dlareg (unregistered)

    I really like where the calculator on android (used?) to give different results when used in portrait or not. Just try 5+6*7 In portrait it would add 5+6 and then multiply by 7 otherwise it would multiply 6 and 7 then add 5

    great great fun

  • Code Ninja (github)

    """over the decline of Apple’s code quality,"""

    Hard to say their code quality is in decline when considering they released iTunes. Probably one of the worst pieces of widely adopted software in the history of this planet.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Patozo

    "The "modern" Windows GUI uses only border-less buttons. This makes sense for Websites, because hunting for gray buttons on gray background makes you stay longer on the site and therefore increases chances for the ads to leave an impression/generate clicks. But using this in Desktop Apps is not especially clever.

    I read an article telling me that Microsoft uses this (crap) as an example to show off how wonderful their new GUI-technology is."

    The calculator's functionality isn't as important as the fact that it's partially transparent.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/style/acrylic#acrylic-in-utility-apps

  • Olivier (unregistered)

    "In reality, touchscreen calculators are really terrible, because a good calculator should be usable without having to look at it"

    I cannot agree enough on that. And a touch screen phone is really terrible because you should be able to dial a number without looking at your phone...

  • (nodebb) in reply to JiffyPop

    I am fascinated that there is more than one way to get the answer: 1+23+45+6 = 12+3+4+56 = 75

    Not too surprising: we're shifting some digits from the ones place to the tens place, so we add 9 * (the sum of those digits) to the total. (We can't use consecutive digits for this, because one would go into the hundreds place, so that does limit the combinations a bit.) Since 2+4 = 1+5, doing it for the 2 and 4 gives you the same result as doing it for the 1 and 5.

    If we were adding 7 as well, we'd get a third possibility: 1 + 23 + 45 + 6 + 7 = 12 + 3 + 4 + 56 + 7 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 67 = 82.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Olivier

    "you should be able to dial a number without looking at your phone..."

    Yeah, you should be able to dial 999 in the dark by feeling for the holes where the 0 and 9 are, and sticking your finger in the 9, then turning the dial until your finger hits the little stop, and following it back as the dial unwinds, then repeat twice.

    Oh, ... Um ... I think I'm in the wrong century. (But that is a useful side-feature of the UK's emergency dial code being 999.)

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to WTF?

    Cornify has been absent for a few months now. Presumably all the unicorns and rainbows spewed too much glitter into the server's disk cabinets.

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to Dlareg

    Not on my Android, and AFAIAA never has. Then again, maybe it did five years ago, when I didn't have one yet.

  • RLB (unregistered) in reply to David

    Summerfilth.

  • kktkkr (unregistered)

    In reality, touchscreen calculators are really terrible, because a good calculator should be usable without having to look at it

    Okay, but have you seen the state-of-the-art in OCR calculators? :)

  • SirTwist (unregistered) in reply to Alan

    CLOSED NOREPRO I type here, I press my calculator button, add 1 + 2 + 3, ^C to copy result, alt-F$ to close, then ^V: 6. At no time do I need to click on anything.

  • Patozo (unregistered) in reply to Watson

    Yeah, great! More WTFs coming...

    1. So Microsoft in fact found a way to camouflage their crappy GUI even more. And it's even GPU intensive...

    2. The whole thing is backed by cargo cultists that actually think that there's something "important" behind all that...

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    i am reminded of a story where someone was asked to help with problems someone else was having with their new Iphone or Ipad. he was EXTREMELY shocked to find that it did not recognize Quicktime as a valid format. WTF?! THE most commonly used Apple software, Quicktime, is NOT COMPATIBLE with the newest Apple Ipad?! this was some time ago, so that MIGHT have changed...

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