u/nazarthinks

I'm using several smart plugs from Tapo, which I control from my phone using their iPhone app. Normally I use them to turn on and off a lamp following a programmed scheduled, but sometimes I use the Timer function.

The Timer has a fairly practical and clean UI, but it has a few details about those scrolling dials that make it unnecessarily hard to use in practice. There are two problems, which you can see in the video.

PROBLEM 1. Narrow touch area in the minutes section.

The areas under hrs and min labels don't react to the touch, so you have to position your finger exactly under the number to make it scroll. In the hrs section, the whole empty space to the left from the numbers also acts as a scrolling area. Yet in the min section there is hardly any space left around the number, which requires more pointing precision. This inconsistency between the two sections is confusing and almost always leads to a few failed attempts to scroll the minutes wheel until I adjust to the finer precision.

PROBLEM 2. Inertia of the whole screen blocks the scrolling of the wheel.

When I try to scroll the minutes wheel with my finger slightly outside of its touch area, the whole screen gets scrolled and then returns back with inertia. This eased out animation makes the actual wheels unresponsive to the next touch until the screen settles completely. But because of the eased-out animation, even when the screen seems visually settled, it still keeps moving slightly, taking over any touch gestures. In that moment, trying to scroll the min wheel with repositioned finger keeps scrolling the whole screen again, forcing me to wait even longer to ensure that my scroll will go to the wheel instead of the screen.

SOLUTION:

First of all, there is no reason to have asymmetric division between the hour and minute sections. The `hrs :` part should be moved to the left, leaving more space around min, so that they require equal amount of precision to scroll.

Secondly, there is no need to have the scrolling animation for the whole screen, as all the controls take less than 50% of the screen height. Making it fully static would solve the interference with the eased-out animation, making the whole experience much more responsive and less frustrating.

In the LinkedIn app on iOS it's impossible to modify the text of a comment inplace. As you can see in the attached video, once I move the cursor to the middle of the text and start typing, immediately after the first character the cursor jumps back to the end of the text. And this repeats every time, making it impossible to type more than one character in the place I want. Sometimes it happens after the 2nd character, but I haven't noticed any obvious reason.

This leaves me with two options:

1. move the cursor back after each character, which only makes sense if I only need to correct 1-2 characters ();

2. cut the rest of the text, type my correction and then insert the rest of the text back.

This must be a bug, because I can't imagine why someone would intentionally implement this kind of behavior.

I hope it gets fixed soon, because it makes commenting on the phone too exhausting.

This issue with Figma Make has been pointed out by Braden Pomeroy in his LinkedIn post.

Apparently the Point and Edit function that allows to manually adjust your design becomes disabled once you run out of AI credits. This is contradicting the whole foundation of Figma, which is a tool for designers who create things with their hands. Disabling the manual editing function kills the whole point of the tool in the first place.

This is particularly frustrating given that manual editing doesn't use any AI features and therefore should not depend on AI credits at all. This same issue has been raised on their support forum, where it was confirmed that this behavior is intentional.

This kind of focus on AI that goes against the whole foundation of the product is quite disturbing, especially given how large is its user base.

In the iPhone app of the Flibco bus company the UI for selecting the route is confusing because of the wrong use of the word Destination.

In the 1st screenshot you're presented with the selector of two ends of the trip, defined as From (Departure) and To (Arrival) – everything clear and consistent.

Once I click to choose my Departure location (2nd screenshot) the large button at the bottom says Confirm destination, which is the opposite of Departure, and is written twice at the top of the screen. According to Oxford dictionary destination means "a place to which somebody/something is going or being sent" – to, not from.

At the next step, when choosing the Arrival location (3rd screenshot) everything is more consistent: Destination twice at the top and Arrival Location at the bottom.

As a result, it happened to me at least twice that I got confused, returned to the home screen and started my search from zero after seeing the Confirm destination button, thinking that maybe I've pressed a wrong field earlier and I'm now booking the trip in the wrong direction.

This single word is creating unnecessary confusion and doubt, which is particularly annoying when booking the ticket in a rush before the bus departure.

Besides, there is another small inconsistency: the text on the confirmation button is written in small case on the Departure screen (Confirm destination) and in Camel Case on the Arrival screen (Set Arrival Location). This is functionally harmless, but it does show the lack of care about details in this UI.

I think a better solution would be to use a consistent convention across the both screens, for example:

• Set Departure Location
• Set Arrival Location

I love the functionality of Google Forms, especially considering that it's completely free. But there is one UI feature that I find disappointing – the Email field.

First of all, it's too rigid. If you choose the Responder input option for the form's email-collection setting, it adds an Email field with a predefined format, without any possibility to add any text to the description, as it is with all the other types of questions.

Furthermore, even if I'm already logged in with my Google account, the Email field remains empty, forcing me to fill it in manually. I don't see why it can't be prefilled with my Gmail address by default, which I can modify if I want to use a different email.

Seeing my Gmail address under the form title and then an empty Email field right underneath makes it look like something has failed in the UI. Having it prefilled if I'm already logged in would look better, in my opinion, and would probably be a preferred option for the majority of Gmail users.

Top navigation bar on the official Apple website is semi-transparent, probably to match the liquid-glass aesthetics of iOS and macOS. And funny enough, it doesn't work properly in their own Safari browser.

As I despise the dysfunctional liquid-glass aesthetics of their 26-series operating systems, I have not upgraded my macOS. I'm running Safari 26.2 on macOS Sonoma, and as you can see from the 1st image – the navigation bar looks transparent, but not translucent. This leads to the navigation text mixing with the text in the background, making it hard to read in certain situations.

As you can see form the 2nd screenshot, taken in Chrome, there should be a strong blur effect applied to the portion of the background behind the navigation bar, which doesn't seem to work in my Safari.

Looks like they use --globalnav-backdrop-filter CSS property for that effect.

Having transparency without blur makes it worse than no transparency at all. This effect clearly needs a better fallback scenario for browsers that don't fully support it.

P.S. Surprisingly, it does work in Safari on my iPhone running iOS 18.6.2.

Ghost blogging platform provides several options for deploying your blog, out of which Digital Ocean seems to have a good balance of full control over the hosting and ease of single-click installation.

According to the dedicated documentation page the cheapest $5/month droplet from Digital Ocean can be used, which on paper satisfies the stated minimal requirements for running Ghost installation, most importantly 1GB of RAM (1st image).

But if I follow those steps on Digital Ocean, trying to set up a droplet using the Ghost image from their marketplace, it says that the cheapest droplet doesn't meet the minimal requirements. More specifically – not enough disk space, which is 25GB on the $5$6 droplet (2nd image).

This is not only frustrating, as it contradicts the information in the Ghost documentation, but it is also not really true. I've managed to easily set up a working Ghost installation on the same $6 droplet following the manual procedure, based on Ghost CLI installed on the generic Ubuntu 24.04 droplet.

As you can see in the 3rd image, my Ghost setup is only using 60% of RAM and 35% of Disk space on the droplet that Digital Ocean considers insufficient. In terms of disk space that leaves plenty of room for a blog that mostly contains text and images.

Are there any valid reasons for Digital Ocean to disable the cheaper options for Ghost droplets?

And unless this is a temporary glitch on Digital Ocean side, Ghost should update their documentation to reflect the real cost of hosting it on Digital Ocean, because the x2 difference is quite significant. Moreover, the prices seem to be outdated in general, since there seems to be a 20% increase in Digital Ocean prices since the time when that documentation was written.

On the EasyJet website, when one of the From/To fields is populated with a city name, the other field immediately filters out all the cities that don't have direct connections with the first one.

As shown in the 1st screenshot, if Milan is already chosen as destination, typing Turin in the other field doesn't show anything. But if I clear the destination (2nd screenshot), then I get Turin as an option, because EasyJet has flights from/to Turin and from/to Milan, but not between the two.

This might seem like a smart move, as it interrupts the search for a non-existent flight at the earliest stage. But the I find the actual implementation not ideal from the UX perspective. Here are at least 2 examples where it gets more complicated for no reason:

1. city names can have different spelling in different languages, and it's not always obvious in what language the name should be written. For example Turin is Torino in Italian (3rd screenshot), and when I'm looking for flights I can have several websites open with different languages. So when I don't see the name appearing, my instinct is to type it again in a different language, before I realise that the problem was with the other city;
2. when looking for a flight, I often compare options where both ends of the trip have to change, for example Turin-Stansted and Malpensa-Luton, both of which are different variations of Turin-London (my actual target). But this filtering requires me to first empty both fields and then type each city (4 operations) instead of typing new city names right away (2 operations).

I see a very simple solution that would improve user experience in such situations, while fully preserving the original functionality.

THE SOLUTION

When typing a city name, show the list of all cities matching that name, but grey out the ones that don't have connections with the city in the other field. This preserves the signaling to the user about unavailable connections, while eliminating extra 2 clicks for a fresh search. And to prevent users from searching for unavailable flights, the Show Flights button can be disabled if greyed out cities have been chosen for both fields.

Any thoughts on this? Does anyone else find this automatic filtering unnecessary?

It is really annoying that every website nowadays requires you to fiddle with the Cookie Policy pop-up before doing anything. It's even more annoying when on top of that there are more pop-ups to go through before being able to browse the website.

This particular case of the Cartier website is particularly frustrating, as it has two pop-ups, each blocking the website browsing completely:

1. Cookie Policy pop-up appears right in the middle of the page
2. Language-choice pop-up appears in the middle again

Especially the 2nd pop-up could have been implemented in a more subtle way, without blocking the whole page. Furthermore, the two red buttons look identical except for just 2 letters, which adds additional confusion when you just want to get to the website.

Considering its positioning as a luxury brand, it looks strange that they haven't bothered to make the browsing experience more enjoyable without unnecessary interruptions.

I'm paying for the Premium Family plan on Spotify and I've just noticed, while switching between podcasts on my phone, that I've been shown ads twice within a few minutes, which was also impossible to skip.

These were not some ads integrated into the podcast audio stream, but proper ads by Spotify with their own interface, which I find frustrating. If'm paying for ad-free experience, why should I still be seeing ads?

A quick check online showed that I'm not the only one seeing them (examples 1, 2), but there doesn't seem to be that much discussion about it either.

Is this an intentional practice from Spotify? Does anyone also see ads on paid plans?

I love the design of Vans Old Skool and I'm very disappointed with their degraded quality over the last few years. More specifically, the problem I see is in the rear part surrounding the heel.

In the photo you can see my three pairs of these sneakers that clearly demonstrate the issue:

1. the blue pair from 2024 I've used very little;
2. the black pair from 2024 I've used much more, just for walking;
3. the black pair from 2022 I've used even more: just for walking until 2024, and then used more for riding a BMX (you can also see the age from its darker insole and burnt black colours).

In the 2nd photo you can clearly see how much the plastic behind the heel has decomposed in the model from 2024, which I've used more, while the one from 2022 is still intact. My naive assumption is that Vans have switched to some "more sustainable" version of plastic that is more fragile, but I might be wrong.

I'm pretty sure that there is no contribution from any external effects like environment or the anatomy of my feet, since I'm still wearing the pair from 2022 to this day and it doesn't show any signs of breaking.

Has anyone else noticed this change? Are your Vans falling apart like this too?

A small dessert was served on a larger plate with the curved shape that makes it very easy for the small dessert fork to slide in. As it fits perfectly at the flat bottom of the plate, its handle ends up dirty, which is frustrating.

I think this could be solved by using a smaller plate, like the one for the coffee cup, which would still fit the dessert perfectly, while making it impossible for the fork to slide in.

Or a big plate with a different curvature shape can be used, having a smaller radius of the flat bottom, such that the whole can’t fit inside.

Finally, if the fork had a perfectly straight handle, it probably wouldn't slide as easily either.

Any other ideas on how this experience can be improved?

In this toilet the flush buttons are quite narrow (see 3rd picture) and are almost completely covered by the lid when it's open. This makes it impossible to press any button without closing the lid or at least turning it away from the wall. This adds a completely unnecessary extra step to the process of flushing, which is really annoying.

Positioning these buttons even 2 cm higher would have made the experience so much better, and there is more than enough space for that. This is a small detail that should never be left out.

This is a display inside an elevator of a residential apartment building that has been continuously showing this black screen with technical instructions for at least 6 months now. Judging from the last line on the screen, it's made or managed by Enplug, which is now part of Spectrio.

Apart from it being dysfunctional for so long, what bothers me even more is that it's showing a bunch of technical information that is totally irrelevant to every single person seeing it multiple times a day. All this information is only relevant to one person – a technician, who only needs to know that there is an issue, while all the other information should be accessible somewhere outside this display (like their website), or on a different screen that can be accessed manually using a keyboard.

So it would be a much better experience for everyone if it showed nothing at all or some wallpaper image, with just a small icon somewhere signaling about the Internet-connection status. But displaying 24/7 a black screen with the instructions and MAC addresses, like in the startup BIOS screens of the old PCs, makes no sense in an elevator.

Apple have been showing nothing but logo in their full-featured computers for 20+ years now, and it's crazy to see that a basic elevator display still shows you all that verbose text in 2026.

When I open the Claude website, it shows the prompt input with "Ask Claude" button, which looks like it's going to process my prompt straight away. But it doesn't. Instead, it asks me to log in or register, completely losing the original prompt in the process.

What's even more confusing is that the registration process ends with a predefined list of prompt examples that can be clicked, without any text field to put my own prompt again. I find this very strange, as I'm forced to to do one of the examples even if none of them is relevant for me. Only later, after getting an answer to the predefined useless prompt do I get the choice to start a fresh chat with my own prompt. This happens both in the web-browser version and in the standalone app, as you can see in the screenshots.

To make this experience less confusing, right under the example prompts it should have a text field for my own prompt or at least a button that brings me to a fresh chat with Claude. Otherwise it looks unnecessarily limited and quite useless.

As you can see in the video, it's impossible to type a long post in the Reddit iOS app.

Once the text exceeds the initial text area above the keyboard, the text field doesn't scroll up to keep the cursor visible. Instead the text keeps being added underneath, making it impossible to see what I'm typing. And if I scroll the text field up to see what I'm typing, the keyboard goes away. As soon as I tap to continue typing, the keyboard hides the cursor again.

Note that this happens on my iPhone 13 mini running iOS 18. So it's a small screen and old iOS, which I'm not planning to update because I can't stand the liquid-glass interface.

Does this issue happen on other phones and OS versions?

My job requires me to take a blood test every 1-2 years, which I've always being doing in Turin (Italy). I've done it at least 5 times by now, both in private and public hospitals.

Every single time, after taking the needle out of my vein, the nurse puts a piece of cotton and firmly wraps several layers of adhesive tape around my arm to fix the cotton in place. And every single time I would go through a pretty painful process of removing that adhesive tape, which is pulling the hair out of my skin (see the 2nd photo).

I do realize that my hair is probably longer than average, which probably makes it more painful. At every given point there are more individual hairs being glued to the tape, and each of them has a larger contact area, making it harder to detach. But I don't think that it's completely painless for anyone either, because everyone does have some amount of hair on their arms anyway.

Because this happens only once every few years, I always forget about this part before the needle goes inside. And afterwards everything happens so quickly that I have no time to ask about an alternative solution. Even if I had an option to hold that piece of cotton myself for 10 minutes, I'd rather do that than deal with the adhesive tape.

So my questions in this respect are three:

1. Is this a standard way of closing the vein after a blood test everywhere (in Italy or any other country)?
2. Is it supposed to be so painful? (I wonder if the adhesive tape they use is too strong and maybe there are other kinds that are less sticky)
3. Are there any other ways to stop the blood without adhesive tapes?

If someone knows any tricks or alternative solution to make this process less painful, please share in the comments as well. I just can't believe that in 2026 this is the best that the industry has to offer.

The water container in this espresso machine looks a little confusing, and a quick search online showed that most coffee machines use the same design for their water containers. The line of plastic marked by the yellow arrow looks very much like the water surface line.

As I've been using this machine in someone else's house, I've never refilled this container before, so I never saw how it looks when it's empty. The first time when it was actually empty, it took me a while to realise why the coffee wasn't coming out despite the pump making its usual noise.

Only after looking at the container for the 3rd time, checking whether it has water, have I realised that the line is actually the plastic bottom of the container, and there is no water inside.

This is certainly not a critical issue, but I also believe that it could be done better.

For example, the part below the line could be painted from the inside to not be transparent, avoiding the confusion with water. Even better if that extra piece of plastic could be removed completely and made part of the machine body itself, providing the same support for the container.