I just wish apple would stop breaking gdb every release. They need to make up their mind on whether OS X is a general purpose OS intended for developer use or if its just a locked down version of iOS which runs on larger devices.
We need to document macOS
181–190 of 266 posts
Re: We need to document macOS
#182When I did some work on porting out product to macOS (so developers could run their server environment locally, though a few loons wanted to actually run macOS on servers), I was immediately struck by how awful and incomplete the documentation was. And, I've been working in the Linux world for a couple decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the time. In particular, the service launcher (launchd, ment…
Imagine you have written a small utility for a commercial OS. Something like it should have been included with the os but wasn't. You've scratched your itch. You decide to open-source it, so that everyone else who has a similar problem could benefit. Kudos! Good thing is that you can push it to Github or something like that, making it instantly available. Now replace the code with documentation. You have found someth…
> Where do you go?
Typically I just leave it in the code so that people aren't confused by non-obvious code. When I'm dealing with an API and the documentation is poor, I usually just search the name of the function on GitHub, and see how other people prod it.
Re: We need to document macOS
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plist files have two standard encodings, an XML-based textual one and a binary one. You can use plutil to convert between the two, e.g. plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.Finder.plist However, for preferences you probably want to use the `defaults` command instead, because IIRC they’re managed by a daemon (cfprefsd) that might not notice if you modify the backing files while it’s running.
When someone decides a config file needs two different serializations and a daemon, I'm reminded of https://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html .
The two different encodings aren't just for config files; property lists are used throughout the OS for all sorts of things. They're a serialization of standard data structures such as arrays and dictionaries: same idea as JSON, decades before JSON. In retrospect, the XML-based text format is excessively verbose, but back then XML was all the hotness… As for the binary format, well, even given JSON's relative succinctness, there are many different formats that attempt to fill the role of 'binary JSON' (BSON, BJSON, JSON-B, MessagePack, CBOR, UBJSON, Fleece, PSON). It's just that none of them have become ubiquitous, probably because of some combination of fragmentation and the lack of built-in browser support.
As for the daemon, among other benefits, it allows preference changes to be immediately visible across all processes on the system, rather than requiring manual action to reload from disk. See:
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Dat...
Re: We need to document macOS
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
>And, I've been working in the Linux world for a couple >decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the >time. Nice summary of the status of Linux documentation. Not sure if it's really 50% wrong, especially the man pages make an impression of over-corrected but the usefulness depends on the tool and is completely random. But yeah, online documentation, classical tutorials are usually useless. When I see…
# man pdftohtml This manual page documents briefly the pdftohtml command. This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page.
That is outdated though, at least my current release version of poppler (0.57.0) has a manpage for pdftohtml which says at the end "This manual page was written by Søren Boll Overgaard , for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).". According to the current poppler PKGBUILD in Extra[0], there are no patches applied.
Edit: Actually, poppler has had the pdftohtml manpage upstream since version 0.5.0, which was released 2006-01-11. The last release of poppler without a pdftohtml manpage was 0.4.0, released on 2005-08-07. How on earth are you running a twelve year old version of poppler? Or does Debian/Ubuntu still overwrite the upstream version of that manpage?
[0]: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/P...
Re: We need to document macOS
#185Better: We need to stop using undocumented proprietary systems like macOS.
In contrast to undocumented free (open) systems? Documentation is an issue irrespective of prorietariness(??!) of a system. I welcome this initiative. (Yes I know there are examples of documentation excellence to be found in some free/open systems. You can advocate their use whilst also having well documented macOs.)
At least with the free software, you can hope to accurately document it.
Re: We need to document macOS
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Years ago Finder left much to be desired, but with all the updates of the last few revisions I'm not left wanting for anything. People complaining about searching likely haven't tried smart searches, it's awesome. Can anyone specifically call out what their issues are with Finder besides "it sucks"? I really feel that I'm missing something here.
I have not used smart searches, and now I'm reading about them and it does look pretty cool. But that search bar should give me something sort of close to what I'm looking for in a couple strokes and it really doesn't. I can specifically call out what my issues are with Finder. - Where is my fucking folder tree. There was no reason to take it away other than "thinking different" just like the backspace key. Super spe…
You may know this, but from column view you can use the toolbar or a keyboard shortcut to do 'Arrange By', which is not exactly a sort but similar. (It splits files into groups based on intervals of the specified property, and the groups are sorted, but the files aren't sorted within the groups.) Alternately, it's not exactly the most streamlined option, but you can change 'Sort By' from the window that pops up from Cmd-J.
Re: We need to document macOS
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sentiment is why I do almost everything in a terminal. I see even people who use mac do everything on the terminal. Whenever someone complains about a UI tool crashing, acting wonky, being slow, my reply is always 1. I can't help you, I don't use that; 2. Just use the terminal. UI fashions come and go, but the terminal is forever.
If you are just using bash for everything why don't you just use a tty instead. Jokes aside, Isn't linux a better idea if Bash is all you need? The only difference is that Mac has more proprietary stuff that don't support linux. If that's not an issue linux is much better.(IMO)
Device drivers. That's what kills Linux for desktop/laptop use.
Re: We need to document macOS
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Linux is a great server OS but a really terrible choice on the desktop. Why?
Because I spent 4 hours today trying to figure out how to prevent something from starting on boot (which boot system is Ubuntu using this version? Why do the systemctl and service commands disagree with each other?). I spent two weeks trying to make my ctrl/capslock swap stick and not reset every time the computer slept/resumed. When I plug my headphones into the computer, I have to manually switch the output source…
A lot of those issues result with non-uniform hardware. If you want predictability with that then buy from a manufacturer who has designed for and preinstalled Linux, like one of those Dells.
Re: We need to document macOS
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
A beefy windows workstation or laptop to cover Adobe & DAWs + VMWare for Linux. With fullscreen VMWare and open-vm-tools I can barely notice that it doesn't run bare metal, and i can keep different distros at hand for different purposes.
I bought Windows 10 Pro last year and had really high hopes for it after the Ubuntu shim was introduced. Windows is a fucking nightmare for anything involving producing audio at a pro level. The Ubuntu shim does not solve what I need even though it's a nice add. The real kicker is that STILL many errors produce a window where I can't even fucking copy the output. Why that is still a feature, I have no idea. That coup…
I hear you about the audio part. I do electronic music as a hobby - I'm not much of a keyboard player, but I do a lot of editing and tweaking using a digital audio workstation program (DAW).
Whenever I look for stuff in user forums, it seems like it's always the folks on Windows who are having a devil of a time getting audio drivers and stuff to play nice. I can't imagine dealing with all of the nagware popups and such on Windows, either, when trying to run a song. Sounds like the kiss of death if you were ever performing.
I have been using Linux since 1995, but switched over to OSX (Macs) about 5 years ago. Commercial audio products generally don't work on Linux. Maybe you can get Reaper to work under WINE, but good luck getting any licensed soft-synths to run (maybe, but I never tried). I'm sure you can "muzzle" some of Windows more annoying nagging and such, but I have other things to do than get an MSCE cert - paying triple for a laptop to Apple every 5 years or so turns out to be cheaper and faster than keeping up with MS internals :-(
Back to the main topic: I've developed a vested interest in the last few years of seeing OSX continue to thrive. I hope Apple doesn't kill it by continuing to make reckless changes to the hardware and/or software.