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The myth of Snow Leopard

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Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#111

Post by downrightmike »

steve1977 wrote: post #69
giantrobot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah as someone else that worked on Snow Leopard I found this article and ones like it a bit silly. They're a lot like the old "debug code" posts on Mac forums back in the day trying to explain why Puma was slow (no, you've got a G3 and an unaccelerated video card). Tiger and Leopard were sprawling releases. Tiger covered 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, then 32-bit x86, then 64-bit x86 Macs. Tiger was also what I guess I'…

iOS killed the macOS star...

And instead of controlling our apps, ios devs just slap in any old SDK without reprisal

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#112

Post by bitwize »

frollogaston wrote: post #95
ndiddy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BSODs were largely because Vista changed the driver API so everybody had to write new drivers. I remember seeing an article saying that Microsoft's telemetry showed that ~30% of all Vista BSODs were caused by the nVidia graphics driver. Windows 7 came out a few years later with the same driver API, so by then everybody had gotten most of the kinks worked out of their drivers.

Yeah, it was that. Win7 became stable but kept some or all of the Vista bloat, but people noticed less because PCs were faster by then. I barely use Windows but could see XP as the best-ever version of it if they'd kept it up to date.

Windows 2000 was peak.

Windows XP was when they started putting the activation bullshit in, which was just a little too much for privacy-brained me. I had migrated to Linux pretty much exclusively by then.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#113

Post by alsetmusic »

thayne wrote: post #59
LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing. That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their wo…

> with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems.

I mean, what software is bug-free? Fewer bugs is a big deal. Less-severe bugs is a big deal.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#114

Post by alsetmusic »

fragmede wrote: post #43
ndiddy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Snow Leopard was a refinement of Leopard, and both releases had unusually long durations as the newest release of Mac OS X, totaling 4 years. It then continued getting security updates until late 2013, another 2 years after Lion replaced it. I can see how people would treat the later point rel…

When you have a bunch of windows open but you click on the desktop, the windows go off to the edges so you can see the desktop.

> When you have a bunch of windows open but you click on the desktop, the windows go off to the edges so you can see the desktop.

It's one of the first things I turn off.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#115

Post by alsetmusic »

musicale wrote: post #18
mymacbook wrote: post #2

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogf…

> When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated What about the recent macOS releases that seem to prioritize dubious features (Apple Intelligence) that don't add a lot of value (and don't work well), while botching the core fundamentals of UI design and functionality,…

> while botching the core fundamentals of UI design and functionality, as with the UI disaster that was Liquid Glass

This is why Apple nerds (like me) are hopeful that John Ternus will refocus the company. Steve said that companies that want to make good software should make their own hardware. I only learned that Alan Kay said that first when looking to make sure that I had this quote correct.

Alan Dye is gone. The guy who was completely unqualified to lead UI design is no longer in charge. Tim Cook will soon move to a new role. The business guy is stepping aside. An actual engineer with no business degree is gonna be in charge. Maybe things will become sane again. I hope so.

Fwiw, Apple nerds who care about UI design would enjoy the recent Talk Show episode (Daring Fireball, John Gruber, the Markdown guy) ep with Louie Mantia. He's a designer who expresses why Dye was unfit for the job in a satisfying way.

Just woke, probably typos and mistakes.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#116

Post by AnthonyMouse »

speed_spread wrote: post #91
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. There was something else going on during that time period though. Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot. Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got…

Ahem, the best version of Windows was 2000 / 2003 x64 server. It had all the improvements from real world experience gained by NT 3.5 and 4.0 and none of the consumer crap pushed in XP by the abandonment of the Win95 line.

That indeed was the best business edition of Windows. Consumers weren't supposed to have that though. The then-consumer edition was Windows ME, which... wasn't as good.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#117

Post by manxiemanx »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57
LegNeato wrote: post #40

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…

> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. There was something else going on during that time period though. Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot. Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got…

It's rewriting history to say that OS X didn't have a decent release before Snow Leopard. Panther and Tiger were both excellent releases and Panther was widely considered the first truly usable OS X release. That's when it got decent.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#118

Post by manxiemanx »

mymacbook wrote: post #2

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogf…

No one said major software updates are impossible on a yearly schedule. It's obviously possible since Apple's been doing it. What's not possible is major software updates with a normal amount of new features for a major software update at a reasonable level of quality

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#119

Post by manxiemanx »

dwaite wrote: post #96
steveBK123 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Call me an old man, but I'm no longer sure that annual major OS upgrades are even desirable. Adding features is great, but half of the changes feel like product manager brain "changes to show we made changed things". I actually don't need buttons moved around in photos/mail/finder annually. I do…

One big source of both delays and bugs is the feeling that your work (which has compatibility impacting changes) _has_ to make it in the current release, because otherwise it will languish for years until the next train leaves. Likewise, if a fix requires a behavioral change that impacts third party developers, that fix may not feasible to deploy until the next release. Apple had some pretty fundamental things like C…

Understandable from a developers perspective but this is what management is for. This is a great indicator that Apple's current software management is doing a bad job. Because their job is to say no and come up with the plan that will make the software quality and one time. It's really the only thing they do that matters

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#120

Post by manxiemanx »

fragmede wrote: post #43
ndiddy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Snow Leopard was a refinement of Leopard, and both releases had unusually long durations as the newest release of Mac OS X, totaling 4 years. It then continued getting security updates until late 2013, another 2 years after Lion replaced it. I can see how people would treat the later point rel…

When you have a bunch of windows open but you click on the desktop, the windows go off to the edges so you can see the desktop.

I hate that. So Windowsy in a bad way. A Windowsy thing in a good way thing they added was window snapping and autosizing
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