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The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

amberweinberg.com

61–70 of 152 posts

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#61

They also kicked the web-Sharing configuration. :( I got to work and wondered why my localhost did not respond. I installed mountain lion the night before. so I thought I have to re-enable websharing but couldn't found the confit anymore. After some googling I got the answer: it has moved to a so called "Server" App for round about $20. It provides many things I didn't use ... and the "old" websharing. :/ Remember St…

http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html or indeed http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-macosx.html

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#62

In a word Amber, yes, of course you are right to feel violated. Apple removed your data without your consent. The fact that you were able to recover it is impressive, and far beyond the ordinary user. The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. That feed collection was your data, and Apple had…

> The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. It seems like just yesterday my NASA rocket scientist friend was asking me what this new-fangled RSS thing was. I explained, and his response was, "So they just reimplemented USENET?"

Other than the fact that RSS and NNTP are both built on TCP, they have virtually nothing in common neither technically, architecturally nor in terms of use case they are trying to solve.

IOW, wat

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#63

"A computer shall not harm your data or, through inaction, allow your data to come to harm." -Jef Raskin's first law of interface design Shame to see the Macintosh violating the first law of the Father of the Macintosh.

Jef Raskin was not the "Father of the Macintosh". At least not according to Andy Hertzfeld, who actually worked on the Macintosh.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=The_Father_of_The...

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#64

In a word Amber, yes, of course you are right to feel violated. Apple removed your data without your consent. The fact that you were able to recover it is impressive, and far beyond the ordinary user. The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. That feed collection was your data, and Apple had…

> The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. It seems like just yesterday my NASA rocket scientist friend was asking me what this new-fangled RSS thing was. I explained, and his response was, "So they just reimplemented USENET?"

No wonder the space program has stalled! Your friend's memory has failed him, usenet bears no resemblance to rss in anyway. Usenet was a discussion forum, rss is link syndication.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#65
post #52
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that Apple didn't even think to solve it is, in fact, disheartening Probably Jobs would have caught it, his attention to such details was painful, probably both for him and the ones at the other end of the table. Simplicity is an amazing difficult thing to get right. If you don't have the right man, well, just look at Gnome3's Unity or even at this incident: RSS removal could have easily been done in the n…

Would this be the Steve Jobs who ditched floppy disk drives when people still had piles of disks around, and Firewire ports when people still had plenty of devices requiring them, etc.?

If I buy a new computer, I hopefully understand what features it has and lacks.

It is another thing altogether for a operating system upgrade to purposefully destroy user data.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#66
"All this to say, that I still run out and buy the new OS as soon as possible. The affordability and ease of doing so make it ridiculous not to. But this time I’m disappointed for one very specific reason."

"run out and buy the new os"

If you are a user to the extent that your usage depends on having access to all or certain features [1] is probably isn't the wisest thing to upgrade immediately or even upgrade on the existing disk without doing some testing.

I typically wait some time until the immediate bugs get squashed, and even then I will try to install on a different cpu, migrate things over and test before switching over what I would consider my "main" desktop machine (or laptop).

If you only have one cpu you can take the existing disk and partition it so you can boot from either the old OS or the new OS. You can setup the new OS and then use migration assistant to move over your old data. Or you can clone your existing OS on the partition (using "Super Duper") and then install the new OS on that extra partition. Which isn't a bad idea anyway in case something goes wrong.

All this of course takes having enough space to create the two partitions. But as an alternate you can also attach a USB drive and do the same. That way you can boot from either and do your testing in a controlled manner. (Note migration assistant doesn't work when filevault is on so you have to turn it off.)

The amount of effort you put into this all depends on how critical certain features are to you.

[1] I have a dns server running under 10.5 Mac OSX and the admin utility (hate it but have to use it) that runs under 10.6 or above won't allow you to access the 10.5 server. So I have to keep 10.5 running on a CPU (or as mentioned above) in order to control that server. Or I have to upgrade the 10.5 server which I'm not really looking forward to taking the time to do.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#67
post #41
post #8

We've found the only user in the world that used RSS in Mail! I feel a bond, as I was apparently the only user of RSS in Safari. (as confirmed by informal polling of friends and family). I moved my stuff into Google Reader and also went to Reeder on the Mac, but tried Newsify on the iOS devices and have to say that a custom newspaper is a much better experience than the hundred takes on master-detail drill down you f…

I had just finished implementing RSS on a website I was working for a client, making sure it worked for Safari, and that was yesterday. =\

Your work is not in vain, it's not as if everyone is going to switch to Mountain Lion anyway, if we look at the poor adoption numbers of Lion. http://imgb.mp/ivu.jpg

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#68
post #14

If you don't like a product, don't use it. If you don't properly research a product, don't complain about its features. Do some research next time. Take responsibility for your actions instead of blaming others. These are elementary principles.

[deleted]

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#69
post #34

In a word Amber, yes, of course you are right to feel violated. Apple removed your data without your consent. The fact that you were able to recover it is impressive, and far beyond the ordinary user. The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. That feed collection was your data, and Apple had…

> the fact that Apple didn't even think to solve it is, in fact, disheartening Probably Jobs would have caught it, his attention to such details was painful, probably both for him and the ones at the other end of the table. Simplicity is an amazing difficult thing to get right. If you don't have the right man, well, just look at Gnome3's Unity or even at this incident: RSS removal could have easily been done in the n…

His attention to detail only extended as far as things that excited him. I'm sure he wouldn't even notice the RSS feature was gone. OS X and iOS had lots of small oversights like this even when Jobs was around.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#70
I don't have a lot of sympathy for her. 1. She could have read up on what was changing with ML. 2. She could/should have a backup of her data, especially before an OS upgrade. 3. Her data wasn't rendered "unusable" or "lost" it was left where the old RSS client kept it. 4. Her real beef seems to be that she lost the RSS functionality and wasn't told about it.

For all of the commentators saying that Apple should have exported her data to the desktop in a neat file/folder with an alert, get real. This is such an edge case that it doesn't warrant the effort from Apple nor from HN.

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