My employer (a large university) recently adopted a new parking portal. To pay for parking every morning, I have to open my browser, navigate to a webpage (there is no mobile app), and tap eleven times to pay for parking:
1. Tap "login", taking me to the login page.
2. Tap the "login" button on that page.
3. Sign in using 2FA. (A few more taps, but I'm not counting that against the portal).
4. Tap "Redeem Parking Permit"
5. Tap "Redeem use of Permit Pack"
6. Tap the car that I used that day (which is always the same car)
7. Tap "Confirm"
8. Tap the calendar icon to open the date chooser.
9. Tap on today's date (why isn't this the default?!)
10. Tap "Confirm"
11. Tap "Complete"
After a month or so at being annoyed by all of this unnecessary friction, I had Claude write an iOS app that keeps me logged into the parking portal. Now paying for parking requires just a single tap in my custom app. It also shows me a widget, telling me whether I have already paid or not.
I've built a lot with Claude this year, but that simple tool might be the one that brings me the most happiness.
The app was only necessary as a one click bypass for the original bad UX. Im not the author but would likely develop an automation of sorts for such a pointless daily friction. And it doesn’t really matter what’s bundled as (app, script, etc) as long as it gets compressed/reduced to one click.
why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing. everything that happens once inside the app or website is just normal UX design - no reason to do it 'worse' on a website.
> why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing.
Except saving that to the Home Screen isn’t the same user experience as downloading an app via an qr code, and you’ll be expecting some pretty technically incompetent people to be using the parking space.
But I do agree with your general point about the UX inside the (web|mobile) app.
the complaint wasn't about the 'discovery and install experience', it was about the UX of paying for parking every day. There are definitely things that the app store experience brings to the table for distribution of apps - trust being the main thing I think. I really don't like the barriers that iOS specifically puts in place for web apps - they're intentionally making it harder than it needs to be, in order to protect their walled garden and the $$ that brings them.
There's absolutely no need for an "app" / "website", a phone, and everything that comes with using that choice, i.e. original posters 10 steps, to pay for parking.
The design choices added more friction than walking past a "pay and display" machine.
The design choices added more friction than displaying a monthly/anual pass that you purchase for regular parking at places like universities.
The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
> There's absolutely no need for an "app" / "website", a phone, and everything that comes with using that choice, i.e. original posters 10 steps, to pay for parking.
Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.
> The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
The one instance of this I have seen used an app to connect your licence plate to your payment method.
> You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
With a proper app, it’s a quick, simple process if you have a phone that is just “not completely discharged”, no need for it to be fully charged.
The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.
If flushing the toilet without an app would suddenly require you to walk across campus to obtain a one-time-use Toilet Flushing Override Token (and no, you can't ask for multiple ones - no "hoarding" allowed!), there would be riots on introduction - and rightfully so! The fact that an app has to exist at all is a symptom of a systemic issue.
Same with parking. ANPR cameras are ancient technology, and many commercial lots already have tap-to-pay at the exit barrier. Or even the entry barrier, for fixed-price parking. Even the complicated cases have you enter your vehicle registration on the payment terminal these days, rather than messing around with paper passes. In this world it should not be complicated to handle employee parking with a one-off license plate registration on some intranet web page, or just allow tapping your employee badge at the parking barrier. Worst-case scenario they'd hand you an EZPass-like RFID tag during onboarding to put behind your car's windscreen.
The toilet-flushing app should not have to exist. It is the ultimate embodiment of institutional "we have tried nothing, and are all out of ideas". Accepting deeply-flawed workarounds for non-problems should not be a normal part of your day-to-day life.
> The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.
Well, yes, that’s exactly my point. It’s not the case with parking, so the analogy breaks down.
> The fact that an app has to exist at all is a symptom of a systemic issue.
How exactly? You’re kind of begging the question by taking it as self-evident that an app is an inherently bad solution. What is so bad and “deeply flawed” about a properly designed app? Do you posit that there are many employees who have a car but no smartphone?
> You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
I agree with you with parking garages or tolls. The license plate system is definitely preferable.
But, street parking was not a quick or simple process for 50 years. I used to have to keep a stack of quarters with me in order to street park, which was a huge PITA. Then the meters moved to working with CCs, but they were broken much of the time. Then they put in random kiosks every couple blocks that you had to find and figure out, often having to go back and drop a slip in your car.
Now I pull up, park, get out, and walk off while clicking 'park' in the app. It literally can't be any simpler.
The person we're talking about didn't make an app to "pay for parking". They made an app to automate a tedious process their employer makes them do every day.
iOS has App Clips which theoretically are supposed to do this - just tap on NFC, app clip opens up and lets you pay, and sticks around to allow you to re-up while your meter is going.
Agree tho, parking is not a world where we get really good UX developers.
I have used them once to pay in a restaurant in Prague.
There was an App Clip code on the table that you could scan to pay.
The UI/UX was pretty nice, but I bet you could make a website also look that nice and work as well.
I have also seen them around Japan, but of course, Japan being Japan, if you scan them you’ll normally get an error saying that it’s not supported on your non-Japanese-region set phone.
Toast used it pretty effectively for QR code-initiated restaurant bill payments. Though in the US I've only seen a few restaurants trust customers to pay by QR code and not physically want to handle a card.
Though the other notable thing about it was that the App Clip version does a decent upsell to get you to install the full Toast Local app. Then once you have the Toast Local app you never see the App Clip version again. So there's probably other things that have App Clips but you would not notice because you already have the full app.
I used easypark to pay for parking in different cities and countries very happily.
It is vastly preferable to "find a parking meter, sort out rules, find a way to pay" which was the previous experience, I'm a bit concerned they look like a sort of monopoly but I'll take that over every city having their own system.
Can you explain why? As someone who parks in different cities and areas a lot EasyPark is...well, easy. Finding meters, going back to the car to drop in the slip, extending parking if you need to is much easier. And having a single app that works in most places is helpful.
“Finding meters, going back to the car to drop in the slip, extending parking” takes up very little of my life. I don’t like apps and generally hate the idea that I should be forced to 1) have a cell phone to park a car, 2) install closed source software on the cellphone, 3) be gaslighted by the vc and company behind that app that it’s for my benefit. In fact, it depresses me a little bit that the world is getting worse at an ever increasing pace.
2 days ago I was in the waiting room for a medical checkup. I had parked ~8 or 10 mins walk away, though day in the city. The doctor took more than I estimated, and renewing the parking was a total of 30 seconds from taking my device out of the pocket, hitting "Extend time", and "Confirm". Done, without risking that my turn might come during the ~15 or so mins I'd have been outside running through the street.
Some things are better in modern times. I'd rather have more time-efficient public transport to not need going by car, but that's a different topic.
It is also another example of having a phone or SIM card with you is a requirement to function. I hate mobile phones. They are really useful but I really enjoy hours or days when I can leave them behind. But what you can do without a SIM card device in your pocket keeps getting more restrictive.
When mobile phones came out I wrote something that logged my phone onto the schools WiFi and put it in the App Store. Make a few hundred selling it for 0.99. I found out the school had to have a meeting about it and that caused them to fix their cumbersome system.
Wow, most garages I go to now, there are license plate readers. You just register once online and then save CC info and it’ll remember your plate from then on. Get auto charged once you exit.
This especially is an important factor often not considered. A task can only take a minute but if it's unpleasant/tedious enough that it makes me take different decisions on a macro-scale, it can still be worth it to automate it. Like, a macro that automatically opens all the software and directories related to a personal project saves in reality maybe 10 seconds, but the added friction of having to find the right folder would make me more likely to get distracted and just not work on it all evening.
Migrating phones is always a bit of a hassle, but it really shows you the quality difference between different software providers. Recently upgraded from Pixel 8 to 10, and the process itself was super smooth, all my data and settings were pulled over in a couple of clicks.
Well, not all my settings, of course Google feels the need to force certain AI features I deactivated back onto me. Also things like Bluetooth Auto On. Still very minor compared to some of the other issues I had:
1. My German bank doesn't support switching phones for their online banking auth app. I needed to order a new activation code by mail to activate the new phone.
2. I have a ticket that allows me to use all public transport in Germany for a fixed monthly amount. Really good stuff. But I just couldn't find it in my DB account in the app. It completely disappeared from my subscriptions. Turns out, it can only be active on one device to avoid people sharing (fair enough), but instead of showing it as inactive, I have to delete it from my old phone for it to be visible in my subscription again.
Everything feels so cumbersome. I click on a link in some app which takes me to their login which takes me to MSFT login which takes me to the 2FA provider which asks me for a passkey which takes me back to MSFT which asks me whether to remember which takes me back to my app which forgot the redirect on the way which takes me back to the home view from which I navigate back to where I wanted to go where I can finally see what I wanted to see. Surely there must be a better way.
I really hate this bullshit "security". Why on earth do I have to log in every single day? If anything, it gives an attacker more chances to either steal my password, or makes me more likely to be phished because logging in is so automatic now.
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
I'll take that risk, especially since I've basically never heard of a successful attack hinging on a stolen session cookie being used for months. Either you do what you'll do within a few minutes, or you never do.
That's a great way for someone to siphon a lot of session tokens and then auction them off to a black hat.
It's also a great way to lose everything if you happen to lose your phone or laptop and it gets found a few hours or a day later and the antagonistic finder guesses your weak PIN.
In the US, service providers and manufacturers are often held liable for losses if they make something that has sub-standard security. Kia, for example, was held liable for making their cars too easy to steal. Banks have boatloads of things they have to do to protect their customers.
It's not really your choice to take the risk here, apparently.
I actually did this for my small saas Ive sold to a couple dozen companies, and while all my programming friends at the coworking office said I was crazy, Gmail and facebook were my go to answers. If they can do it safely, I might as well try.
Maybe Gmail, but definitely not GCP. I have to re-auth every day or two for that.
And even with Gmail there's a decent chance it isn't just "blindly trust unlimited-duration token". Cookie stealing is now one of the main forms of credential compromise, so I bet there's some form of browser and/or IP verification going on to demand a reauth when some `curl` instance from a Russian VM tries to make use of it...
Then connect the browser directly to the secure element of the device, so the session cookie is cryptographically signed by something you are physically in possession of.
Logging and alerting the user that their account is being used from a new context and requiring reauthentication when accessing the account from an unfamiliar IP/user agent would mitigate this to some extent.
The alternative is offering offline versions of apps to students and allow students to open downloaded items off the cloud locally. It also means students don't require internet access when off campus.
Are those used in practice, though? I'm not aware of any "sign request headers with private key cookie stored in TPM" HTTP extension, but I would love to be proven wrong.
Of course, in practice that would just turn cookie-stealer malware into request-proxying malware.
It's also crazy that as far as technology has advanced, the concept of the username/password is still so prevalent. Passkeys are sort of changing things, it all still feels decidedly low-tech.
Edit: Can you get a Yubikey as an RFID implant? ...asking for a friend.
What is really crazy is that things that should be just an application locally installed on the device (such as PowerPoint) need a login at all.
There's a secondary issue of schools pushing children to use proprietary applications when perfectly serviceable alternatives exist (especially for school level work).
How the hell we all normalized this crap is maddening.
It's not even new. 20 years ago I got a bad grade in highschool because I used StarOffice and not Office 2003 for a project
My father and I had an unreasonably long conversation with the dean of students about how requiring someone to purchase a $300 software suite for a basic highschool English class was egregious
One of the "best" parts being the first one of those was meant to be an "SSO" but apparently is design-by-committee and very bad at it. (Requiring too frequent logins, not saving usernames between logins [for kids?!], requiring login dances at downstream logins.)
Username/password is the easiest way to log in, assuming there is no stupid format requirements. It's just two strings stored in your password manager. The most retarded way to implement log in is actually magic email link, which requires opening your email client, waiting for the email to arrive, and copying the code. If you want to make it even worse, you can require that to be done using the same browser that is trying to log into the account.
There are still plenty of technical and scientific uses of the word in various forms, including retard, retarded, retardant, and retardation. One that’s in common use outside the sciences is “flame retardant”.
Technical usage, where the word is describing a quantity, process, or function include: retarded time, retarded position, retardation time, regarded coordinates, retarded Green’s function, retarded potential, retarded acceleration, and retarded ignition.
In all these cases, it’s used to refer to something whose progress is delayed or impeded in some way, which is the original meaning of the word “retard”, that also ended up being used in medicine and psychology and becoming a slur in those contexts.
So the correct answer to my original question is either “no” or “it depends”, with the latter requiring some qualifying criteria.
Passkeys. That has both and it can’t be set insecurely, written on paper or given to an Indian call centre who assures you they are from the finance department.
How do you identify whose passkey it is without an identity? They're a decent defensive auth method for people who can't use a password manager but they can't replace username/password.
Passkeys as they are currently-marketed are resident credentials. This means a passkey stored on your Yubikey (or smartphone, or Windows account, or...) is not only a private key, but also contains a UID to identify it. A website doing authentication can trivially use this to look up which user it is associated with. Very convenient for single-press login, but it requires a decent bunch of per-website storage on the hardware token. Which is of course a net positive for the big tech companies, because it forced you into using smartphones as the token, and doing silly things like cloud sync with them.
The original FIDO U2F credentials were not resident. You'd enter your username, and the website would sent over a bunch of opaque blobs representing the associated hardware tokens. The hardware token would decrypt their blob using a key derived from a combination of the website's domain name and the hardware token's single stored secret, and then do the whole auth shenanigans using the data retrieved from the blob. Yubico invented a very nice protocol[0] around this "server-stored blob" idea to allow registering a backup security token, but the strong push towards insecure smartphone-stored cloud-synced Passkeys of course killed this.
Making it phishing-resistant, for starters. And having a built-in way to prevent people from reusing their password across multiple websites, so that any single compromise doesn't instantly turns into having all of their accounts pwned.
I don't remember the last time I had a workday that didn't involve logging into something that I definitely logged into not very long ago, that I use every single day, and it's so, so, so fucking tedious.
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Edit: Oh oh and, for the above? If you're working through your morning coffee and accidentally click OK instead of cancel, it'll sit there spinning forever, not sign in correctly, and then you get to do ALL THIS BULLSHIT AGAIN.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.
> lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end.
Whenever I see the Outlook auth box I mash in some gibberish for my password to immediately get the "expired" notice so that I can enter my real auth info.
So if any admin happens to look, my baseline for incorrect passwords entered is 50%.
Fortunately I don't have to deal with Microsoft professionally, but anything Xbox related is also such a massive pain. More than 3 times now I've tried to login and got into an endless login loop.
If you look that up you'll see that people have been encountering that for over a decade.
I simply and truly don't get it.
Microsoft must have at least 80.000 devs. No one there ever wanted to fix this?
Microsoft's auto-logout appears to be implemented in the frontend. If I leave the Outlook or Teams tabs opened but idle for a few hours I get kicked and have to log in again, but I have an addon that will unload tabs I haven't interacted with for an hour, and one day I noticed that if I click away and intentionally let those tabs unload when I'm not using them, I can stay logged in for weeks or months.
I genuinely could not care less about it. Most of it is trivial click-through session validation (Github -> Microsoft auth -> Github) where most of the pain is solved by auto-redirect, the rest is auto-filled by my password manager - including 2FA, although that part is technically probably not the best idea.
If I ever have to manually fill anything in, it is almost certainly going to be a phishing attempt. It immediately jumps out as "this is unusual, something is wrong here".
The only thing which bothers me is email login links, but luckily I don't daily any apps which use them.
Yes, web apps should support passkeys directly and have a "log in with your passkey" button if there's a cookie indicating that you previously logged in with one. Also, don't screw up the UI by then sending you an email or text message with a confirmation code.
(If it's a browser that you haven't used before, perhaps be a little more paranoid.)
Yeah. The other day I registered into something using my institutional login (with 2FA). And then i have to activate 2FA in the relying party as well. So everytime i login there i need 2 2FAs.
Most of my current company runs on Teams, which is such a massive self-inflicted gunshot wound. It must cost billions in lost productivity across the globe, just dealing with how terrible it is.
A few examples that happen pretty much every day:
1) The teams interface takes upwards of 60 seconds to load, from the moment I've gone through the auth process and the Teams logo pops up, from when the UI actually renders the sidebars and the first chat window.
2) It frequently fails to load new messages after resuming an existing session for a few minutes. It shows everything up to date, you can navigate between chats, but no new messages or unread message counts update. Then after s a few minutes, it suddenly works, but it's impossible to tell if it's working and you don't actually have any messages or if it's in this limbo state.
3) When you need to reauth, the app seems to work, again showing all the previous messages, but there's this tiny toast at the top saying that you need to log out.
4) The log out button doesn't actually work. On Chrome, I've had to use devtools to clear my cookies & sessions for it to get into a valid state where it would actually let me sign in again. The Mac app just goes unresponsive and needs to be forced to quit.
I didn't feel the tiniest bit bad for all the companies going down thanks to MS this week. Alarms have been blaring for years and nobody cares.
Just to get into my development environment, I have to:
1. Log in to OKTA and choose my specific account (we have 2 accounts for some reason, and only one of them is used for development)
2. Log into AWS with that account
3. Select another sub-account in AWS
4. Navigate to my developer EC2
5. Start the instance
6. In VS Code, open a terminal and log in with “aws login —profile myName”
7. Wait for redirect to AWS in the browser window
8. Click ok and close the tab
9. Back in VS Code, open remote explorer and click on a preset that does an ssh tunnel to my workspace on the EC2
10. Wait for VS Code to spawn a new window
11. Now I can go through all of my other development setup tasks (another 6-10 steps depending on what I need to do)
Every day. And our instances force auto-shutdown at 9pm, so if you need to work late, better save your work, log off preemptively, and go through the same process.
My morning: Turn on the Mac. Username, password. Switch to insecure wifi. Microsoft username, password, phone call. Then for some reason Mac asks for the password again. Switch to secure wifi. Kerberos username, password. Microsoft username, password, phone call. Finally logged in!
Well, that's not the end of the story, because despite having a "single sign on", I actually have to log in to everything separately... using the same username and password. So I open Jira: username, password. Bitbucket: username, password. Jenkins: username, password. AWS... well, that's where it gets too complicated.
My first 15 minutes of work are spent logging in. On a good day, everything works predictably. On a bad day, something randomly breaks, and the easiest way is to restart the machine and do the 15 minutes again. If it fails the second time, I check if my colleagues are complaining, too, and then we wait for the tech support to tell us what broke recently.
As a new parent I was surprised that schools have even gotten into a state where iPads or Chromebooks are used regularly in the classroom. I don't understand how kids can learn on them.
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
I was issued an iPad in high school in like 2014. Even then, they were distracting. We all played games on them. They did have some benefits, though. They ensured that every kid consistently had a small, portable, fairly rugged device to take home so that they could take online quizzes, write essays, do digital homework assignments, do research or reading assignments, scan paper documents, do video assignments, check schedules and announcements, etc., all without requiring parents to spend hundreds of dollars on devices for their kids.
Our school district uses Lenovo laptops and Microsoft for everything. My daughter couldn't do her homework yesterday b/c of the Microsoft outage. They use teams for absolutely everything.
I have seen tons of university students taking note on their iPad with a pencil. Felt like a legit usage: read the course material on the iPad instead of printing everything, annotate PDFs, take notes.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
Yeah, I used an iPad and an Apple Pencil all through college. Lifesaver, I did all my homework on it and skipped paper completely.
Being able to turn in something handwritten, with whatever diagrams and stuff I want to draw, but also with the ability to quickly erase, move, shrink, etc. handwritten text on the fly removes a ton of friction from the learning process for me.
I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing. I go out as-a-fox to do all sorts of things such as photography and ritual leadership [1] and tarot readings and I always have a “fox-in-a-box” kit for each activity.
Overall I don’t like it that people in ritual spaces are reading off their phones all the time but, hey, I use the compass to figure out where the quarters are though I do try to mark them early on. I still like having books to read tarot and I have a few that fit in my bag but the really good ones (the spiritually oriented ones, not the ones that give answers like “in the basement of the Alamo”) would take up like 1/4 of the volume of my bag and that’s a lot.
So yeah, I may pack a mass market paperback that explains Smith-Waite imagery and a little materialistic book but I am going to fall back to my iPad if I need Rachel Pollock. It doesn’t help that the physical form of books has gotten worse over time, like the 1st edition of The Spiral Dance that was rebound by my Uni library is great but the later edition trade paperback I have reminds me of why I hate trade paperbacks and it doesn’t help that Starhawk’s practical magic got bulked up with a lot of speculation…. So i keep falling back to “get another book for kindle” because i can pack 10k books on my iPad.
[1] with the unusual OKR of “people can’t tell better than chance that this was Paul’s circle”
First, I only said that "back then, printing all that stuff seemed like a waste". I didn't say anything about the iPad.
Second, it's not like modern students wouldn't have an iPad or a laptop, is it? It's not exactly a waste if they use a device they have anyway. Probably some even have an iPad instead of a laptop, so...
I see iPads (class 7 to 13, german school system) very positive. Let me just point out 3 aspects:
My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)
And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...
Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.
the amount of "better education" we would have with kids driving a desktop/tower running a proper desktop (Linux) is immeasurable better than a locked down system like Appleland - tech literacy is literally one of the most discussed/emergent topics, be at the ed. tech field or traditional discussions about pedagogy
[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it
I agree with the importance of tech literacy and having a Linux-box could be way to achieve this but I hope you will grant me that its possible that in my subjects (Biology and German language/literature) an iPad is of greater use (as a tool outside, in the lab, to produce something cool with language) than a desktop pc. I don't see them as mutual exclusive.
which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland? given AI, the possibility of doing a clone being quite cheaper than 5 years ago... now the trade-off of teaching and promoting freedom principles Linux surf (the GPL itself is a GREAT example) and allow users to have, against something hostile (whatever you say about Apple hardware and it's ecosystem, it's a net negative company for society) by a monopoly-like tech giant, on my opinion it's non-negotiable! i believe education is one of the most revolutionary (effective) acts we can do and just by excluding the dialogue FOSS can promote, make it instantly a great loss
i still tangle my head till today when proprietary musical software discussions emerge, on HN that's even more surprising, and no Csound, pd is cited even when those have decades old mature and updated codebases, with efficient DSP programmed by academics, all free of price with very permissive licenses - Bitwig costs 399 USD and that's like a lot for a lot of people - that's just a silly example, i'm not even getting into ed. tech software (for educators or kids) ecosystem which sometimes i still have a hard time seeing why someone don't just learn Emacs org-mode for 1 week and stop using N services their school have to pay a subscription... Apple hardware, often deprecated much faster than hardware which run libre software, isn't a great monkey-see-monkey-do example on teaching how important is rights of repair and permacomputing principles
> which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland
- The school goes to a supplier and order 500 iPads and says they want them preloaded with X and X apps and be centrally managed by their Device Management software.
I love Linux, but nobody is creating Linux tablets and supplying them to schools at discounted rates and pre-configuring them with MDM ready out of the box.
Again, I agree with you: all the points of your first paragraph are valid to some extent.
But sometimes a totally dumb and closed system like an iPad is a feature.
It is so simple that Students (from 10 to 19 years old) and teachers (from 25 to 70) can use it. It is so closed down that the teachers can easily and reliably distribute tasks, apps, restrictions and don't have to deal (they will stand no chance) with students tampering with their systems.
It would be great when all school subjects would address FOSS and the impact of closed systems on society but they also have to address their core curriculum. Here I see the possibilities that the iPad opens up as a net positive.
> My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
What's the point of that? Seems like unproductive busywork. How does it help with memorization and brain training? (Or isn't that the point of school anymore?)
This was years ago, but my son went to a middle-school that provided them for all the kids. In class they had a rack of them at the back where they recharged. During a student-teacher conference with my son, she asked him to go grab a Chromebook and pull up an assignment he had done so we could talk about it. He went and grabbed a random computer off the rack, it instantly woke up, he logged in and had his lesson loaded for us to see in literally seconds. I had never seen the Chromebooks in action before and as a techie I was amazed at how smooth it was.
I have no idea how iPads are set up for use in educational environments, but seeing how the Chromebooks were used really impressed me. I also don't know if things have changed in the years since, but they definitely worked great for kids a decade or so ago.
Heh. To tell you how long ago this was, my son is actually a high school teacher himself now! So obviously it wasn't an impediment to his education.
Some of the pain in this specific example case seems to be haven gotten into a state where both iPads and Chromebooks are regularly used side by side in the classroom. They are using Google Workspace accounts with a custom SSO "app" on an iPad presumably so that everything is synchronized with Chromebooks, too.
I've never heard of "Clever" but it looks like that's the real problem? And some need for a Google integration. So they're making kids use two separate online services just to see a presentation! There is surely a better way, whoever is mandating these platforms has to be being bribed.
Clever is garbage. They claim it's free for the school, but end up charging vendors for connecting. So vendors increase their prices, but Clever doesn't allow vendors to say that's why they increased their price or charged an extra fee.
The complaint is entirely about the school's software stack including "Clever" and Canvas:
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
Administrators are the ones making purchasing decisions. IT might make recommendations, but it's someone in administration (or multiple someones) who makes the final decision on what software the district buys for its many students.
Maybe what's needed - broadly - is some sort of "choosing good software vendors" education, for people in non-IT fields. Medical care would certainly benefit from similar education.
In the 90s my parents were briefly involved in designing that sort of curriculum in a for profit space (for kids) [1] and they encountered all sorts of problems in that 1) software vendor advice changed roughly every six months (often for no particular reason than a brand got bored and changed names/rearranged cheese or went out of business or got bought by some other conglomerate got worse and a new alternative needed, 2) nobody really wanted to pay for the education of which software to buy/use, and most crucially, 3) nobody thought they needed that education.
Parents assumed kids should naturally get it from the school systems. School systems don't have the resources to teach it in most places (and where they did it has always been underfunded/under-appreciated). Parents themselves assumed they were smart enough to figure the stuff out, when they had a chance to get around it it, probably.
It sort of feels like software education has been left in a permanent "Somebody Else's Problem" field. Both in learning it personally and in finding someone to teach it.
Remember when we used to write specs and we said, “the screen will respond to the user in 2 seconds or less”? I often think about that when I’m waiting for a page to load or struggling through some painful login sequence that takes waaaay longer than 2s. This is the truth in an age that talks about usability and accessibility. At the end of our days we will account for all those lost seconds and find we’ve spent weeks waiting for computers to respond. Literally wasted time and no compensation. Sad thought really
Mazda used to have a bunch of guidelines for their customer facing technology. Stuff like the number of interactions to do things, responsiveness, etc.
It was really nice until ~2015 when they threw out that rulebook and went cheap.
I regularly have to use an interface that accepts two bytes of input from me, and spends 10 seconds sending an email before I can move on to the next two bytes. A dozen times.
They give me an up-specced M5 Pro and I use it to enter information over a gigabit fiber optic connection at 1 and 1/3rd baud.
Two seconds is already atrocious. Every time I have to wait for my PC for longer than point two seconds, my time is wasted. Often, I'll end up context switching and do something else.
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
I remember bashing out papers on my iPod Touch while I rode the bus to school, then emailing them to my student address and printing them out in the library. For a master procrastinator, it felt like the future.
I remember doing similar on a Palm TX (with @dmitrygr's patched Graffiti 1.999) and some version of Documents to Go. That was a painful experience in hindsight!
Exactly why I don't have an iPad. I would like one, but iOS isn't a serious operating system.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
The one use case I have for an iPad is the pencil for screen sharing / white boarding on zoom, although my chicken scratch writing may not come across well. I don't think it would work for me on a laptop screen either, I need it sitting flat to draw diagrams or overlays.
Getting a keyboard and touchpad case setup totally changed my view on them for productivity. As a primary driver I'd still opt for a laptop but they work great when traveling.
The price and weight of an iPad with all the accessories is approaching a laptop anyway, while still remaining an inferior alternative. And there’s no guarantee you won’t have to replace a keyboard case after you upgrade an iPad due to intentional physical incompatibility between the models
That's a horrifying read. Our school uses Chromebooks for K-8, but I'm sure there are plenty of iPads floating around pretending to be a proper replacement for a laptop. For the IEP student in question, my goodness this must feel like pulling teeth just to keep up with the class. I don't remember it being this bad on my iPod Touch in high school, but back then was the dawn of iWork for iOS.
Why are kindergartners being given chromebooks? Why are they logging in with QR codes? Why is anyone using a password, without a vault, in a multi-login flow?
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
The night before delivering my talk I thought it was a good idea to change my slides.
After an hour of work I close the deck and go to upload it on the organisers’s platform.
“Mh the file size is the same, that’s odd”.
PowerPoint on iPad did not save any change.
Security has gotten weird these days. I work for a fairly large (but not yet public) company, so we have would be considered "standard" corp security.
To get to a dashboard, I have to jump through four or five websites for different parts of the auth and security checks (and sometimes provide a biometric check too).
At least in my case my browser mostly jumps through the hoops for me (although I usually have to click at least twice and present my finger).
I am using YouTube website, on Firefox, GrapheneOS. If I click on youtube logo, it will close the video.
what am I missing from not using the app? It also continues playing when phone closed/black screen
Do you mean the iOS YT app? It's at most three, two if you allow a swipe. Swipe down on the video (moves it to a smaller view in the lower-right) > tap the X in the upper right of the video. Or tap the video (to bring up controls) > tap the down-arrow in the upper left (moves to the same smaller view) > tap the same X in the corner.
I just tried on an iPad, so it's possible it's a different experience, but it was only 3: swipe down (exit's fullscreen) > swipe down (same flow as before) > X in the corner.
Sometimes the entire tech industry feels like one giant pile of enterprise software - something we are all forced to use everyday, but is some combination of hostile and careless towards us because decisions were made elsewhere for other reasons.
This feels both like a result of and an emblematic example of bureaucracy. I do believe that done right, technology like this can improve the educational experience. However, there's so many different moving parts and rules that come along with the technology that in practice the teacher would have been better off xeroxing the presentation to give students individual physical copies like we did 25+ years ago.
Bureaucracy is interesting. People love to blame it for outcomes, which is fair, but when there's a catastrophic outcome, (not necessarily the same) people will also say that there should have been a rule, or better yet, the process that lead to the outcome should not have been possible.
In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.
This is basically rage bait, posted by a (supposed) teacher to Reddit, and now reposted here to HN. I flagged it.
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
I do not know what this thing is about and the reason for posting, possibly it is fake and attention hungry whatever, but why then sounds the suffer so familiar to me not even close to learning/teaching on iPad? Must be coincidence or hallucinations then.
I was literally browsing the Teachers sub while procrastinating on studying for a midterm, read that post, and was curious what people would have to say about it on HN (in all fairness, I suppose at least part of me was also like "Wow this would do numbers on HN).
It's fair to complain that you don't find it constructive, interesting, or educational, but I promise it was at least an organic process.
Passkeys do eliminate or trivialize many of these steps.
> * Find the […] phone
You can use Passkeys (with biometric unlock) directly on Windows/Linux/macOS and not need your phone at all for a Passkey login. (You have an option to keep all your Passkeys only on your phone, but you don't need to. Add that Windows passkey next to your iOS passkey and login on all your devices the easiest way. The Passkeys API will even help you do this automatically in some cases.)
> * Scroll and search for the app. If you don't remember the right authenticator, that's another process.
> * Type keywords to find the right account
Passkeys don't require a separate app at all (just use the OS or browser provided flows), but if you optionally want a password manager involved it integrates into the OS or browser provided flows and you don't have to search for it.
Similarly, Passkeys keep enough metadata that you never have to search for a specific passkey, as in all flows (even with a third-party password manager) the best passkey is chosen automatically.
> The last two (copy/paste) aren't a required part of 2FA, if you're using (T)OTP it's just a short numeric code.
You've never struggled with dyscalculia, then. (Dyslexia's mathematical friend where the ordering of numbers is hard to read and/or maintain in one's head.) TOTP codes can be especially frustrating to dyscalculia because they are random and have no additional punctuation. I don't have consistent dyscalculia, but I have enough bouts with it that I certainly don't trust "just remember it then type it in" if I can avoid it and try to copy and paste whenever possible. Because I have been locked out of accounts for accidentally transposing two numbers in a code too many times in a row.
Which is also to say that you've just switched copy/paste steps with remember/type steps and assumed remember/type was easy and hid that under the "just" rug. It's just remembering and typing 6 numbers. How hard can that be? Harder than you think for some people. (Arguably many people on a bad day given all the ways that short-term memory can be compromised in adults.)
To me it appears that they could have just logged directly to Canvas to get the file. And then it appears that files have been named poorly and perhaps either get the PowerPoint or put the files in Keynote.
My youngest has to suffer Google Classroom on mandatory iPads at school. It is, to be polite, a complete pile of donkey shit. The amount of times work can’t be done because something is broken or corrupted or doesn’t display properly or there are auth or consistency problems is unreal. That is if you can find the work in the first place. On top of that hardware problems galore like the mandatory keyboard cases dropping connection every 30 minutes or so. Or the school’s AP and Internet crapping out or being overloaded.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
Makes me wonder if you could point an agent at a school Google Classroom and get it to clean up all this stuff. It's roughly a storage platform, and those do accumulate cruft. An agent can go deep, actually understand the pieces, fix permissions, delete corrupted stuff that is also probably defunct, etc.
I’ve joked about that a couple of times as well :)
At least it’s not the raspberry Pi and programming fad which taught children to sift through boxes of damaged e-waste to assemble a working computer for the first 90% of the lesson.
My kid has some mild attention issues, keeping track of assignments is only made more difficult by Google classrooms. Some assignments are in Google Classrooms, some are there but only placeholders as there was a handout, some aren't in there at all.
I doubt Google Classroom itself is the problem at all, that's pretty rock-solid in my experience.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
It reminds me of the emails I get from my kids' school. For example, an email from a teacher about the upcoming bake sale contains the first sentence or so, then a link read the rest. Click the link. Website with a login. Enter username and password. Then it requires 2FA. Asks if it should remember this computer (I say yes every time and it asks every time). Navigate through the website to the correct class. Find the email that was sent today. Click that email. Click on attachments. Get a PDF of the email.
Great, now I know the bake sale starts at 6:30.
Long term result, I no longer read emails from my kids' school.
We’ve got to start using the word “harassment” to describe common user interface tropes such as excessively complex login systems (funny the people who are experts at logging into your account without your permissions absolutely thrive in this environment), cookie popups, cloudflare popups, etc.
I dunno how much of this comes out of being based in the Bay Area where it is normalized that you’ll stay in your conference hotel and never leave the arcology because otherwise you’ll get harassed. I wonder if people realize that you could go to like Ohio or something and it doesn’t have to be that way.
The teacher used to show up with a stack of printouts they made before class and hand them around. Thank god we've finally eliminated that inefficiency.
I tried to figure out “how much annual leave does one of my staff members have left” today, in workday. The flow was roughly open bookmark, realise bookmark is just some sort of ephemeral link, get redirected back to workday, open okta, 2fa into okta (which I’ve done 3 times today), open workday, 2fa into workday (which is the same 2fa method as okta - yubikey), navigate through 4 different pages, only to be told that this person has X hours remaining for the period until 31/11/2026. It doesn’t show the balance rhey have left after what they’ve booked.
I ended up emailing HR to get an answer, and I’m reasonably certain my employer pays workday 500k+ per year for me to not be able to use the damn thing.
Seeing reddit pushed hard on the front page after its become a login online site I wonder if this is yet another push to try and make the site relevant again after a decade of mismanagement, stackoverflow 2.0 if you'd like.
The amount of failed digitization in primary/secondary education is astounding. It's a tax on parenthood in favor of the school system. Deficits are paid for out of the children's education. Each new system that comes along is just https://xkcd.com/927/.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
Huh, doing PowerPoint presentations was easy when I was a kid. Plug virus-infested (soon if not already) USB stick into virus-infested class computer -> open .ppt.
When I taught undergrads, most people taught from personal ipads. I ditched mine and switched to Android because they were so bad about this: tap,tap,tap,tap, seemingly endless tapping for simple file operations. And if you're teaching in smallish seminars, you're constantly referencing, sending, receiving, grading a million documents. An inefficient pdf opening sequence is going to be repeated 60 times for each assignment.
Last year had to purchase an iPad for one application for work.
I've been on iPhone from number one up to five but soon left for Android and have been more or less happy there.
I was utterly shocked at the state of the iPad OS and it's ridiculous unintuitive convoluted and user unfriendly UI. Everything is more difficult, more clicks, more taps, mis taps, mis slides, no consistency, window buttons all over the screen in random places and different on every app and so on.
steps 1-11 could apply to anything. Can we compare number of actual vendor specific steps if that's how its going to be framed? How many clicks does it take on a real computer?
Every work day I have to login to Personio. It is 15 clicks, because it has email and password and otp on separate pages and somehow defeats the password manager required by my employer (who also choose Personio).
Also, Tailscale silently starts failing to connect during the day, invariably in the middle of debugging something, so I have to debug Tailscale instead.
Everything is stupid and broken and I'm counting the days until I retire, buy a goat, and walk until my phone loses signal.
> Teacher forces student to go through 16 clicks to open a powerpoint on an iPad instead of printing said powerpoint or projecting it for the whole class.
Maybe, but other UXs are notably worse. Capitalism may not be the best, but it's the best we've come up with so far. Unfortunately, at least in the US, it's crony capitalism.
My employer (a large university) recently adopted a new parking portal. To pay for parking every morning, I have to open my browser, navigate to a webpage (there is no mobile app), and tap eleven times to pay for parking:
1. Tap "login", taking me to the login page.
2. Tap the "login" button on that page.
3. Sign in using 2FA. (A few more taps, but I'm not counting that against the portal).
4. Tap "Redeem Parking Permit"
5. Tap "Redeem use of Permit Pack"
6. Tap the car that I used that day (which is always the same car)
7. Tap "Confirm"
8. Tap the calendar icon to open the date chooser.
9. Tap on today's date (why isn't this the default?!)
10. Tap "Confirm"
11. Tap "Complete"
After a month or so at being annoyed by all of this unnecessary friction, I had Claude write an iOS app that keeps me logged into the parking portal. Now paying for parking requires just a single tap in my custom app. It also shows me a widget, telling me whether I have already paid or not.
I've built a lot with Claude this year, but that simple tool might be the one that brings me the most happiness.
There's nothing about "pay for parking" that screams "app" to me. This is just a case of no one caring about UX, like at all.
The app was only necessary as a one click bypass for the original bad UX. Im not the author but would likely develop an automation of sorts for such a pointless daily friction. And it doesn’t really matter what’s bundled as (app, script, etc) as long as it gets compressed/reduced to one click.
I think GP was responding to "navigate to a webpage (there is no mobile app)"
An app is more convenient for something you do every day.
why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing. everything that happens once inside the app or website is just normal UX design - no reason to do it 'worse' on a website.
> why? you can save the website to your home screen and should be able to get the same user experience for launching the thing.
Except saving that to the Home Screen isn’t the same user experience as downloading an app via an qr code, and you’ll be expecting some pretty technically incompetent people to be using the parking space.
But I do agree with your general point about the UX inside the (web|mobile) app.
the complaint wasn't about the 'discovery and install experience', it was about the UX of paying for parking every day. There are definitely things that the app store experience brings to the table for distribution of apps - trust being the main thing I think. I really don't like the barriers that iOS specifically puts in place for web apps - they're intentionally making it harder than it needs to be, in order to protect their walled garden and the $$ that brings them.
I was clearly replying to your comment about how “saving a webpage to the home screen is easy”.
Yes it’s easy…if you’re technical. But most people who drive are not good with technology.
“Most people who drive are not good with technology”?
Now there’s a correlation I wasn’t aware of! Regrettably you’re forcing me to use one of the most annoying phrases on HN: “citation needed”.
It's just a subset of "most people". Hardly a controversial claim.
It’s paying for parking.
It was a solved problem long before smart phones.
Technology is supposed to improve the experience not make it worse.
What’s your actual point?
There's absolutely no need for an "app" / "website", a phone, and everything that comes with using that choice, i.e. original posters 10 steps, to pay for parking.
The design choices added more friction than walking past a "pay and display" machine.
The design choices added more friction than displaying a monthly/anual pass that you purchase for regular parking at places like universities.
The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
> There's absolutely no need for an "app" / "website", a phone, and everything that comes with using that choice, i.e. original posters 10 steps, to pay for parking.
Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.
> The design choices added more friction than driving through a boom gate with camera recording license plate, and auto charging you on the exit or taking payment at exit.
The one instance of this I have seen used an app to connect your licence plate to your payment method.
> You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
With a proper app, it’s a quick, simple process if you have a phone that is just “not completely discharged”, no need for it to be fully charged.
> Making a proper app for it makes it not take those 10 steps.
No it means I’ve got to install a junk app for every individual carpark I use that uses their own app.
It doesn’t have to mean that. Over here in Switzerland, it seems relatively consistent.
And anyway, the original comment was about a car park they use “every morning”.
Would you download an app to flush your toilet?
I might if the alternative was to walk to a parking meter or send a registration form for a paper pass.
The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.
If flushing the toilet without an app would suddenly require you to walk across campus to obtain a one-time-use Toilet Flushing Override Token (and no, you can't ask for multiple ones - no "hoarding" allowed!), there would be riots on introduction - and rightfully so! The fact that an app has to exist at all is a symptom of a systemic issue.
Same with parking. ANPR cameras are ancient technology, and many commercial lots already have tap-to-pay at the exit barrier. Or even the entry barrier, for fixed-price parking. Even the complicated cases have you enter your vehicle registration on the payment terminal these days, rather than messing around with paper passes. In this world it should not be complicated to handle employee parking with a one-off license plate registration on some intranet web page, or just allow tapping your employee badge at the parking barrier. Worst-case scenario they'd hand you an EZPass-like RFID tag during onboarding to put behind your car's windscreen.
The toilet-flushing app should not have to exist. It is the ultimate embodiment of institutional "we have tried nothing, and are all out of ideas". Accepting deeply-flawed workarounds for non-problems should not be a normal part of your day-to-day life.
> The alternative to a toilet-flushing app is a flushing button.
Well, yes, that’s exactly my point. It’s not the case with parking, so the analogy breaks down.
> The fact that an app has to exist at all is a symptom of a systemic issue.
How exactly? You’re kind of begging the question by taking it as self-evident that an app is an inherently bad solution. What is so bad and “deeply flawed” about a properly designed app? Do you posit that there are many employees who have a car but no smartphone?
> You now need your phone with you, fully charged, to complete a transaction for what used to be a quick, simple process for at least 50 years.
I agree with you with parking garages or tolls. The license plate system is definitely preferable.
But, street parking was not a quick or simple process for 50 years. I used to have to keep a stack of quarters with me in order to street park, which was a huge PITA. Then the meters moved to working with CCs, but they were broken much of the time. Then they put in random kiosks every couple blocks that you had to find and figure out, often having to go back and drop a slip in your car.
Now I pull up, park, get out, and walk off while clicking 'park' in the app. It literally can't be any simpler.
The person we're talking about didn't make an app to "pay for parking". They made an app to automate a tedious process their employer makes them do every day.
>Technology is supposed to improve the experience not make it worse.
no. technology is meant to increase the profits of the shareholders.
can't track and sell your location data if you don't use your phone to park.
Screams "data surveillance" to me. https://www.wsmv.com/2024/12/19/4-class-action-lawsuits-file...
They all do this, unfortunately, it's not just Metropolis. Currently in a dispute with two other parking companies for similar forms of shenanigans.
iOS has App Clips which theoretically are supposed to do this - just tap on NFC, app clip opens up and lets you pay, and sticks around to allow you to re-up while your meter is going.
Agree tho, parking is not a world where we get really good UX developers.
I've never once came across these famed App Clips
I've only seen them when paying for parking in the EU. They do work as the poster said.
I have used them once to pay in a restaurant in Prague.
There was an App Clip code on the table that you could scan to pay.
The UI/UX was pretty nice, but I bet you could make a website also look that nice and work as well.
I have also seen them around Japan, but of course, Japan being Japan, if you scan them you’ll normally get an error saying that it’s not supported on your non-Japanese-region set phone.
For instance, Starbucks Japan has them everywhere: https://atadistance.net/2024/05/22/starbucks-app-clips-an-ap...
Toast used it pretty effectively for QR code-initiated restaurant bill payments. Though in the US I've only seen a few restaurants trust customers to pay by QR code and not physically want to handle a card.
Though the other notable thing about it was that the App Clip version does a decent upsell to get you to install the full Toast Local app. Then once you have the Toast Local app you never see the App Clip version again. So there's probably other things that have App Clips but you would not notice because you already have the full app.
I used easypark to pay for parking in different cities and countries very happily.
It is vastly preferable to "find a parking meter, sort out rules, find a way to pay" which was the previous experience, I'm a bit concerned they look like a sort of monopoly but I'll take that over every city having their own system.
It is vastly non preferable for non riffraff individuals (eg me).
Can you explain why? As someone who parks in different cities and areas a lot EasyPark is...well, easy. Finding meters, going back to the car to drop in the slip, extending parking if you need to is much easier. And having a single app that works in most places is helpful.
“Finding meters, going back to the car to drop in the slip, extending parking” takes up very little of my life. I don’t like apps and generally hate the idea that I should be forced to 1) have a cell phone to park a car, 2) install closed source software on the cellphone, 3) be gaslighted by the vc and company behind that app that it’s for my benefit. In fact, it depresses me a little bit that the world is getting worse at an ever increasing pace.
2 days ago I was in the waiting room for a medical checkup. I had parked ~8 or 10 mins walk away, though day in the city. The doctor took more than I estimated, and renewing the parking was a total of 30 seconds from taking my device out of the pocket, hitting "Extend time", and "Confirm". Done, without risking that my turn might come during the ~15 or so mins I'd have been outside running through the street.
Some things are better in modern times. I'd rather have more time-efficient public transport to not need going by car, but that's a different topic.
If you're driving your own car, you're riffraff.
It is also another example of having a phone or SIM card with you is a requirement to function. I hate mobile phones. They are really useful but I really enjoy hours or days when I can leave them behind. But what you can do without a SIM card device in your pocket keeps getting more restrictive.
When mobile phones came out I wrote something that logged my phone onto the schools WiFi and put it in the App Store. Make a few hundred selling it for 0.99. I found out the school had to have a meeting about it and that caused them to fix their cumbersome system.
This is the real AI revolution.
Wow, most garages I go to now, there are license plate readers. You just register once online and then save CC info and it’ll remember your plate from then on. Get auto charged once you exit.
That’s more futuristic than a talking computer than can write all my code for me.
https://xkcd.com/1205/
Doesn't account for quality of life, the effects of procrastination due to tasks being considered onerous, etc.
This especially is an important factor often not considered. A task can only take a minute but if it's unpleasant/tedious enough that it makes me take different decisions on a macro-scale, it can still be worth it to automate it. Like, a macro that automatically opens all the software and directories related to a personal project saves in reality maybe 10 seconds, but the added friction of having to find the right folder would make me more likely to get distracted and just not work on it all evening.
Migrating phones is always a bit of a hassle, but it really shows you the quality difference between different software providers. Recently upgraded from Pixel 8 to 10, and the process itself was super smooth, all my data and settings were pulled over in a couple of clicks.
Well, not all my settings, of course Google feels the need to force certain AI features I deactivated back onto me. Also things like Bluetooth Auto On. Still very minor compared to some of the other issues I had:
1. My German bank doesn't support switching phones for their online banking auth app. I needed to order a new activation code by mail to activate the new phone.
2. I have a ticket that allows me to use all public transport in Germany for a fixed monthly amount. Really good stuff. But I just couldn't find it in my DB account in the app. It completely disappeared from my subscriptions. Turns out, it can only be active on one device to avoid people sharing (fair enough), but instead of showing it as inactive, I have to delete it from my old phone for it to be visible in my subscription again.
Everything feels so cumbersome. I click on a link in some app which takes me to their login which takes me to MSFT login which takes me to the 2FA provider which asks me for a passkey which takes me back to MSFT which asks me whether to remember which takes me back to my app which forgot the redirect on the way which takes me back to the home view from which I navigate back to where I wanted to go where I can finally see what I wanted to see. Surely there must be a better way.
I really hate this bullshit "security". Why on earth do I have to log in every single day? If anything, it gives an attacker more chances to either steal my password, or makes me more likely to be phished because logging in is so automatic now.
It has negative security. Log me in for a fucking month, stop wasting a minute of my time every day!
Because the alternative is that a very long or unlimited session cookie can be stolen and used for months to impersonate you. That’s the tradeoff
I'll take that risk, especially since I've basically never heard of a successful attack hinging on a stolen session cookie being used for months. Either you do what you'll do within a few minutes, or you never do.
That's a great way for someone to siphon a lot of session tokens and then auction them off to a black hat.
It's also a great way to lose everything if you happen to lose your phone or laptop and it gets found a few hours or a day later and the antagonistic finder guesses your weak PIN.
In the US, service providers and manufacturers are often held liable for losses if they make something that has sub-standard security. Kia, for example, was held liable for making their cars too easy to steal. Banks have boatloads of things they have to do to protect their customers.
It's not really your choice to take the risk here, apparently.
When was the last time that happened to a Gmail account? It has unlimited cookie sessions.
I actually did this for my small saas Ive sold to a couple dozen companies, and while all my programming friends at the coworking office said I was crazy, Gmail and facebook were my go to answers. If they can do it safely, I might as well try.
Username checks out!
Yes, they made the account to post that comment. Might as well make the username relevant.
Maybe Gmail, but definitely not GCP. I have to re-auth every day or two for that.
And even with Gmail there's a decent chance it isn't just "blindly trust unlimited-duration token". Cookie stealing is now one of the main forms of credential compromise, so I bet there's some form of browser and/or IP verification going on to demand a reauth when some `curl` instance from a Russian VM tries to make use of it...
Then connect the browser directly to the secure element of the device, so the session cookie is cryptographically signed by something you are physically in possession of.
Logging and alerting the user that their account is being used from a new context and requiring reauthentication when accessing the account from an unfamiliar IP/user agent would mitigate this to some extent.
The alternative is offering offline versions of apps to students and allow students to open downloaded items off the cloud locally. It also means students don't require internet access when off campus.
TPMs / secure enclaves can (in theory) prevent sessions or cookies from being stolen. Not claiming there aren't other attack vectors though.
Are those used in practice, though? I'm not aware of any "sign request headers with private key cookie stored in TPM" HTTP extension, but I would love to be proven wrong.
Of course, in practice that would just turn cookie-stealer malware into request-proxying malware.
It's also crazy that as far as technology has advanced, the concept of the username/password is still so prevalent. Passkeys are sort of changing things, it all still feels decidedly low-tech. Edit: Can you get a Yubikey as an RFID implant? ...asking for a friend.
What is really crazy is that things that should be just an application locally installed on the device (such as PowerPoint) need a login at all.
There's a secondary issue of schools pushing children to use proprietary applications when perfectly serviceable alternatives exist (especially for school level work).
How the hell we all normalized this crap is maddening.
It's not even new. 20 years ago I got a bad grade in highschool because I used StarOffice and not Office 2003 for a project
My father and I had an unreasonably long conversation with the dean of students about how requiring someone to purchase a $300 software suite for a basic highschool English class was egregious
The school in the linked post actually requires 3 separate logins before you can see the presentation, that’s just…
One of the "best" parts being the first one of those was meant to be an "SSO" but apparently is design-by-committee and very bad at it. (Requiring too frequent logins, not saving usernames between logins [for kids?!], requiring login dances at downstream logins.)
Username/password is the easiest way to log in, assuming there is no stupid format requirements. It's just two strings stored in your password manager. The most retarded way to implement log in is actually magic email link, which requires opening your email client, waiting for the email to arrive, and copying the code. If you want to make it even worse, you can require that to be done using the same browser that is trying to log into the account.
There's no need to use slurs.
Is it a slur if it's describing a process, rather than a person?
Yes.
There are still plenty of technical and scientific uses of the word in various forms, including retard, retarded, retardant, and retardation. One that’s in common use outside the sciences is “flame retardant”.
Technical usage, where the word is describing a quantity, process, or function include: retarded time, retarded position, retardation time, regarded coordinates, retarded Green’s function, retarded potential, retarded acceleration, and retarded ignition.
In all these cases, it’s used to refer to something whose progress is delayed or impeded in some way, which is the original meaning of the word “retard”, that also ended up being used in medicine and psychology and becoming a slur in those contexts.
So the correct answer to my original question is either “no” or “it depends”, with the latter requiring some qualifying criteria.
This is just sophistry. You and I both know what they meant when they said "the most retarded way".
The correct answer is that the manner in which you used the word in the context above was as a slur. As you're no doubt well aware.
Full stop.
> the concept of the username/password is still so prevalent
How can you improve on it? You have the identity part and the auth part. What is better than that?
Passkeys. That has both and it can’t be set insecurely, written on paper or given to an Indian call centre who assures you they are from the finance department.
How do you identify whose passkey it is without an identity? They're a decent defensive auth method for people who can't use a password manager but they can't replace username/password.
username/passkey works just fine. No password needed. Nobody said drop usernames, the idea is drop passwords.
Passkeys as they are currently-marketed are resident credentials. This means a passkey stored on your Yubikey (or smartphone, or Windows account, or...) is not only a private key, but also contains a UID to identify it. A website doing authentication can trivially use this to look up which user it is associated with. Very convenient for single-press login, but it requires a decent bunch of per-website storage on the hardware token. Which is of course a net positive for the big tech companies, because it forced you into using smartphones as the token, and doing silly things like cloud sync with them.
The original FIDO U2F credentials were not resident. You'd enter your username, and the website would sent over a bunch of opaque blobs representing the associated hardware tokens. The hardware token would decrypt their blob using a key derived from a combination of the website's domain name and the hardware token's single stored secret, and then do the whole auth shenanigans using the data retrieved from the blob. Yubico invented a very nice protocol[0] around this "server-stored blob" idea to allow registering a backup security token, but the strong push towards insecure smartphone-stored cloud-synced Passkeys of course killed this.
[0]: https://www.yubico.com/blog/yubico-proposes-webauthn-protoco...
Making it phishing-resistant, for starters. And having a built-in way to prevent people from reusing their password across multiple websites, so that any single compromise doesn't instantly turns into having all of their accounts pwned.
Because everything is sitting out on the public internet now, only protected by those things.
My web app makes you enter your password two times before you can log in. It’s twice as secure!
I don't remember the last time I had a workday that didn't involve logging into something that I definitely logged into not very long ago, that I use every single day, and it's so, so, so fucking tedious.
And it doesn't escape my notice that all the fucking things I have to log into over and over and over are using Microsoft auth. Which granted, I think every office worker would notice that just from the ubiquity of their software, but still. And, on top of it, Microsoft's login flows are remarkably, consistently clunky. The forms jump all over the place and it has to refresh the page like 5 times as it's processing your credentials, and lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end. Like I dunno personally I wouldn't get a security token until the user has actually interacted in some way with the stupid form but what do I know I've only been making software for like 13 fucking years.
Oh yeah, bonus points: I use the passkey thing for my MS Auth app on my phone, and every single goddamned time I sign in, it asks me if I want to.... wait for it... create a passkey.
Edit: Oh oh and, for the above? If you're working through your morning coffee and accidentally click OK instead of cancel, it'll sit there spinning forever, not sign in correctly, and then you get to do ALL THIS BULLSHIT AGAIN.
Just, truly the biggest circus with the most clowns over there.
> lord help you if Outlook needed you to sign in and silently opened that stupid auth window, because if you go through the entire thing, odds are great that you'll get a "security token expired, please do it again" message at the end.
Whenever I see the Outlook auth box I mash in some gibberish for my password to immediately get the "expired" notice so that I can enter my real auth info.
So if any admin happens to look, my baseline for incorrect passwords entered is 50%.
Fortunately I don't have to deal with Microsoft professionally, but anything Xbox related is also such a massive pain. More than 3 times now I've tried to login and got into an endless login loop.
If you look that up you'll see that people have been encountering that for over a decade.
I simply and truly don't get it.
Microsoft must have at least 80.000 devs. No one there ever wanted to fix this?
Microsoft's auto-logout appears to be implemented in the frontend. If I leave the Outlook or Teams tabs opened but idle for a few hours I get kicked and have to log in again, but I have an addon that will unload tabs I haven't interacted with for an hour, and one day I noticed that if I click away and intentionally let those tabs unload when I'm not using them, I can stay logged in for weeks or months.
I genuinely could not care less about it. Most of it is trivial click-through session validation (Github -> Microsoft auth -> Github) where most of the pain is solved by auto-redirect, the rest is auto-filled by my password manager - including 2FA, although that part is technically probably not the best idea.
If I ever have to manually fill anything in, it is almost certainly going to be a phishing attempt. It immediately jumps out as "this is unusual, something is wrong here".
The only thing which bothers me is email login links, but luckily I don't daily any apps which use them.
Yes, web apps should support passkeys directly and have a "log in with your passkey" button if there's a cookie indicating that you previously logged in with one. Also, don't screw up the UI by then sending you an email or text message with a confirmation code.
(If it's a browser that you haven't used before, perhaps be a little more paranoid.)
Sure there is—local apps.
Yeah. The other day I registered into something using my institutional login (with 2FA). And then i have to activate 2FA in the relying party as well. So everytime i login there i need 2 2FAs.
Most of my current company runs on Teams, which is such a massive self-inflicted gunshot wound. It must cost billions in lost productivity across the globe, just dealing with how terrible it is.
A few examples that happen pretty much every day:
1) The teams interface takes upwards of 60 seconds to load, from the moment I've gone through the auth process and the Teams logo pops up, from when the UI actually renders the sidebars and the first chat window.
2) It frequently fails to load new messages after resuming an existing session for a few minutes. It shows everything up to date, you can navigate between chats, but no new messages or unread message counts update. Then after s a few minutes, it suddenly works, but it's impossible to tell if it's working and you don't actually have any messages or if it's in this limbo state.
3) When you need to reauth, the app seems to work, again showing all the previous messages, but there's this tiny toast at the top saying that you need to log out.
4) The log out button doesn't actually work. On Chrome, I've had to use devtools to clear my cookies & sessions for it to get into a valid state where it would actually let me sign in again. The Mac app just goes unresponsive and needs to be forced to quit.
I didn't feel the tiniest bit bad for all the companies going down thanks to MS this week. Alarms have been blaring for years and nobody cares.
Just to get into my development environment, I have to:
1. Log in to OKTA and choose my specific account (we have 2 accounts for some reason, and only one of them is used for development) 2. Log into AWS with that account 3. Select another sub-account in AWS 4. Navigate to my developer EC2 5. Start the instance 6. In VS Code, open a terminal and log in with “aws login —profile myName” 7. Wait for redirect to AWS in the browser window 8. Click ok and close the tab 9. Back in VS Code, open remote explorer and click on a preset that does an ssh tunnel to my workspace on the EC2 10. Wait for VS Code to spawn a new window 11. Now I can go through all of my other development setup tasks (another 6-10 steps depending on what I need to do)
Every day. And our instances force auto-shutdown at 9pm, so if you need to work late, better save your work, log off preemptively, and go through the same process.
My morning: Turn on the Mac. Username, password. Switch to insecure wifi. Microsoft username, password, phone call. Then for some reason Mac asks for the password again. Switch to secure wifi. Kerberos username, password. Microsoft username, password, phone call. Finally logged in!
Well, that's not the end of the story, because despite having a "single sign on", I actually have to log in to everything separately... using the same username and password. So I open Jira: username, password. Bitbucket: username, password. Jenkins: username, password. AWS... well, that's where it gets too complicated.
My first 15 minutes of work are spent logging in. On a good day, everything works predictably. On a bad day, something randomly breaks, and the easiest way is to restart the machine and do the 15 minutes again. If it fails the second time, I check if my colleagues are complaining, too, and then we wait for the tech support to tell us what broke recently.
As a new parent I was surprised that schools have even gotten into a state where iPads or Chromebooks are used regularly in the classroom. I don't understand how kids can learn on them.
iPads especially, they aren't a tool for productive work. Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming. If I was in school today I think the distractions they provide would make me a far worse student.
All it takes is two decades of relentless lobbying by some of the richest companies in history
I was issued an iPad in high school in like 2014. Even then, they were distracting. We all played games on them. They did have some benefits, though. They ensured that every kid consistently had a small, portable, fairly rugged device to take home so that they could take online quizzes, write essays, do digital homework assignments, do research or reading assignments, scan paper documents, do video assignments, check schedules and announcements, etc., all without requiring parents to spend hundreds of dollars on devices for their kids.
Our school district uses Lenovo laptops and Microsoft for everything. My daughter couldn't do her homework yesterday b/c of the Microsoft outage. They use teams for absolutely everything.
I have seen tons of university students taking note on their iPad with a pencil. Felt like a legit usage: read the course material on the iPad instead of printing everything, annotate PDFs, take notes.
Back in my days we were printing the slides and annotating (sometimes) them. That was a big waste of paper.
Yeah, I used an iPad and an Apple Pencil all through college. Lifesaver, I did all my homework on it and skipped paper completely.
Being able to turn in something handwritten, with whatever diagrams and stuff I want to draw, but also with the ability to quickly erase, move, shrink, etc. handwritten text on the fly removes a ton of friction from the learning process for me.
Fascinating to call printing a few hundred pages a "waste of paper" but buying a $1000 device to act as paper is somehow not a waste.
I believe they are working on other functions for the device. Don't quote me on that.
They are, but each function takes 16 clicks.
I’ve got mixed feelings about the whole thing. I go out as-a-fox to do all sorts of things such as photography and ritual leadership [1] and tarot readings and I always have a “fox-in-a-box” kit for each activity.
Overall I don’t like it that people in ritual spaces are reading off their phones all the time but, hey, I use the compass to figure out where the quarters are though I do try to mark them early on. I still like having books to read tarot and I have a few that fit in my bag but the really good ones (the spiritually oriented ones, not the ones that give answers like “in the basement of the Alamo”) would take up like 1/4 of the volume of my bag and that’s a lot.
So yeah, I may pack a mass market paperback that explains Smith-Waite imagery and a little materialistic book but I am going to fall back to my iPad if I need Rachel Pollock. It doesn’t help that the physical form of books has gotten worse over time, like the 1st edition of The Spiral Dance that was rebound by my Uni library is great but the later edition trade paperback I have reminds me of why I hate trade paperbacks and it doesn’t help that Starhawk’s practical magic got bulked up with a lot of speculation…. So i keep falling back to “get another book for kindle” because i can pack 10k books on my iPad.
[1] with the unusual OKR of “people can’t tell better than chance that this was Paul’s circle”
First, I only said that "back then, printing all that stuff seemed like a waste". I didn't say anything about the iPad.
Second, it's not like modern students wouldn't have an iPad or a laptop, is it? It's not exactly a waste if they use a device they have anyway. Probably some even have an iPad instead of a laptop, so...
I'm not a parent and none of my friends are. what's the benefit they're supposed to be providing?
Is it just grading and parental access?
I see iPads (class 7 to 13, german school system) very positive. Let me just point out 3 aspects:
My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
It added a lot to how I teach (make a podcast, produce videos, simulate, ...)
And as parent: I was more than happy when my son had (for the first time) all learning materials together in one place and not scattered in bags, on the bed, in the school locker...
Let me assure you from personal experience that iPads can (used right) contribute to better education.
Does any of this lead to better outcomes for the students?
Screens in general tend to produce less desirable outcomes. Learning goes down, retention, attention, etc.
It doesn't just have to be at school. Screens after school affect learning in school.
the amount of "better education" we would have with kids driving a desktop/tower running a proper desktop (Linux) is immeasurable better than a locked down system like Appleland - tech literacy is literally one of the most discussed/emergent topics, be at the ed. tech field or traditional discussions about pedagogy
[0] probably over hour 600 on pedagogic scientific research and other podcasts talking exclusively about it
I agree with the importance of tech literacy and having a Linux-box could be way to achieve this but I hope you will grant me that its possible that in my subjects (Biology and German language/literature) an iPad is of greater use (as a tool outside, in the lab, to produce something cool with language) than a desktop pc. I don't see them as mutual exclusive.
which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland? given AI, the possibility of doing a clone being quite cheaper than 5 years ago... now the trade-off of teaching and promoting freedom principles Linux surf (the GPL itself is a GREAT example) and allow users to have, against something hostile (whatever you say about Apple hardware and it's ecosystem, it's a net negative company for society) by a monopoly-like tech giant, on my opinion it's non-negotiable! i believe education is one of the most revolutionary (effective) acts we can do and just by excluding the dialogue FOSS can promote, make it instantly a great loss
i still tangle my head till today when proprietary musical software discussions emerge, on HN that's even more surprising, and no Csound, pd is cited even when those have decades old mature and updated codebases, with efficient DSP programmed by academics, all free of price with very permissive licenses - Bitwig costs 399 USD and that's like a lot for a lot of people - that's just a silly example, i'm not even getting into ed. tech software (for educators or kids) ecosystem which sometimes i still have a hard time seeing why someone don't just learn Emacs org-mode for 1 week and stop using N services their school have to pay a subscription... Apple hardware, often deprecated much faster than hardware which run libre software, isn't a great monkey-see-monkey-do example on teaching how important is rights of repair and permacomputing principles
> which solution iPad has that can't be re-created in Linuxland
- The school goes to a supplier and order 500 iPads and says they want them preloaded with X and X apps and be centrally managed by their Device Management software.
I love Linux, but nobody is creating Linux tablets and supplying them to schools at discounted rates and pre-configuring them with MDM ready out of the box.
Again, I agree with you: all the points of your first paragraph are valid to some extent.
But sometimes a totally dumb and closed system like an iPad is a feature. It is so simple that Students (from 10 to 19 years old) and teachers (from 25 to 70) can use it. It is so closed down that the teachers can easily and reliably distribute tasks, apps, restrictions and don't have to deal (they will stand no chance) with students tampering with their systems.
It would be great when all school subjects would address FOSS and the impact of closed systems on society but they also have to address their core curriculum. Here I see the possibilities that the iPad opens up as a net positive.
...you know, being "digital native" means today actually being able to use an app on your smartphone and swipe into the correct direction :-D
> My students can really work with book or materials (make a photo, then annotate, cut, copy paste, extend the pages ...)
What's the point of that? Seems like unproductive busywork. How does it help with memorization and brain training? (Or isn't that the point of school anymore?)
It isn't for learning, it's for spying. Edutech in American schools are very much into surveillance.
Procreate, Nomad Sculpt, Final Cut, Logic Pro, Garageband and the Affinity Suite would love a word.
I disagree about the Chromebooks.
This was years ago, but my son went to a middle-school that provided them for all the kids. In class they had a rack of them at the back where they recharged. During a student-teacher conference with my son, she asked him to go grab a Chromebook and pull up an assignment he had done so we could talk about it. He went and grabbed a random computer off the rack, it instantly woke up, he logged in and had his lesson loaded for us to see in literally seconds. I had never seen the Chromebooks in action before and as a techie I was amazed at how smooth it was.
I have no idea how iPads are set up for use in educational environments, but seeing how the Chromebooks were used really impressed me. I also don't know if things have changed in the years since, but they definitely worked great for kids a decade or so ago.
Heh. To tell you how long ago this was, my son is actually a high school teacher himself now! So obviously it wasn't an impediment to his education.
>Not many people use iPads professionally - they are designed for consuming.
Tons of people in the arts do, it's a bit silly to claim otherwise.
Some of the pain in this specific example case seems to be haven gotten into a state where both iPads and Chromebooks are regularly used side by side in the classroom. They are using Google Workspace accounts with a custom SSO "app" on an iPad presumably so that everything is synchronized with Chromebooks, too.
I've never heard of "Clever" but it looks like that's the real problem? And some need for a Google integration. So they're making kids use two separate online services just to see a presentation! There is surely a better way, whoever is mandating these platforms has to be being bribed.
That's the crazy thing, it looks like Clever is a SSO solution that's making it take much longer to sign in.
The idea one needs to log in to anything is pretty absurd in this particular environment
Back in my day we double clicked a ppt on a flash drive, and we liked it!
Clever is the portal. It sits behind the Google SSO after you've authenticated. It holds classrooms and links to other things.
Glad I skipped out on this by being older. All the kids I know hate Clever and IXL. They are basically curse words to them.
Clever is garbage. They claim it's free for the school, but end up charging vendors for connecting. So vendors increase their prices, but Clever doesn't allow vendors to say that's why they increased their price or charged an extra fee.
The complaint is entirely about the school's software stack including "Clever" and Canvas:
> login to clever
> click google profile
> type in his long terrible email he is required to remember 32lastnamefirstinital at schoolname.k12.state.us
> type in his equally annoying password
> click canvas
> click log in via google again (because????)
> Click google profile that he already logged into
> click class name
> click modules
> scroll about 40 links until he spots the powerpoint in the sea of other links with similar names
> click download powerpoint
> click open external link to keynote (because the ipad can't run powerpoint)
> turn the ipad vertically to reveal the blue "open" button
> turn off screen lock
> Click open which was not previously visible on the horizontal ipad
> hit play button
> hit present on this device. Take notes.
Educational software is a dumpster fire. The people making the purchasing decisions never have to use the software. It's just sales people tracking down the person with purchasing authority and schmoozing them until the PO comes through.
There are some schools and districts where the IT people take their jobs seriously and actually care about making things work well. Administrators need to close the loop and hold IT accountable for bad experiences and purchase decisions, and they need to drop contracts with services that aren't performing.
This anecdote is what happens when IT doesn't care and administrators never hold anyone accountable.
Administrators are the ones making purchasing decisions. IT might make recommendations, but it's someone in administration (or multiple someones) who makes the final decision on what software the district buys for its many students.
Not bribed.
They are a school administrator whose job description, formal training, etc. os in education, not vendor selection and certainly not SSO.
Source: county PTA and working with the school board.
Since the issue is so obvious as not to require any competence in "vendor selection" to notice, you need a better explanation
Maybe what's needed - broadly - is some sort of "choosing good software vendors" education, for people in non-IT fields. Medical care would certainly benefit from similar education.
In the 90s my parents were briefly involved in designing that sort of curriculum in a for profit space (for kids) [1] and they encountered all sorts of problems in that 1) software vendor advice changed roughly every six months (often for no particular reason than a brand got bored and changed names/rearranged cheese or went out of business or got bought by some other conglomerate got worse and a new alternative needed, 2) nobody really wanted to pay for the education of which software to buy/use, and most crucially, 3) nobody thought they needed that education.
Parents assumed kids should naturally get it from the school systems. School systems don't have the resources to teach it in most places (and where they did it has always been underfunded/under-appreciated). Parents themselves assumed they were smart enough to figure the stuff out, when they had a chance to get around it it, probably.
It sort of feels like software education has been left in a permanent "Somebody Else's Problem" field. Both in learning it personally and in finding someone to teach it.
[1] It was a franchise called Futurekids.
Remember when we used to write specs and we said, “the screen will respond to the user in 2 seconds or less”? I often think about that when I’m waiting for a page to load or struggling through some painful login sequence that takes waaaay longer than 2s. This is the truth in an age that talks about usability and accessibility. At the end of our days we will account for all those lost seconds and find we’ve spent weeks waiting for computers to respond. Literally wasted time and no compensation. Sad thought really
Mazda used to have a bunch of guidelines for their customer facing technology. Stuff like the number of interactions to do things, responsiveness, etc.
It was really nice until ~2015 when they threw out that rulebook and went cheap.
I regularly have to use an interface that accepts two bytes of input from me, and spends 10 seconds sending an email before I can move on to the next two bytes. A dozen times.
They give me an up-specced M5 Pro and I use it to enter information over a gigabit fiber optic connection at 1 and 1/3rd baud.
Two seconds is already atrocious. Every time I have to wait for my PC for longer than point two seconds, my time is wasted. Often, I'll end up context switching and do something else.
Well, that tracks.
I don't try to do any sort of "productive" work on iPhone/iPad because I simply don't know how to. Very simple file operations are often so unnecessarily complicated.
I remember bashing out papers on my iPod Touch while I rode the bus to school, then emailing them to my student address and printing them out in the library. For a master procrastinator, it felt like the future.
I remember doing similar on a Palm TX (with @dmitrygr's patched Graffiti 1.999) and some version of Documents to Go. That was a painful experience in hindsight!
Exactly why I don't have an iPad. I would like one, but iOS isn't a serious operating system.
Instead of a Macbook with touch, I want an iPad with MacOS, for the situation where I want to watch movies on the go, but also get serious work done every once in a while.
Aren't the new NeoBooks exactly that? A tablet with MacOS (and a keyboard)?
No touch or tablet mode unfortunately, otherwise it would be pretty perfect as an educational device.
The one use case I have for an iPad is the pencil for screen sharing / white boarding on zoom, although my chicken scratch writing may not come across well. I don't think it would work for me on a laptop screen either, I need it sitting flat to draw diagrams or overlays.
It doesn't seem the iPad fault this time. On a normal iPad a tap on a ppt file will open PowerPoint, and that's it.
Getting a keyboard and touchpad case setup totally changed my view on them for productivity. As a primary driver I'd still opt for a laptop but they work great when traveling.
The price and weight of an iPad with all the accessories is approaching a laptop anyway, while still remaining an inferior alternative. And there’s no guarantee you won’t have to replace a keyboard case after you upgrade an iPad due to intentional physical incompatibility between the models
On the flip side, if you bring your own keyboard instead of using a laptop keyboard, it makes sense to get a tablet.
But all tablets I have tested cannot function as a real computer, so I am out here traveling everywhere with two keyboards...
Does not track, isn’t true. Click a file in Files or an attachment in email and the relevant app opens. No complication.
The example in this story is to do with other cruft that schools have installed.
That's a horrifying read. Our school uses Chromebooks for K-8, but I'm sure there are plenty of iPads floating around pretending to be a proper replacement for a laptop. For the IEP student in question, my goodness this must feel like pulling teeth just to keep up with the class. I don't remember it being this bad on my iPod Touch in high school, but back then was the dawn of iWork for iOS.
Why are kindergartners being given chromebooks? Why are they logging in with QR codes? Why is anyone using a password, without a vault, in a multi-login flow?
That's the real horror of that thread. Our kids are going to grow up illiterate and pwned.
The School based chromebook horror show is something else.
Google Docs/Slides/Sheets masquerading as EdTech
The night before delivering my talk I thought it was a good idea to change my slides. After an hour of work I close the deck and go to upload it on the organisers’s platform. “Mh the file size is the same, that’s odd”. PowerPoint on iPad did not save any change.
Security has gotten weird these days. I work for a fairly large (but not yet public) company, so we have would be considered "standard" corp security.
To get to a dashboard, I have to jump through four or five websites for different parts of the auth and security checks (and sometimes provide a biometric check too).
At least in my case my browser mostly jumps through the hoops for me (although I usually have to click at least twice and present my finger).
Seems like as much of an indictment on the services stack the school chose as it is a problem inherent to the iPad.
5 clicks/touches on YT mobile to close a video. iOS version, but I assume others are the same. I use the mobile app a whole lot less because of it.
16 is insane, though.
I am using YouTube website, on Firefox, GrapheneOS. If I click on youtube logo, it will close the video. what am I missing from not using the app? It also continues playing when phone closed/black screen
On the Android app it takes two touches.
Do you mean the iOS YT app? It's at most three, two if you allow a swipe. Swipe down on the video (moves it to a smaller view in the lower-right) > tap the X in the upper right of the video. Or tap the video (to bring up controls) > tap the down-arrow in the upper left (moves to the same smaller view) > tap the same X in the corner.
Full screen:
1. touch screen to see controls
2. touch lower-right -><-
3. touch screen to see \/ in upper left
4. touch \/
5. touch X
If the video play to the end (1) and (2) are replaced with touch X, for a total of 4.
I just tried on an iPad, so it's possible it's a different experience, but it was only 3: swipe down (exit's fullscreen) > swipe down (same flow as before) > X in the corner.
It is a very different experience on the iPad. I don't use YT much there, but it's not as annoying, for sure.
Sometimes the entire tech industry feels like one giant pile of enterprise software - something we are all forced to use everyday, but is some combination of hostile and careless towards us because decisions were made elsewhere for other reasons.
Kafkaesque systems at scale
This feels both like a result of and an emblematic example of bureaucracy. I do believe that done right, technology like this can improve the educational experience. However, there's so many different moving parts and rules that come along with the technology that in practice the teacher would have been better off xeroxing the presentation to give students individual physical copies like we did 25+ years ago.
Bureaucracy is interesting. People love to blame it for outcomes, which is fair, but when there's a catastrophic outcome, (not necessarily the same) people will also say that there should have been a rule, or better yet, the process that lead to the outcome should not have been possible.
In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.
This is basically rage bait, posted by a (supposed) teacher to Reddit, and now reposted here to HN. I flagged it.
The alleged chain of clicks and typing is not really plausible unless the kid just got handed a brand new machine on the first day of school. These are services that kids use everyday that employ cookies to persist session, just like any other web service.
I do not know what this thing is about and the reason for posting, possibly it is fake and attention hungry whatever, but why then sounds the suffer so familiar to me not even close to learning/teaching on iPad? Must be coincidence or hallucinations then.
I was literally browsing the Teachers sub while procrastinating on studying for a midterm, read that post, and was curious what people would have to say about it on HN (in all fairness, I suppose at least part of me was also like "Wow this would do numbers on HN).
It's fair to complain that you don't find it constructive, interesting, or educational, but I promise it was at least an organic process.
> just like any other web service.
Just like any good web service. Many web services are terrible. I have to use one such every day, it's awful
You flagged it. Wow, so brave! How dare someone write about a bad experience with your favorite company's products! It must be fake and bait.
2FA needs to die:
* Find the second factor, phone
* Biometrics authentication or enter pin
* Scroll and search for the app. If you don't remember the right authenticator, that's another process.
* Type keywords to find the right account
* Tap to copy
* Back to the app, and paste
Make it all passkeys and biometrics, instead.
All of those steps are required to use passkeys. Where's the improvement?
The last two (copy/paste) aren't a required part of 2FA, if you're using (T)OTP it's just a short numeric code.
Those into phishing, I'm sure, would argue 2FA is an annoying (/defeating) pain.
At least some apps supporting passkeys integrate correctly with Android, and just bring up the biometric prompt to approve the sign-in.
Passkeys do eliminate or trivialize many of these steps.
> * Find the […] phone
You can use Passkeys (with biometric unlock) directly on Windows/Linux/macOS and not need your phone at all for a Passkey login. (You have an option to keep all your Passkeys only on your phone, but you don't need to. Add that Windows passkey next to your iOS passkey and login on all your devices the easiest way. The Passkeys API will even help you do this automatically in some cases.)
> * Scroll and search for the app. If you don't remember the right authenticator, that's another process.
> * Type keywords to find the right account
Passkeys don't require a separate app at all (just use the OS or browser provided flows), but if you optionally want a password manager involved it integrates into the OS or browser provided flows and you don't have to search for it.
Similarly, Passkeys keep enough metadata that you never have to search for a specific passkey, as in all flows (even with a third-party password manager) the best passkey is chosen automatically.
> The last two (copy/paste) aren't a required part of 2FA, if you're using (T)OTP it's just a short numeric code.
You've never struggled with dyscalculia, then. (Dyslexia's mathematical friend where the ordering of numbers is hard to read and/or maintain in one's head.) TOTP codes can be especially frustrating to dyscalculia because they are random and have no additional punctuation. I don't have consistent dyscalculia, but I have enough bouts with it that I certainly don't trust "just remember it then type it in" if I can avoid it and try to copy and paste whenever possible. Because I have been locked out of accounts for accidentally transposing two numbers in a code too many times in a row.
Which is also to say that you've just switched copy/paste steps with remember/type steps and assumed remember/type was easy and hid that under the "just" rug. It's just remembering and typing 6 numbers. How hard can that be? Harder than you think for some people. (Arguably many people on a bad day given all the ways that short-term memory can be compromised in adults.)
https://www.ueddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1xuup7a/technolog...
To me it appears that they could have just logged directly to Canvas to get the file. And then it appears that files have been named poorly and perhaps either get the PowerPoint or put the files in Keynote.
The walled corporate garden - time to switch away from big tech.
https://occupysaas.com/ and OSS are the future.
My youngest has to suffer Google Classroom on mandatory iPads at school. It is, to be polite, a complete pile of donkey shit. The amount of times work can’t be done because something is broken or corrupted or doesn’t display properly or there are auth or consistency problems is unreal. That is if you can find the work in the first place. On top of that hardware problems galore like the mandatory keyboard cases dropping connection every 30 minutes or so. Or the school’s AP and Internet crapping out or being overloaded.
I approached the school about it two years ago and they were dismissive and ignorant.
I have to pay £14 a month for that too.
They also have Chromebooks but they were post Covid emergency purchases and they are all end of life and need replacing. Hence the iPads because we have to pay for the renewal then not the school. And the chromebooks were just as terrible.
I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It’s a kafkaesque nightmare. They should go back to paper for most work.
Makes me wonder if you could point an agent at a school Google Classroom and get it to clean up all this stuff. It's roughly a storage platform, and those do accumulate cruft. An agent can go deep, actually understand the pieces, fix permissions, delete corrupted stuff that is also probably defunct, etc.
It’d be like giving a monkey a machine gun.
Most of what people do with it is muscle memory. Everyone would be instantly broken. They are if anyone changes or moves anything already.
I sincerely hope this comment was made in jest.
> I have heard of entire subject lessons being wasted on IT issues. And children getting detention because something was broken.
It's good that schools are teaching kids how the real world works :)
I’ve joked about that a couple of times as well :)
At least it’s not the raspberry Pi and programming fad which taught children to sift through boxes of damaged e-waste to assemble a working computer for the first 90% of the lesson.
Sounds awesome
My kid has some mild attention issues, keeping track of assignments is only made more difficult by Google classrooms. Some assignments are in Google Classrooms, some are there but only placeholders as there was a handout, some aren't in there at all.
I doubt Google Classroom itself is the problem at all, that's pretty rock-solid in my experience.
But with third-party auth, the third-party add-ons and integrations, that's where it turns into complete crap. Those are the things that often tend to be terribly engineered.
Classroom pretty much works like a dream if you stick to materials in Docs/Sheets/Slides and do the grading within Classroom as well. And if each student has their own device so they don't need to log in again every day, even better.
But schools purchase all of these integrations and then expect the teachers to use them and then the quality of the user experience goes down the toilet. But the fault is pretty much entirely with the integrations, in my experience. Because some are quite reliable, it can definitely be done. But a lot of these companies just don't care.
Is this a state school? Government rules [1] say:
> School governing bodies and local authorities cannot charge for:
> [...]
> education provided during school hours (including the supply of any materials, books, instruments or other equipment)
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5af99c8ae5274...
It’s an academy.
If it's a state school (even an academy) they can't force you to pay for technology that they require your child to use.
Teachers have been teaching kids to read and write for 5000 years.
But I suppose education is a business and they need to keep inventing new "methods".
Why is any login required at all? Is this sensitive information that needs authentication?
Students use the same platform to submit homework.
it's to a school account. so yeah, it need authentication.
It reminds me of the emails I get from my kids' school. For example, an email from a teacher about the upcoming bake sale contains the first sentence or so, then a link read the rest. Click the link. Website with a login. Enter username and password. Then it requires 2FA. Asks if it should remember this computer (I say yes every time and it asks every time). Navigate through the website to the correct class. Find the email that was sent today. Click that email. Click on attachments. Get a PDF of the email.
Great, now I know the bake sale starts at 6:30.
Long term result, I no longer read emails from my kids' school.
We’ve got to start using the word “harassment” to describe common user interface tropes such as excessively complex login systems (funny the people who are experts at logging into your account without your permissions absolutely thrive in this environment), cookie popups, cloudflare popups, etc.
I dunno how much of this comes out of being based in the Bay Area where it is normalized that you’ll stay in your conference hotel and never leave the arcology because otherwise you’ll get harassed. I wonder if people realize that you could go to like Ohio or something and it doesn’t have to be that way.
The teacher used to show up with a stack of printouts they made before class and hand them around. Thank god we've finally eliminated that inefficiency.
On the flip side, I’m sure students appreciate not having to carry around multiple textbooks and binders full of papers.
Then again they might not appreciate the difference in fragility. Their parents' wallets probably feel the same.
I certainly remember needing to carry roughly 100lb of books all day because my high school stopped offering lockers.
I tried to figure out “how much annual leave does one of my staff members have left” today, in workday. The flow was roughly open bookmark, realise bookmark is just some sort of ephemeral link, get redirected back to workday, open okta, 2fa into okta (which I’ve done 3 times today), open workday, 2fa into workday (which is the same 2fa method as okta - yubikey), navigate through 4 different pages, only to be told that this person has X hours remaining for the period until 31/11/2026. It doesn’t show the balance rhey have left after what they’ve booked.
I ended up emailing HR to get an answer, and I’m reasonably certain my employer pays workday 500k+ per year for me to not be able to use the damn thing.
Seeing reddit pushed hard on the front page after its become a login online site I wonder if this is yet another push to try and make the site relevant again after a decade of mismanagement, stackoverflow 2.0 if you'd like.
The amount of failed digitization in primary/secondary education is astounding. It's a tax on parenthood in favor of the school system. Deficits are paid for out of the children's education. Each new system that comes along is just https://xkcd.com/927/.
Handouts just need to be printed and books reused. None of the other stuff is useful or helpful. And don't get me started on the "gamification" of every learning task.
Try buying a donut on the new Dunkin Donuts' app:
1. Tap "Start an Order".
2. Tap "Order Here" for the location.
3. Tap "Walk-In"/"ASAP".
4. Tap "Confirm".
5. Scroll down and tap "Donuts, Bagels, ...".
6. Tap "Classic Donuts".
7. Select "Boston Creme".
8. Tap "Add to Bag"
9. Tap "View Bag".
10. Tap "Continue".
11. Tap "Place Order".
You want to add coffee? Then you need to repeat most steps again.
Huh, doing PowerPoint presentations was easy when I was a kid. Plug virus-infested (soon if not already) USB stick into virus-infested class computer -> open .ppt.
When I taught undergrads, most people taught from personal ipads. I ditched mine and switched to Android because they were so bad about this: tap,tap,tap,tap, seemingly endless tapping for simple file operations. And if you're teaching in smallish seminars, you're constantly referencing, sending, receiving, grading a million documents. An inefficient pdf opening sequence is going to be repeated 60 times for each assignment.
Another “fun” procedure:
1. Open canvas on laptop
2. Open canvas quiz
3. Write answers on paper
4. Scan paper with office lens
5. Export document from office lens
6. Upload document to google drive
7. Open google drive on laptop
8. Download document from google drive
9. Upload document to canvas
10. Realize you forgot to write your student id on page 2, write and go back to step 4
Last year had to purchase an iPad for one application for work. I've been on iPhone from number one up to five but soon left for Android and have been more or less happy there.
I was utterly shocked at the state of the iPad OS and it's ridiculous unintuitive convoluted and user unfriendly UI. Everything is more difficult, more clicks, more taps, mis taps, mis slides, no consistency, window buttons all over the screen in random places and different on every app and so on.
Clicks? So this iPad has a mouse or a trackpad?
steps 1-11 could apply to anything. Can we compare number of actual vendor specific steps if that's how its going to be framed? How many clicks does it take on a real computer?
an "open" button that only shows up in portrait sounds like some sadistic Myst puzzle
Every work day I have to login to Personio. It is 15 clicks, because it has email and password and otp on separate pages and somehow defeats the password manager required by my employer (who also choose Personio).
Also, Tailscale silently starts failing to connect during the day, invariably in the middle of debugging something, so I have to debug Tailscale instead.
Everything is stupid and broken and I'm counting the days until I retire, buy a goat, and walk until my phone loses signal.
What’s the goat for?
When I was in school we had computers without any of this "school" software. They worked fine. That entire industry is a dead weight loss.
i need to mentally prepare myself before opening that
I find it harder and harder to make good use of tablets. Is it just me?
It’s like, they are right in the middle of the tech gadget spectrum, and they want to be a bit of everything but are not really good at anything.
PCs, laptops, smartphones, even smartwatches all have the right form factor for what their use is. Tablets? Meh.
> Teacher forces student to go through 16 clicks to open a powerpoint on an iPad instead of printing said powerpoint or projecting it for the whole class.
There you go.
This example shows that capitalism is great for innovation but it can suck for creating a streamlined UX.
Maybe, but other UXs are notably worse. Capitalism may not be the best, but it's the best we've come up with so far. Unfortunately, at least in the US, it's crony capitalism.
Big Tech eventually enshittifies everything; it has to for the financial scaling economics to work out.