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If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

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Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#281

Post by atdt »

dilap wrote: post #161
Osmium wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a few cases like this. Presumably the original was created/maintained by just one person, they move on, and then when the next person comes along they decide it's easier to re-write than modify the old code. But they don't have sufficient time and the new version is inferior to the old. Bear in mind the old version did need to be updated (new CoreStorage features, has to handle Fusion drives, now APFS…

1. dont have the same depth of dev talent they used to 2. mgmt that isnt as sensitive-to and focussed-on quality. (this is 75% speculation on my part and 25% confirmed by conversations with 2 ex-apple engineers.)

You'll find that ex-anything engineers tend to find their former workplace degraded in quality and talent.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#282

Post by exikyut »

KGIII wrote: post #272
thought_alarm wrote: post #49

How did Disk Utility.app go from being one of the great built-in OS X utilities to the embarrassing amateurish shit show that it is today? Perhaps the same people responsible for the file system engineering are also responsible for developing this user-facing application. They might excel at low level system engineering, but they are utterly unqualified to develop a high level GUI application. Spend 5 minutes with th…

One of the most-common complaints that I see about Apple is that they have allowed macOS' quality to steadily decline and the most-common speculation has been that this declination in quality is because macOS makes Apple less money than iOS. The iOS-using products are Apple's cash cow. It does make sense that they'd prioritize working on iOS. However, what doesn't make sense is that Apple certainly has enough resourc…

Manglement seems to have collectively forgotten that iOS app quality is dependent on macOS and tooling quality. Improve macOS, you put a lightness in devs' steps everywhere and iOS apps get even better.

It seems that macOS has gotten completely bogged down (like really, really bogged down) and mired in bureaucracy.

What I just described is a "little thing" that's very very hard to quantify to non-engineers, sadly.

(I recently learned (I have no exposure to Apple, I'd like to but their stuff is expensive!!) that you can't just "go ahead and upgrade Xcode", but that you have to do it in a very specific/esoteric way or you break absolutely everything, and that it's not unreasonable sometimes to just nuke macOS from orbit and green-field reinstall everything.)

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#283

Post by y_tho »

pfranz wrote: post #207
mi100hael wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Dell Precision laptop running Linux at home and a MacBook Pro from work. On a weekly basis, the Mac won't wake from sleep and requires a hard reboot. The Time Machine backups get corrupted at least every other month and require a full backup from scratch. Sometimes the audio just quits working when I wake from sleep. The App Store is some horribly wrapped, unresponsive web app. Disk Utility is useless. Etc,…

It sounds like you have a hardware problem with your Mac. Time Machine and wake from sleep could be signs of bad RAM...maybe the audio problem, too. Or maybe the extra stuff your work installs? In my experience (for all platforms) that software is low-level and of dubious quality. OTOH, as long as your hardware is decently supported, I haven't really had fundamental complaints about desktop Linux in the 10+ years I'v…

> could be signs of bad RAM

Well, they can just open it up and cha-... I hope it's an older model.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#284

Post by antod »

nkkollaw wrote: post #194
freedomben wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's become a bit of a joke that every year is "the year of the linux desktop," but seriously I've been amazed at how awesome machine I can get with linux for half the price of a macbook. Linux UX has come a long way. Both Gnome and KDE these days have a pretty complete and nice experience.

Every time I go back to desktop Linux, my experience is a nightmare. It usually includes updates (or myself by mistake? not sure) making my system so broken that I have to reinstall and start again from scratch. This year I thought I'd try with the Pro after the MacBook Air wasn't upgraded with retina, but if I have to spend almost EUR 2,000 and have faulty hardware and a broken OS that shows my password in clear tex…

> It usually includes updates (or myself by mistake? not sure) making my system so broken that I have to reinstall and start again from scratch.

I hear that a lot, but I always wonder what distro people are using or what they do to their machines or what hardware they have etc.

My current laptop at home has been getting every 6 monthly Ubuntu in-place upgrade since 13.04 and hasn't had an issue. Same with the kids second hand laptops. But I choose Thinkpads and make sure I always get Intel graphics and wifi chipsets for compatibility.

Based on my colleagues experiences though - I don't have anywhere as much upgrade confidence at work with my Macbook Pro though (still on El Capitan).

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#285

Post by exikyut »

ProAm wrote: post #218
rising-sky wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally concur with that last comment. I had to reset my iPhone 7 plus and watch series 3, twice over the weekend to get the Activity app to sync properly. Which is a shame considering Apple's reputation for building "air-tight" software and products and not rushing features to market because they want to get it "right".

> Apple's reputation for building "air-tight" software Really that was 5+ years ago. Apple is a life style company first these days and a technology company second you can see this by their priorities.

Wanted to voice my complaint that you're being downvoted. This is absolutely true, I completely agree.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#286

Post by nier »

mi100hael wrote: post #145
planetjones wrote: post #50

The lack of attention to detail by Apple recently e.g. code reviews, in house testing is clearly too low. I have seen too many software failures recently from this company. Like photos freezing on my new iMac (before High Sierra), numerous issues with iOS (I remember the podcasts app wasting all my cellular allowance because it ignored WiFi only) and other nuances, inconsistencies and defects. Only in iOS 11 have the…

I have a Dell Precision laptop running Linux at home and a MacBook Pro from work. On a weekly basis, the Mac won't wake from sleep and requires a hard reboot. The Time Machine backups get corrupted at least every other month and require a full backup from scratch. Sometimes the audio just quits working when I wake from sleep. The App Store is some horribly wrapped, unresponsive web app. Disk Utility is useless. Etc,…

Every time I had these issues with corrupt Time Machine backups the destination drive had bad blocks. If you have the right drive/interface combination you can use an application called SMART Utility by Volitans to check on that. Time Capsule drives need to be put in compatible enclosures.

I would be suspicious of any drive that has even one bad block.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#287

Post by dilap »

threeseed wrote: post #276
dilap wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. dont have the same depth of dev talent they used to 2. mgmt that isnt as sensitive-to and focussed-on quality. (this is 75% speculation on my part and 25% confirmed by conversations with 2 ex-apple engineers.)

3. It's just a bug. You know the sort of thing that happens to developers: Every. Single. Day.

I opened the App Store just now to see if a few lack-of-polish bugs were present. The screen flickered a couple times and then was nothing but white and a loading spinner. Waited 30 seconds, never went away.

Force quit, reopen, loads fine.

Go to the Today tab. Scroll through. Notice that sometimes your scroll doesn't get registered. Why? Because if you try to scroll over an "Open" or "Get" button, it steals the event and breaks your scrolling. Amature mistake, and the kind of detail Apple used to always get right.

Watch OS SDK: When the user performs an action on a notification that arrives on the watch, it calls a callback on the application on the phone. What happens if the user's phone is not reachable? The action just gets dropped on the floor, and to the user the app looks buggy. (Maybe/hopefully this is fixed in the latest version of watchOS; I haven't checked.) Flawed, poorly thought out API design.

Go to the updates tab on the App Store app. Pull down to refresh. No updates, but the "Available" headline disappears and then weirdly reveal-animates back into place, an overall feeling of flicker.

Huge issues? No, but a very real drop-off in quality and polish from what Apple used to put out.

(The password bug is a little different -- obviously bugs can and do happen. But not having a testing procedure in place for the core paths through a piece of software is a huge process failure, especially for something critical like security. Every release of the software should have testers going through a plan like, "enter password hint. attempt to access volume. verify password hint is correctly shown." &c.)

(Also, to be fair, I think after taking a huge dive the quality of Apple software seems to be slowly ticking up again.)

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#288

Post by kemitche »

crispinb wrote: post #277
davrosthedalek wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that small command-line tools "the unix way" combined with a competently written -h help page is quite discoverable. Maybe not for a general computer newbie, but certainly for people used to /other/ cli tools.

This only seems to work in practise for tools that are very small, otherwise exceptional writing is required (which, by definition, will rarely occur). I can't imagine (to pick a particularly extreme example) that anyone has ever learned to use git by reading the man pages. In contrast, even features in pretty poor GUI apps are by default generally discoverable.

I shudder to think how hard it would be - likely impossible - to use a bad git GUI if I didn't already know many of the git CLI commands.

Even just, say, MS Word. If I don't know a feature exists, clicking around through dozens of menus isn't going to get me anywhere. For both CLI and GUI, Google or official docs are the only reasonable way to discover.

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#289

Post by joombaga »

robtaylor wrote: post #192

As there are a few mac gurus on this thread - an OT question... colleague has 2014 rMBP and used HDMI out and a DVI adapter via thunderbolt port to have two external displays. Sierra update killed that - only one display will work at a time. prams zapped, settings fiddled with, cables tested in millions of combos and even playing with AppleGraphicsControl.kext Any other ideas? Seems nuts an update can kill such a thi…

Connect the other monitor via thunderbolt->HDMI adapter? You're right, it does seem silly. Possibly just coincidental?

Re: If macOS High Sierra shows your password instead of the password hint

#290

Post by selectodude »

pfranz wrote: post #211
mi100hael wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a sustainable solution, though. At some point, 3rd party developers quit supporting old systems and Apple quits issuing security patches. If I had my way, time would've froze with 10.6.8.

It depends on what you do. I have a friend still happily running SL. He's curious about the new version of Lightroom, but still using the old version just fine.

I hope it's not connected to the internet.
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