The team responsible for the FaceTime app on tvOS needs a VERY stern talking-to. Just for starters, take a look at the menu that appears when trying to start a call with a person.
Now imagine if it actually showed the emails or phone numbers for any of these choices. But no, you just have to guess! It’s on a giant TV screen! There’s plenty of room! It is MADDENING!
@siracusa Not a lot of DRIs left at Apple it seems. Shit just breaks or is released in a terrible state and nobody seems to care ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Creating a shared Photos album took me 20 minutes and a reboot to get it working, sort of.
@siracusa Maybe they had help from the iOS team, who brought us such gems as “a readily available Live Photo button that hardly anyone uses, but several taps delayed by animations to change between the front-facing and rear cameras every. single. time.”
@siracusa What if you were making a FaceTime call at a party of mixed attendees, and did not feel comfortable revealing someone’s contact info?
It may not be what you are saying at all, but I do see good reason for keeping that initiation of a large screen call in the relative privacy of a phone in the palm of your hand, than ‘on screen’. Uhuru probably had every body’s number.
@siracusa I suspect a lot of the developers working on these features don’t use the. at all in their real life. They couldnt possibly and still go into work the next day and not immediately fix these obvious issues. It’s gotta be 30mins tops to open a PR to display that info… Maybe a couple of hours to troubleshoot why the unresponsive hang happens far too often.
Launching the app often shows this screen, in which no button presses or swipes on the remote will do ANYTHING. Like, nothing. No item changes appearance. No actions can be triggered. Force-quitting the app and re-launching it usually “fixes” it.
Once you pick from one of the mystery “home” or “mobile” or whatever contact methods for a person, you often get this screen, which makes it seem like you can press the main (touchpad) button on the remote to press the green button and initiate a FaceTime Video call. That is NOT the case.
Pressing the button on the remote actually moves the selection focus back to the user list! (You can figure out why if you look closely.)
@Chancerubbage Guess what happens if you click the button. It removes the image! But when you select the same contact again, the image reappears! So it didn’t actually remove it! Or something!
@siracusa it obviously a ‘Wrong choice? Go back!’ minus sign. Not like minus signs have ever been used to denote removing things completely and forever into the void.
@siracusa It’s like whoever had that job left for lunch and never came back. I simply don’t understand a company that large having no continuity or Quality Assurance and project maintenance. It’s like musical chairs.
Was someone suddenly reassigned to change the tires on Project Titan?
Here’s what the screen has to look like in order for a button press on the remote to actually click the “FaceTime Videol button. No, this is not the same screenshot as before.
@siracusa you might make this easier to see by enabling Settings → Accessibility → Display → Focus Style → High Contrast, which will draw a white box around the focused ui element, not only here, but also throughout tvOS. why this isn’t the default is beyond me
If you actually manage to start a FaceTime call, it will periodically (every few minutes) be stopped entirely, displaying this baffling screen. The only possible action is to click the red “Disconnect” button.
After that, you have to reconnect Continuity Camera, which means getting up from the couch and picking up the phone to manually accept the connection, even though the phone and the Apple TV are both signed into the same Apple ID and the phone was already being used as a camera earlier.
The interface for trying to add one or more people to an existing call is even more byzantine and full of UI dead ends and traps, but I don’t have the energy to set up a test call to screenshot it all. Please, Apple, do better.
@siracusa It is hard to know if they have just lost design leaders or if they’re focused elsewhere. So many basic design principles are missing across their platforms.
@siracusa this is a problem throughout tvOS. The fix, as others have mentioned and you prob already know is to turn on focus outlines. Without them, it feels like navigating a desktop without a cursor. It’s wild that folks (not just Apple) still make this mistake. Focus outlines everywhere (in TV app and game UIs) please.
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