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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#221

Post by anon7000 »

AHTERIX5000 wrote: post #21
rcarmo wrote: post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

Spotlight straight up broke on both of my Macs after Sequoia. It can't even find exact matches in many directories marked for indexing and re-indexing did nothing. Just searching for apps under Applications doesn't seem to find all apps.

The nice thing is that there are several apps which replace it and do a lot more at the same time. (Like LaunchBar, Raycast, Alfred)

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#222

Post by gilgoomesh »

Snow Leopard was macOS moving so slowly people thought Apple were abandoning the Mac.

Apple changed how they tied OS updates to hardware sales in this era and this left a lot of Macs on Snow Leopard for half a decade. So people remember that last point update – which was as close to a low-term-stability release as Apple has ever had.

But to get there, Snow Leopard received 15 updates over 2 years and it was really just point updates to Leopard so it was more like 29 updates over 4 years without a major user facing feature. And this was after Leopard itself took over 2 years to develop.

If Apple did nothing but polish features and reduce bugs for 6 years, people would proclaim them dead. And they might actually be dead since their entire sales model is tied to cycles of development, promotion and delivery. For those of us who remember Apple getting stuck on System 7 between 1990 and 1997 and how the company nearly collapsed in that era: it would be a delay almost on that scale.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#223

Post by alt219 »

booleandilemma wrote: post #170
lor_louis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, win11 is a nightmare in terms of usability. I can only assume a committee of eldritch beings and accountants designed it. It blows my mind that when right-clicking on a file in file explorer, the 'delete' option is hidden in a sub-menu under 'more options'.

Are you sure about that? Look for the trashcan symbol on the upper-right of the context menu. I agree that having "more options" to begin with was a jarring experience coming from windows 10 though.

Except for when the placement of the icon strip with the trashcan symbol changes to the bottom of the context menu because of the location of the context menu on the screen. Bonkers. No idea why the UI committee would’ve okayed that one.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#224

Post by hkpack »

JamesonNetworks wrote: post #181
hkpack wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it doesn't in practice. I develop and distribute few free apps for macOS, and building / notarising is never a problem.

In contrast to this point, as long as I use Xcode and do the same thing I've always done allowing it to manage provisioning and everything else, I don't have a problem. However, I want to use CI/CD. Have you seen what kind of access you have to give fastlane? It's pretty wild. And even after giving it the keys to the kingdom, it still didn't work. Integrating apple code signing with CI/CD is really hard, full of very…

I don't know about fastlane, since my CI/CD is just a shell script, and signing and notarising is as hard as (checking the script) running `codesign ...` followed by `notarytool submit ... --wait`

Yes, you need to put keys on the build server for the "Developer ID Application" (which is what you need to distribute apps outside of AppStore) signature to work.

You do not need to give any special access to anything else beyond that.

Anyway, it is indeed more difficult than cross-build for Darwin from linux and call it a day.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#225

Post by kevincox »

atombender wrote: post #94
rcarmo wrote: post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

Regarding Spotlight, one thing that started happening for me on Sequioa was that Finder and other apps started getting very slow to react to file changes. For example, I can save a new file to a directory, and the Finder window takes maybe 10-20 seconds before the file shows up in the list. If I navigate to a different folder and then back, the file is there. I notice the same delay in apps like IntelliJ. I could be…

My favourite feature is when spotlight tells me that indexing is paused when I am searching for something.

You went through the effort to show some UI when something I am looking for may not be there because indexing is paused... but you didn't think to just unpause the indexing so that I can find it? I feel like I am being spit on, "Yeah, you not finding what you are looking for? I know, I'm not even trying"

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#226

Post by kasey_junk »

onemoresoop wrote: post #149
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. People don't want animojis, and they don't want other trite new features that only seem to exist because Apple feels it needs to demo something new every year. What they want is something that just works without annoyances, distractions, failures, or complications. Give them that and they'll break down the doors trying to get their hands on it, because it's so far from how most tech works today.

Something that just works and is stable is bad business for companies these days.

Why would it be bad business for Apple? Their business model is based on selling a holistic ecosystem. They don’t have any need to chase new features and there steady stream of high margin hardware revenue is at stake.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#227

Post by queuebert »

thewebguyd wrote: post #38
rcarmo wrote: post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

> Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_). I'm there as well. I've been really enjoying desktop Linux lately, but I can't go back to a non-Apple laptop at this point. There's just nothing…

As a former Mac user, I'm really happy with my System76 linux laptops. The only tradeoff is the terrible built-in speakers. My Lemur is lighter and has better battery life than my Macbook Air and has been bulletproof despite my ill treatment. Each of my Macs, however, have had various hardware failures or the famous keyboard recall on the horrible touchbar Macbook Pro. I also prefer matte screens to glossy, so that's a win for me, but ymmv.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#228

Post by hamandcheese »

ehutch79 wrote: post #148
hamandcheese wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding signing as a requirement can easily make what was once a very simple distribution mechanism into something much more complex - now you need manage signing certificates and keys to be able to build your thing. The cost is far far higher than the price.

I take it you feel the trade off for dev team inconvenience, vs end user security, is not worth it?

I'm just observing that the cost is a lot higher than $99/year.

I do this professionally, I maintain macOS CI workers for my employer. Apple doesn't make it easy.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#229

Post by thr0w »

What Apple needs, is to fix that weird bug where my mouse cursor stops responding to what it's hovering over. How does something so fundamentally broken make its way into an OS?

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#230

Post by p_ing »

wpm wrote: post #184
epolanski wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use both Mac and windows extensively and I'm not sure what are you referring to. You can access most settings by Windows + "yourquery".

Using search as a UI is admitting the UI sucks. It is indicative of a failure, not a solution in and of itself.

Just like System Settings in macOS! Always have to use keyword search in that thing.

FWIW, search as a UI isn't a bad thing, Cmd + Space is the main way I launch apps on macOS (or Win + "type whatever").

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