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macOS 10.15 Vista

tyler.io

31–40 of 322 posts

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#31

Literally this was me this morning after I upgraded last night and went to bed. I get Apple wants to make people feel their in control of their privacy, but literally every app I use for work prompts me for every permission imaginable. “Oh the command you’re running in Terminal, it wants permissions to your Downloads folder, is that ok?” ::click yes:: “Guess what? That same command you’re running in Terminal now want…

> I get Apple wants to make people feel their in control of their privacy, but literally every app I use for work prompts me for every permission imaginable. i would guess this has the side-effect of making devs think hard about what really needs access or not, and tightening up where data is stored (say in the app container, not copying files willy nilly over the hd, using entitlements etc) > Oh the command you’re r…

> yes, that is annoying, but i’m pretty sure that only happens the first time it tries to access those folders... is that correct?

I haven't updated to Catalina, but some recent macOS (Mojave?) I didn't get those prompts in Terminal until I ran `find .` So I think you're right.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#32
post #30

This isn't ideal, but it also looks to be because there's a ton of power user stuff installed, which is going to require lots of permissions. And you really do need to ask the user individually.

This. My parents would never deal with this because they don't run Hazel, Alfred, Bartender, etc.

I run some of them, but I'm fine with hard transitions.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#33
post #3

I understand this is chaos, but it's chaos because it has to be. There's no way to move users from an world of opaque "if it's an application, it can do anything it wants" to a world of "applications should ask me when they want to do something" transparency. The idea that Apple doesn't care about the Mac because it's trying to explicitly improve our privacy and security is … weird.

It's a bad onboarding though, full stop, and not very Apple like. For example, I imagine there could be a way to present the user a screen with all apps, and ask the user on one screen to check/uncheck any that it would like to receive notifications for. Similarly, for the apps requesting access to various things, if I were Apple, I'd wait a bit and then present the user a list with the apps requesting access, explai…

”I imagine there could be a way to present the user a screen with all apps, and ask the user on one screen to check/uncheck any that it would like to receive notifications for”

All 150+ apps (I don’t know how many are installed by default, but I have 277 on my system), many of which the user won’t even know he has installed? (I just found out I have an “Adobe Air Uninstaller” and two “Abobe Air Application Uninstaller”s, something called “Computer.app”, and 11 different Java 8 updates, for example)

And no, I don’t think such a dialog would be useful because users could delete applications they “don’t use” from there. The average user simply doesn’t know which applications he doesn’t use. I certainly don’t.

I think they could do a bit better, but I don’t think this problem has an easy answer. For example, they could exclude all Apple apps from these questions, but I suspect that would (rightfully) give us “Apple gives its own applications preferential treatment” complaints.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#34
post #27

You know, this is a pretty apt analogy. Vista (apparently) was considered terrible primarily because it ripped off the band-aid and made a bunch of inconvenient but important-for-security-in-the-long-term changes. [0] [0]: https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/85185740489147187...

Well, that, plus the fact that it was resource-heavy. This was compounded by the fact that a lot of hardware was sold as being 'Vista-ready' while in reality being incapable of running the overly-fancy graphics-heavy 'glass' shell. It also had a number of performance problems (e.g. slow file copy) which only got sorted out in Windows 7. Oh, let's not forget the fact that Vista was supposed to be Longhorn, the OS of the future with a database file system and all sorts of fancy stuff which was either dropped due to performance problems or never left the lab in the first place.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#35
The biggest annoyance I've had here is that it makes some apps just plain not work if they're using something symlinked from ~/Library to ~/Documents (for Mackup or other syncing solutions), though some work fine, so it may just be exposing apps that are doing something weird with file access in the first place.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#37
post #7
post #3

I understand this is chaos, but it's chaos because it has to be. There's no way to move users from an world of opaque "if it's an application, it can do anything it wants" to a world of "applications should ask me when they want to do something" transparency. The idea that Apple doesn't care about the Mac because it's trying to explicitly improve our privacy and security is … weird.

Second this. It's a major security update that allows you to re-evaluate and more precisely manage access rights that your existing apps have. Not sure what "super user" author is really sad about. No one is keeping him from using windows.

Erm, preferring the old Apple experience (or even a perceived old Apple experience) to the modern Apple experience does not necessarily mean he would prefer the Microsoft experience to the modern Apple experience...

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#38
post #3

I understand this is chaos, but it's chaos because it has to be. There's no way to move users from an world of opaque "if it's an application, it can do anything it wants" to a world of "applications should ask me when they want to do something" transparency. The idea that Apple doesn't care about the Mac because it's trying to explicitly improve our privacy and security is … weird.

I disagree. The solution to this situation where there are a bunch of dialogs popping all over the screen, asking for some permission, is not to throw up your hands and say "best we could do".

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#39

This is kind of the same as the first time you enable Little Snitch. IMO it’s good to reveal that you’re running dozens of applications with basically full access to all your files. I’d rather give additive permissions to applications, since I’ve seen evidence time and again that security is one of the lowest priorities for most development shops. It’s annoying the first time after upgrading (I haven’t done it yet),…

LS is probably my favorite app after iTerm2. The hardest part is definitely the first few months of CONSTANT dialogues. So worth it though.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel a certain sense of comfort in seeing explicit privacy dialogues that make sense, coupled with a deep feeling of control when I press that “Deny” button.

Re: macOS 10.15 Vista

#40

At least for me, there's really no good reason to upgrade to Catalina. Most of the new "features" are things that I can't or won't use (e.g. desktop Siri). However Catalina causes a lot of problems with things that I do care about (32 bit apps, hardware drivers)

I won't pretend you have the same interests as me but one of the reasons I personally look(ed) forward to Catalina was the ability to essentially "run iOS apps" (recompiled for macOS).

I can't wait to get rid of some of my Electron apps in favor of proper native ones. That feature alone would be worth the upgrade in my opinion.

But that's not to say I agree with how they've implemented the permissions dialogs. As a developer who had to deal with them I found several glaring bugs in Mojave, not to mention a sub-par UX. I'm sad if they haven't improved on that.

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