71–80 of 152 posts
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…
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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
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> 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.
Except for the mailing list, RSS is the only relatively-heavily-used thing on the internet that shares Usenet's "openness" virtue: namely, there is no single "gatekeeper" organization that a reader must rely on to follow the authors in his RSS feed -- the sudden trouble that the OP experienced when upgrading to Mountain Lion is about the most disruptive thing that could happen to a reader's relationship with the authors in her RSS feed.
(If the assertion I was responding to had been that the designers of RSS should have tried harder to emulate Usenet's subtler virtues, I would have agreed.)
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…
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> 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.
I have no love for RSS, and even if I did, there are many third party apps that fill the niche, but I will say (as a regular Final Cut Pro user) welcome to the club. When Apple does their famous "cutting out the cruft" there are always users like us that are jilted because they depend on that cruft.
So many people are missing the key point...it is never ok to to remove data without warning.
From the LinkedIn profile of the guy who implemented Safari RSS: Social-Software Introvert Apple, Inc. February 2004 – January 2008 (4 years) Part of a very small team that implemented the news-reading (RSS/Atom) features of the Safari browser in Mac OS X 10.4, and the public news-reading framework for 10.5, used by Mail and 3rd party applications as well as Safari. I also prototyped some wild and crazy social-softwa…
Wait.. so the reason Apple removed RSS was they don't have the talent to implement RSS? Apple simply couldn't figure out to implement RSS in a way that they liked. I am sure they had lots of data about the usage of RSS in Safari and mail. Yeah they should have offered an export option, but I for one think RSS isn't going anywhere as a user facing technology. As for not being a social software company, well; they want…
http://web.archive.org/web/20110714114434/http://jens.moosey...
I do think Apple was right to remove support for their crappy reader. In any domain where you have tons of options (like rss readers) I'd rather have no feature than a poorly executed one. No feature means I'll go out and get a good version of it. A poorly executed feature (especially from apple) means I'll probably put up with it longer than I should. However, given that they were going about destroying access to us…
[1] Sorry: I do see that you mention that later on. Though, in general I'm not sure why so many HN comments think it did when the article said that it was still available?