Choosing a Driving Route in CarPlay
That the default route’s Go button is gray while the alternates are green is a stupidity addressed by Sage Olson and Joe Rosensteel, so I won’t bother.
What I will address is that whichever route you choose, you have to tap its Go button. Even though the full description of each route looks like a button, the only part that’s tappable is the part that looks like a button inside another button.
Is this just as stupid as having a dull color as the default and a bright color as the alternate? Yes. And Apple has known that descriptions should be click/tap targets since the very beginning of the Mac. Here, courtesy of Infinite Mac, is MacWrite 1.0 running on a simulation of an original Macintosh.
Previously:
5 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I don't understand why can't they use multiple colors, like blue for this route, purple for that, indigo for that and so on. It would be much more visual and intuitive for comparison and choosing.
Thought I was fully losing my mind yesterday when trying to pick an alternate route and encountering the grey/green thing. Does no one at this stupid company use its products?
That’s programmer talk. Things like active button and touch areas are nerd details. It’s all about the content.
Maybe now that they have an actual designer in charge of design phrases like the above won’t be said around Apple anymore and we can go back to computers that are supposed to work and not just look fancy.
CarPlay on iOS 26 is such a trainwreck. Old versions were able to show an ETA along with 4 buttons (add stop, share, report, end route), all in a single column. The new layout wastes so much space on paddings that they had to drop the ETA, and even then locales with longer text labels can't show all 4 buttons. I now have to scroll to reliably press the End Route button.
CarPlay in general was already kinda cramped on smaller screens, clearly untested, but mostly workable. The new design requires smart zoom to be enabled fit all content, but they don't even offer the option if your screen is smaller than "standard" in either dimension.
