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“This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

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Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#131

Post by npsimons »

sz4kerto wrote: post #25
yuhong wrote: post #3

I think even MS is better than this at supporting old Office binary formats. Only PowerPoint has completely removed the support for pre-97 formats. With Word/Excel you can generally unblock support for older formats even if by default they will not open.

'even MS' MS is one of the best in supporting old formats. That's part of how and why the managed to keep their monopoly on the desktop. There's not many OSs out there where you can start a 20 year old software and it runs almost always perfectly. (Try that on Linux or OSX.)

How about 22 years? Specifically, see Alan Cox's comment about running a version of rogue compiled in 1992:

https://plus.google.com/115250422803614415116/posts/hMT5kW8L...

As for MS, my experience has been different. All too often, when trying to pull up old (mid-90's) Word documents, MS Office chokes, where Libre/OpenOffice chugs along just fine.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#132

Post by Silhouette »

jakejake wrote: post #115
tolmasky wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important point here is that if you are aware of the problem and provide an incredibly lame dialog to deal with it, then you should have just provided the solution. Clearly Apple has all the necessary tools in their possession to fix this problem: they own the source to both Keynote '09 and the latest Keynote. Why not either 1) make a small conversion utility and provide a direct link to it in the dialog (st…

This is just the way Apple has always been. Keep up or fall behind. They're not focused on providing backwards compatibility. They leave the door open to losing customers to companies like Microsoft with these kinds of decisions. But that's the choice they made.

If I were Apple, right now I'd be more concerned with losing customers to Android devices.

Case in point: we have an iPad here that is still on the iOS 5 generation it came with. It has been widely reported that iOS 6 was slower (as well as breaking things like Google Maps), iOS 7 was slower still (as well as making various visual styling changes we don't like) and both iOS 6 and iOS 7 have suffered at least one severe security flaw that iOS 5 did not have. In short, there appears to be no rational reason we would "upgrade" this device as we are repeatedly prompted to do.

Recently, Apple appears to have changed the rules for app developers so new things going into the app store have to aim primarily at iOS 7. At some point we upgraded an app we'd bought a while ago to get some much-plugged new feature that someone thought was interesting. Aside from the fact that the new feature itself turned out to be paywalled anyway, so the upgrade invitation for the app was basically just spam abusing the app store mechanism, the "upgraded" app also had a horribly glitchy UI where previously it had been smooth as silk drawing exactly the same screens.

Can we "downgrade" that app back to something that works, which we already had before, via the app store or otherwise? No, it doesn't seem so.

If we "upgraded" iOS itself, as suggested to fix the app (though we've seen no reports that doing so does in fact fix this app), could we then "downgrade" again if we didn't like it? Also no, as far as we can tell.

As it happens, we need to have Apple devices around for testing our web stuff, so we're stuck with spending some of our company money on new gear now and then for as long as our customers are doing the same, and we're stuck with using more recent versions of iOS on some devices for the same reason. But at this point, nothing would ever convince me to spend my own money on an iSomething. I was always suspicious of the lock-in and kindergarten UI, and seeing it in action, the results are at least as bad as I expected.

What is possibly more interesting is that it seems average users are getting fed up as well. Not so long ago, mobile visits to a site I run that isn't particularly geek-related were utterly dominated by iOS devices. Today, while iOS still represents a clear majority, it is a much closer balance between iOS and Android, and the trend is strongly in the latter's direction. I can't help wondering whether this is people who've now been not-upgraded to more recent versions one time too many, or who've been forced to dump expensive and otherwise working hardware for artificial software reasons, starting to vote with their wallets.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#133

Post by nemothekid »

npsimons wrote: post #129
nknighthb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Patches welcome" is an aggressive, user-hostile, anti-social response to being told that the thing you suggested does not work . It's telling the user to fuck off because your own suggestion was flawed. clarry didn't run to HN and scream "pdf.js sucks!".

I think you're reading too much into that, or have a chip on your shoulder, or both. "Patches welcome" is an invitation, a smiling, friendly, we-think-you're-good-enough-and-want-your-help, open-handed gesture that is meant to encourage cooperation and evoke the deeply human drive to help others.

nknighthb is completely right. It is user hostile. It even makes a huge assumption, that clarry is programmer in the first place. With "Patches welcome" you might as well be saying "If you don't like it, spend a year learning [Language] to fix this issue." How is that anything other than user hostile?

If my mom can't open a pdf in pdf.js, I'm not going to tell her "Well mom, patches welcome."

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#134

Post by Malarkey73 »

jakejake wrote: post #54

The author might consider using Microsoft products because they are obsessive about providing backwards compatibility. That's one of the positive things about Microsoft products. The downside is that they have to deal with a lot of old baggage as a result. Apple, on the other hand is almost the opposite. They're obsessive about upgrading everyone and leaving the past behind. That's great because they're free to make…

I don't see why innovation of your software means you have to lose compatibility to old data.

It seems to me you can do pretty much anything whilst having a small set of conversion scripts to get the old data into your preferred new format.

Its not "big data", not streaming data, not rocket science.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#135

Post by drewcrawford »

tolmasky wrote: post #111
jakejake wrote: post #54

The author might consider using Microsoft products because they are obsessive about providing backwards compatibility. That's one of the positive things about Microsoft products. The downside is that they have to deal with a lot of old baggage as a result. Apple, on the other hand is almost the opposite. They're obsessive about upgrading everyone and leaving the past behind. That's great because they're free to make…

The most important point here is that if you are aware of the problem and provide an incredibly lame dialog to deal with it, then you should have just provided the solution. Clearly Apple has all the necessary tools in their possession to fix this problem: they own the source to both Keynote '09 and the latest Keynote. Why not either 1) make a small conversion utility and provide a direct link to it in the dialog (st…

#2 isn't viable because it breaks the primary design goal and the entire purpose of Keynote '13--that every presentation opens the same way across desktop, web, and mobile. The Keynote '09 source code does not and never has compiled for ARM, and so you would be faced with exactly the same dialog you have now, except instead of on your Mac it's on your iPad and instead of asking you to find an old version of keynote it asks you to find a Mac.

The great thing about #1 is that if Apple really did leave money on the table here, any third-party developer can collect it. Just put a Mac with two versions of keynote behind a REST endpoint and charge a buck or two per conversion. If you can turn a profit at that, not only do you get the smug satisfaction of clearly winning an internet argument, but also there's a cash prize.

If, however, that sounds like a waste of a perfectly good weekend, an economic bet that is unlikely to pay off, it would be an equal waste of a weekend for an Apple engineer. Apple is not a charity; they are a business that takes calculated risks, and they didn't like this one. Did they miscalculate? If you think so, there is no reason not to fill the gap yourself.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#136

Post by tlrobinson »

drewcrawford wrote: post #135
tolmasky wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most important point here is that if you are aware of the problem and provide an incredibly lame dialog to deal with it, then you should have just provided the solution. Clearly Apple has all the necessary tools in their possession to fix this problem: they own the source to both Keynote '09 and the latest Keynote. Why not either 1) make a small conversion utility and provide a direct link to it in the dialog (st…

#2 isn't viable because it breaks the primary design goal and the entire purpose of Keynote '13--that every presentation opens the same way across desktop, web, and mobile. The Keynote '09 source code does not and never has compiled for ARM, and so you would be faced with exactly the same dialog you have now, except instead of on your Mac it's on your iPad and instead of asking you to find an old version of keynote i…

Somehow Apple has been able to port their entire operating system from PPC to Intel to ARM. I think they could manage porting a bit of iWork code.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#137

Post by XorNot »

TillE wrote: post #127
michaelt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume you work on Keynote, so you have access to all the code and documentation for the 09 format. On average computers are now faster and have more RAM. You don't need to write the format, only read it. Your users will tolerate 15 minute format conversion times and the loss some things like formatting and videos. Is it really so difficult to just not break a feature that was present in the last version of the softw…

Yeah, assuming your software is reasonably modular and you haven't completely rewritten everything from scratch in the new version, retaining support for old file formats shouldn't be a very big deal. At worst (like in the case of iWork 13 which probably is completely new code), you get one programmer to spend a few days writing a converter which reuses most of the old code.

More importantly, provided you don't do it too often, users will tolerate some loss of formarting fidelity from version to version.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#138

Post by jakejake »

Silhouette wrote: post #132
jakejake wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the way Apple has always been. Keep up or fall behind. They're not focused on providing backwards compatibility. They leave the door open to losing customers to companies like Microsoft with these kinds of decisions. But that's the choice they made.

If I were Apple, right now I'd be more concerned with losing customers to Android devices. Case in point: we have an iPad here that is still on the iOS 5 generation it came with. It has been widely reported that iOS 6 was slower (as well as breaking things like Google Maps), iOS 7 was slower still (as well as making various visual styling changes we don't like) and both iOS 6 and iOS 7 have suffered at least one seve…

It is a good point and I agree with you it can be annoying to be forced to upgrade perfectly good software. But it does cut both ways. Legacy support is generally good for customers, but a burden for developers.

As far as development and having to spend money on hardware, though, I'd say Android is far worse than Apple in that regard. Android still has nearly half of devices running 2.x and the screen sizes are all over the map. We write and support native apps for both Apple and Android and we have far more Android devices laying around for testing than we do Apple devices.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#139

Post by im3w1l »

valarauca1 wrote: post #39
nols wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like the news that majority of the world's ATMs run on Windows XP or earlier. Or lab equipment that's air-gapped because it only works on some obsolete OS that's horribly insecure. Proprietary software is fine, but if long-lasting hardware is dependent on it bad things happen when that software company decides it's no longer worth supporting.

The problem with airgap test equipment (I work on this kinda of stuff professionally). Is often the redevelopment of real time software for lab and calibration equipment is very expensive. Its easy to think, "Why don't they use [New Hotness Software ]?" Which on the surface seems to be a good idea. Until you absolutely need sub-millisecond precision I/O, then you kinda start to cry when you realize how hard precise t…

It would be so nice if programs could request a dedicated core for these kinds of things.

Re: “This presentation can’t be opened because it’s too old”

#140

Post by valarauca1 »

baddox wrote: post #113
valarauca1 wrote: post #2

A lot of people have absolutely no problem with proprietary software until it breaks. The problem is you never know when it will break, and what it'll take down with it. I'm not saying 'go full Stallman'. I'm just saying think that when ever you hand over your data to a private company if they consider it as important as you consider it.

To play devil's advocate, one could say the same for a lot of open source software: it's great until it breaks. Your claim implies that broken proprietary software is bad because you can't access the source code, while mine implies that broken open source software is bad because there might be no company or organization dedicated to providing support.

But dealing with real life probabilities the likelihood of the event occurring (Unless your approaching the fringe of newer/locked down hardware) is slim.
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