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FYI, Xcode 11.2.1 is out and fixes several issues.
and introduces some new. Seriously, why don't they open source it? There are so many so bad security issues in Apple software last years.
That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snow jobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff.
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They did that with iOS 12. iOS 12 was great. Actually made a bunch of old devices more usable. 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.
iOS 9 as well. But then two versions later we were back to buggy iOS 11. And now the same with iOS 13. Personally, I think the annual release cycle is the problem. They keep having to release these “clean up” versions because they didn’t have time to perfect the originals. Of note on the macOS side, everyone’s fondly-remembered Snow Leopard was also the last non-annual release.
Yeah, this is a problem. They announce a bunch of features at WWDC in June, and everyone expects them in September. If their WWDC announcement was just developer API stuff, and they announced the iOS features a few weeks before release, they'd have a better idea of what was actually ready. Then they could release features in point releases spread across the year.
Maybe it's easy to say but it feels more like a cultural problem than a technical/procedural one. Why the fuck did they let this happen in the first place? Where is this mentality that even the backside of a cabinet should be build well?
The brand has a momentum, even if things start getting worse for customers there isn't an immediate response on a large scale.
A certain quality is important for the "true" advocates, but we're a small minority. Growth is driven by at scale customers who don't notice these issues because they're buying the products for different reasons.
In this context, improving quality to keep the hardcore fans happy costs money, but doesn't impact the bottom line significantly in the short term.
Growth is the only goal at this scale and that's driven by other strategies and not hardcore fans.
I guess long story short is corporations are cash machines and product quality does not play an important part at this scale.
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FYI, Xcode 11.2.1 is out and fixes several issues.
and introduces some new. Seriously, why don't they open source it? There are so many so bad security issues in Apple software last years.
Keep in mind - I am not pro or against open sourcing it - just I don't think it will help currently at all.
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and introduces some new. Seriously, why don't they open source it? There are so many so bad security issues in Apple software last years.
What incentive do they have to free it? Morals don't count. There's no incentive, so they won't. That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snow jobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff.
What does this mean?
Safari, at least on the iPad, is so incredibly buggy in iOS 13 that it’s practically unusable. Not to mention the ridiculous system where it opens new Safari windows, not tabs, and then doesn’t give me any option to close them. And when Safari bugs out, and I have to force close it, it loses every single one of the tabs I have open, and it didn’t do any of this garbage before iOS 13.
Arghh, those floating Safari windows. How do you get rid of them?
Then press the Safari icon (or alternatively, press and hold on the Safari icon and choose "Show All Windows").
Now, all of those floating Safari windows are shown, and you can "toss them away" and close them.
Yes, it's not a very intuitive discovery process :(
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iOS 12 and Mojave are fine. Just stay there, fix bugs, and add support for new hardware.
iOS 12 is fine for phones maybe, but iOS 13 (or iPadOS if you prefer) is a pretty big change for iPads in terms of power-user features. USB storage support, network drive support, multiple instances of apps, multiple apps switchable in slide-over, major improvements to Safari. I've run into some bugs, but I wouldn't switch back to 12. EDIT - Forgot to mention the contextual menus, which are new to iPads this year as…
I think the multiple app stuff was a mistake on Apples part. It complicates the OS significantly and starts to make it feel like a computer operating system.
Improvements to Safari make sense, but then I'd consider that an application and not part of the operating system.
1. Return text selection back to 12.x functionality - it is now literally impossible to e.g., select a single word from a link’s anchor text without first selecting some random portion of text (half the page at times), and then walking back the blue knobs for 45 minutes. The ideal UX is to offer to select a word if I click next to it, and if I press down and hold, give me a movable cursor every single time, and never automatically start selecting whole chunks of text just because I hold my finger down. The current iteration of this functionality randomly switches between both of those modes.
2. allow me to use dictation in offline-only mode so that it actually works AND so that I don’t get 400 words into a message and then watch my phone magically backspace the entire thing and then type it out again, incorrectly, in slow-motion
3. Stop putting my cursor in capitalization mode every time I backspace a word when I’m typing
4. After I dictate a block of text, please do not make it look like you have highlighted the entire block of text for me, when in actuality it’s not highlighted at all, and if I tried to do some kind of operation with the assumption that it’s highlighted (like delete), I will be disappointed by instead performing an accidental operation
5. If I start typing a URL into Safari, let me backspace the characters at the same rate that I have typed them (currently, if I open Safari and click into the URL bar and start typing “new” like I’m going to go to “news.ycombinator.com”, but then decide I first want to go to “google.com”, I have typed 3 chars (“new”) so I should be able to hit backspace 3 times and then start typing “google”. Instead, I must first hit backspace one time to get rid of the auto suggestion because hacker news is in my favorites list. Then I can hit backspace three more times, then start typing “google“. This is an idiotic bug.
6. If I am using dictation and then I click somewhere in the text to prepare to fix the inevitable incorrect word that dictation will put in my text, but I click there before I end dictation, and then I end dictation, please do not insert everything that I said twice, once originally where the cursor was, and then a second time where I clicked to make that correction. I don’t think there is much value in having two copies of the same paragraph, one inserted into the middle of the other...
7. If I try to share a photo while in the Camera app by selecting Share > Messages, and then I turn my phone vertical while I’m typing the message (to make typing easier), please don’t make it so that I can no longer see the keyboard, the text input field, or the photo that I’m sending, and I have no way of getting out of the situation besides losing the message, by closing the app and starting over
8. If I click in the Camera app to start recording a video, start recording immediately instead of waiting a variable amount of time between half of one second and two whole seconds, causing me to A) miss whatever I was trying to record or B) click a second time, resulting in me stopping recording... and missing whatever I was trying to record
9. If I open the Camera app, I am, at that moment, more interested in seeing the Camera app open then I am seeing a black screen with no functionality. Can we make the default such that the Camera app is what I see instead of a black screen that doesn’t go away until I restart my phone? I like that camera feature better than the black screen.
... please add to this list in replies
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> I've missed out on many moments with my toddler because of that You just missed taking pictures. You were still there to live them :)
So true. My parents didn’t miss out not having a camera phone and neither did my grandparents. It’s amazing how dependant we’ve become on capturing moments. Sometimes even to the detriment of actually experiencing them.
The human brain is way better at remembering where to find information than remembering information itself.
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What incentive do they have to free it? Morals don't count. There's no incentive, so they won't. That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snow jobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff.
> That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snowjobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff. What does this mean?
Jobs was notorious for snowing out free software people. If you don't know what that means:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snow%20job
A primary example was when Jobs tried to convince Stallman to allow NeXT to break the GPL, Stallman resisted, and a bit of NeXT got released under a GPL-compatible license.
From a mail exchange between him and the developer of clisp:
I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.
What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.
So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL.
The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed, they made it free.
So I don't think the GPL actually requires a correction for this. But perhaps it would be a good idea to add a note explaining this.