alt Hacker NewsIt Takes 16 Clicks for a Student to Open a PowerPoint on an iPad
Comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
an "open" button that only shows up in portrait sounds like some sadistic Myst puzzle
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Why is any login required at all? Is this sensitive information that needs authentication?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This example shows that capitalism is great for innovation but it can suck for creating a streamlined UX.
Big Tech eventually enshittifies everything; it has to for the financial scaling economics to work out.
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.