this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
240 points (95.8% liked)

Technology

59344 readers
5896 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] aberrate_junior_beatnik 62 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Blue vs green bubble "debate"? Apple put green bubbles in their app to annoy their own users, who then turn around and blame non-apple users. What's to debate about that?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I doubt they will change the bubbles, or they will find some other way to differentiate messages coming from outside the Apple garden.

[–] InvaderDJ 5 points 1 year ago

The bubble being green and Apple making them progressively uglier and breaking their own interface guides is one issue, but the main issue people care about are how SMS conversations break with an iPhone. Group threads will randomly have messages delivered in different threads, pictures and videos are low res if they send at all and there's no advanced features like typing indicators, read receipts, etc.

The hope is with RCS that is fixed. If so, the color of the bubbles doesn't really matter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Apple put green bubbles in their app to annoy their own users

Out of curiosity, when do you think Apple started using green bubbles?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It's not "when" they put green bubbles in but how they've been maliciously modifying the design of green bubbles. They have made them progressively harder to read, here's one article about it: https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The whole argument is ridiculous because it's only the messages that you wrote and sent that are even on a blue or green color. The messages you read are always on the same light gray background regardless of how they sent.

[–] aberrate_junior_beatnik 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People never re-read their own texts, good point.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's just an incredibly weak argument. Messages that you, yourself, wrote are in slightly lower contrast? Who cares? For users who actually have vision problems with low-contrast, there's a single Reduce Transparency toggle in Accessibility settings that will resolve this issue and a bunch of other ones.

[–] aberrate_junior_beatnik 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

An incredibly weak argument is saying that it's fine for Apple to intentionally make their UX worse, because they didn't make it worse enough to matter.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They picked a tint of a color used on low priority text. Someone argued that this particular tint is slightly worse for certain people. If you don't have vision problems, it's not really worse for you at all. We're talking about small differences in relative contrast between different elements. If you do have vision problems, you can easily make it and other similar situations across the entire platform easier to read with an accessibility toggle.

No, I don't buy the argument that the UX for reading SMS messages is meaningfully worse than for iMessages.

[–] GeneralVincent 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People do care for some reason. Psychology or something, here's Marques Brownlee's pretty in depth explanation of the whole thing. It seems like Apple has been aware of the issues and happy to keep them/make them worse since at least 2013

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

People care that SMS and MMS suck. "Green messages" is just a shorthand, nontechnical way of describing it. Nobody legitimately cares that the green background is every-so-slightly lower contrast than the blue background.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

here's Marques Brownlee's pretty in depth explanation

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yeh, not very compelling. Apple has been screwing up usability by reducing the contrast of a lot of screen elements. MacOS window component are horribly washed out these days. Wouldn’t surprise me if they reduced the contrast of the green bubbles just to “improve” the aesthetics

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks like I'd need an account to see the full article, but did the green bubbles have better contrast in previous iOS versions?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks like I’d need an account to see the full article

Here you go, fam.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Thank you, fellow null