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The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

amberweinberg.com

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Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#101

Post by smsm42 »

javajosh wrote: post #25

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…

RSS is passe? That's news for me. I've been using RSS almost exclusively to get my news/blog/entertainment feeds for years now, and I know many others do the same. So what's the cool thing now to use instead?

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#102

Post by smsm42 »

hollerith wrote: post #73
hnriot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the early days of RSS, Dave Winer himself compared RSS to Usenet, so it's not a completely ignorant thing to say. 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 upg…

What kind of virtues you mean?

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#103

Post by prodigal_erik »

icebraining wrote: post #93
prodigal_erik wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interacting with one's tools as a human being. But Apple's customers are self-selected to want to avoid that responsibility.

The fact that she should have done that is completely irrelevant to whether Apple should have provided a way to export her data, much like you can't just run over a pedestrian on a crosswalk just because he forgot to look both ways.

I agree, I'm also saying its unfair and unrealistic to criticize these consumers for being how they are.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#104

Post by smsm42 »

kalleboo wrote: post #69
vladd wrote: 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…

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 remember was taken aback when one of my coworkers showed me his newly-acquired iPhone toy and it turned out it does not have copy-paste function, so if you want to copy URL from some place or take a phrase and put it in the search you have to re-type it on that cute small on-screen keyboard where your finger covers three letters at once. I was repeatedly told since then nobody really needs copy-paste function - up to the day Apple finally implemented it and it turned out everybody need it. So when I hear Apple never misses an UI detail I say "yeah right! and moon is made of swiss cheese!"

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#105

Post by smsm42 »

lubujackson wrote: post #77

Apple products are meant to be used how Apple wants you to use them, nothing else. It's an all-in decision, either you take the good with the bad or get a computer that allows customization. "Apple power user" is a sad, unfulfillable concept.

Not true for MacOS, though Apple is not exactly going out of the way to make it easier. Closer to the truth for iOS, where all "advanced user" stuff is not only not made available - but applications making it possible are explicitly banned. I know there are reasons for that - like if you can do power user stuff, you probably can circumvent Apple restrictions that bring them that juicy 30% payment cut - but the fact is the fact.

However, this is the iOS picture, on Mac picture is much better - I could do on Mac almost every power user thing I did on Linux, albeit I'd have to do more research to find the proper docs and the proper tools, and some of the tools may be not free (in either sense).

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#106

Post by smsm42 »

frankc wrote: post #43
abruzzi wrote: post #3

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.

I think the even bigger point is it's never ok to organize data in a way that removal of the UI leaves you with no access to the data at all, even though you could use another tool to do UI if only the vendor gave you proper access to the data. E.g. if Apple stored their RSS feeds, say, in OPML - migration would be easy. If they exported the feed to OPML on upgrade - migration would be not very hard too. Since Apple did everything the wrong way there, the user had to use 3 tools and spend hours of manual work to get her data back.

This is especially bad coming from the company that is known for their neglect to BC and overhauling UIs in most radical way. Their developers must have known the possibility of UI change exists - and still stored the data in a format that turns this possibility into a major problem for the user.

Compare, for example, to Firefox that stores bookmarks in HTML(-like) file. If ever something happens to Firefox project or their bookmark functionality, I can always take the HTML and get the info out with the simplest of tools, and probably I won't have to, since these tools would already exist - since the format is easy to use.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#107

Post by smsm42 »

jarek wrote: post #86
greedo wrote: post #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…

I don't know why this was downvoted. This is a very accurate representation of Apple philosophy in a nutshell.

Maybe not everybody likes this philosophy...

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#108

Post by smsm42 »

greedo wrote: post #94
icebraining wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is using a functionality that comes with the OS, and then upgrading the OS an "edge case"?

Imagine that Apple decided in the next OSX release to discontinue Safari. Would Apple need to include a utility for users to export their bookmarks/cookies etc before upgrading? She's a developer, a self-proclaimed "Apple fan girl" but she didn't read up the release notes for ML. The world changes, features come and go. Expecting them to stay static or to provide you with with air bags in case of impact is unrealisti…

Actually, for bookmarks you don't need an utility, since they're stored in plist file. It is not as good as it could be, since it's not human-readable and needs plist tools, which AFAIK are available only on Apple platform, to read - but it can be easily converted using these tools to XML format which then can be processed by any tool. So in this case Apple is not good for regular user, but tolerable for power user.

OTOH, Firefox has its bookmarks in HTML file which you could just open in any browser.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#109

Post by hythloday »

jarek wrote: post #86
greedo wrote: post #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…

I don't know why this was downvoted. This is a very accurate representation of Apple philosophy in a nutshell.

No, I'm pretty sure "move fast and break things" is Facebook.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#110

Post by bad_user »

paupino_masano wrote: post #79
rauljara wrote: post #17

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…

They didn't destroy the data [1] but regardless a migration path should have been provided. It wouldn't have been to much effort to check to see if they used the RSS feature and then basically tell them "this feature is not supported, but we see you use it - how about we make an export so you can use one of the other great readers out there". The upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion did something similar when it decided…

     They didn't destroy the data
No, they just left it hidden and in an unreadable format.
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