I have been involved with software development and computers in general for a long, long time now. I have worked and programmed text user interfaces such as MS-DOS 5.0 and POSIX Unix, GUIs such as Windows 3.1, Windows 95, NT 3.51, NT 4, 2000, XP, Windows 7, Windows 10, I have worked in Java, Pascal, Delphi, .NET ASP/C#/VB.NET, C, C++, Assembler, PHP, Python, iOS, Android, Symbian OS and the list goes on.

As both a developer & designer and a user of technology, I am in a good position to offer opinions on the state of software, including usability and user experience. Now I am not going into history again on how modern software is bloated, how budget constraints and competition is driving poor quality and insecure code and so on. Instead I am going to show you some self explanatory images of software that is in a FINAL state, released to the general public, by multi billion dollar (in some cases, trillion dollar) companies. With unlimited funding and own defined deadlines, how is this excusable?

You would think a $1 trillion company would have some R&D money to spend on implementing reasonable limits in their Activity app. Yesterday night at 22:00 local time my watch pinged me with this nice screen:

As if that is not bad enough, Apple clearly has some colour blind people working on their UI experience team. I am not sure about you, but I find the light blue and orange almost impossible to read on an OLED screen (iPhone X):

😢

I am not going to blabber pointlessly about the virtues of a full frame camera vs. a smartphone camera. Instead, I wanted to highlight why the smartphone camera is going to completely replace (if it has not already) the DSLR. Consider the following image I took with my iPhone X in portrait mode - stage lighting mono mode.

The image quality is remarkably good for a quick snapshot. However, blow it up in a 1600 pixel crop and you clearly see the limits in a small sensor camera, one that will not be fixed in the next decade as this is a basic limitation of pixel density vs pixel size, constrained by the physical limitations of a smartphone.

I am not usually one for publicly shaming a company for bad behaviour, but this time I am beyond upset.

I have purchased my first MINI back in July 2013 from MINI Langley. All went well, the deal was closed to my satisfaction and all financial aspects were sorted out with me only needing to sign the usual lease forms with MINI Financial Services and the insurance documents with the insurance broker - all on premises.

The process was repeated in January 2016 when I took back my MINI and got a new one under a new lease agreement. Again, all went well.