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Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.
But then for iOS 13 they tried to catch up with 2 years worth of features in 1 year...
They just need to either slow down the pace, or figure out how to scale their developer count better.
The same thing happened when we were working on Leopard under Bertrand. Because the developer toolchain switched to Objective C 2.0 with garbage collection enabled, the OS was unusable for development for months at a time. Development took twice as long as planned, the release was fairly bloated, and required 2 or 3 updates in the first month or two. When Craig took over he introduced a sprint model so that there wer…
I hate that Rich Hickey quote. Sprints are just the classic computer science "divide and conquer" strategy applied to development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s nice and all, but I don’t really understand how that helps. Ah, from the article: > some “testers would go days without a livable build, so they wouldn’t really have a handle on what’s working and not working,” the person said. This defeated the main goal of the testing process as Apple engineers struggled to check how the operating system was reacting to many of the new features, leading to some of iOS 13’s p…
So one of the issues is that Apple lives on their own tools, so when critical system components are broken nobody can get work done. But ideally they'd actually fix the bugs and try to keep the daily builds livable rather than trying to sweep the issues under the rug…
Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.
People remember fondly of Snow Leopard 10.6.8, but the introduction of Snow Leopard 10.6.0 was very rough, certainly not bug free. Snow Leopard did change a lot of things under the hood (64-bit mostly, maybe Grand Central Dispatch). At the time I was depending on macports to install a lot of dev dependencies: mono was broken, and a bunch of other libraries were also not compiling anymore. It is to this day the only m…
It was a strange way to manage tens of thousands of people.
> The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test versions, known as “daily builds,” of future software updates disable unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and settings menu dubbed Flags
Apple parrots their OS update metrics as a leading indicator of customer engagement / satisfaction with the platform & how sympathetic they are to the difficulty for developers of putting out software for new hardware every year. I'm interested to know the rationale for them putting out weekly releases vs. fortnightly or monthly. It seems like they could burn a lot of goodwill with casual users.
Apple doesn't push out weekly releases to the public. Are you suggesting that they should?
Apple needs another "Snow Leopard" release - spend an entire year not adding anything - just focus on making everything work better, fix bugs, etc.
> The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test versions, known as “daily builds,” of future software updates disable unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option to selectively enable those features, via a new internal process and settings menu dubbed Flags
So they're just now discovering feature flags? I would have assumed that any team working on a large code base has been using those for years. The concept has been around since forever.
Not just on the user side, but the developer end as well.
Perfectly valid code which used to work up till Xcode 11.1 throws errors inside the Swift runtime or toolchain on Xcode 11.2 (and 11.2.1). Even the Swift engineers on the official forums don't seem to know what you can or can't do with the new language features.
And after seeing bugs I reported eons ago still not fixed, it feels futile to even bother reporting them anymore.
It's still not quite bad enough to make me want to flee back to Windows or switch to Android, but it does make me depressed, like there's nothing left in the world that "just works", except maybe my Nintendo Switch.