151–160 of 259 posts
Parts of that article are just downright terrible. First, the criticism of Electron is moot. Yes it's not sleek, but it's sufficient. This app is not supposed to be used heavily on a daily basis. Run it once to setup your drive, run it a few months later for a firmware upgrade or a quick health check and that's all. And when you had a taste of the absolute UX monsters some hardware vendors can produce on the software…
On Windows, you run the uninstaller, click once, and a few seconds later everything is uninstalled. You reboot to remove any remaining files immediately, or you can just wait until the next time you naturally reboot and it happens then. This has been how it works in the Windows world for several decades . Surprising that Apple still hasn't figured this out yet.
Ever tried to uninstall an antivirus on windows? Or any program that does not want to be uninstalled? I've had programs whose uninstall.exe was no different than /bin/true. On this point, Windows is no better than macOS: the OS relies on the goodwill of the developers to provide working uninstallers. The only protection is a world where the OS provider does the application packaging: Linux repositories, Mac App Store…
The only remaining files were the "user space" like custom preferences or files created by the user using the program. The uninstaller rightfully leaves it up to the user to decide what to do with those.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[ Thank you for "PartitionMagic" - crucially important for home / personal computer users, at least in my own history. ] And, I wonder if a (corporate) development organization's overall cultural friction around critical / negative feedback -- in this case integration issues in the technical sense of pulling together modules built by subteams to compose a final product -- could be worth investigating when challenging…
Thank you and to all the others who remember and liked PartitonMagic. It makes an old programmer feel good to know that something he worked on 30 years ago made a difference. BTW: I am currently working on a hobby project called Didgets. It is an object store that does a lot of cool file system stuff and relational table manipulation and analysis. It is available for free download at http://www.didgets.com The instal…
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Are you under the impression that Windows uninstallers don't leave files and registry settings behind?
I use this https://github.com/Klocman/Bulk-Crap-Uninstaller The nice thing about Windows is that people have been writing software for it for decades. A very underestimated advantage.
AppZapper has been doing the same thing on Macs for decades.
I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions. Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product. I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to / and the uninstall process was delete /
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>When a user mode application on the Mac doesn't just allow you to drag the app into the applications folder to install, it's a red huge red flag. And the companies that make such products _never_ care about making sure an uninstallation is actually clean.
In the file menu of the installer, there is generally an option to see all the files it is placing on the system with full system paths. I generally note this down so I can make sure to clean things up completely if/when needed. For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer. That actually makes it harder. For…
I think that problem, in general, is unsolvable on the Mac. The OS cannot know whether a file that an application creates is a user file that should be kept on uninstall or an application one that, maybe, should be deleted on uninstall.
(Maybe because Apple’s guidelines say (or at least used to say) uninstall ers, if you have one, should keep preferences files around, in case a user reinstalls the app later. Also, applications may ship with files (e.g. fonts, sounds, picture libraries) that users may want to keep around)
> For app that just get dragged into the Applications folder, they end up doing all this additional file creation on first-launch instead of via an installer
For quite a few things that an installer can install, applications cannot do that, as they want to install them into protected directories.
I think most of the leftovers whose locations you cannot gauge from looking at the file list in the installer are for caches, preferences, logs, etc.
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Mac apps often do various things on your computer. Just because you dragged it to Bin, doesn't mean there are no leftovers on your computer. I'd prefer proper uninstaller any day.
Are you under the impression that Windows uninstallers don't leave files and registry settings behind?
Just because some Windows uninstaller are bad doesn't mean that all of them are bad, or that uninstaller concept is bad.
Now I'd welcome for operating system to be built in a way to let user to delete everything related to the application. Maybe android or ios are built this way, but not macos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[ Thank you for "PartitionMagic" - crucially important for home / personal computer users, at least in my own history. ] And, I wonder if a (corporate) development organization's overall cultural friction around critical / negative feedback -- in this case integration issues in the technical sense of pulling together modules built by subteams to compose a final product -- could be worth investigating when challenging…
Thank you and to all the others who remember and liked PartitonMagic. It makes an old programmer feel good to know that something he worked on 30 years ago made a difference. BTW: I am currently working on a hobby project called Didgets. It is an object store that does a lot of cool file system stuff and relational table manipulation and analysis. It is available for free download at http://www.didgets.com The instal…
I worked on a disk utility in the 90s called PartitionMagic that was one of the first ones to let you dynamically resize disk partitions. Maybe Samsung used that when naming their product. I am old, but I miss the days when the install process was copy . to / and the uninstall process was delete /
I think the most obscene thing here is that macOS is now littered with permission prompts for camera, background execution, etc, but makes no effort to stop even industry partners from spraying the disk with dozens of files that can’t be removed easily.
That's because this particular sort of cyber security is merely theatrics with the goal of reducing user agency and increasing paranoia and vendor lock-in. The user facing friction is the goal. There will always be scams and viruses; the only practical outcome will be that you have less control over your computer, and Apple/MS/Google have more. See: Sideloading, Wayland, UWPs, iOS JIT, Windows XP and 7 still being us…
Literally all security features carry the hazard of being used for oppression and being ineffective or counter-effective. That's how constraints work.
You need two things for a security feature:
- a segmentation under which a behavior is considered unsafe / unsecure (arbitrary, subjective)
- a technical solution that constrains the behavior of in so that the aforementioned is mitigated
So something being "a tool of oppression" or "a tool of safety" is a matter of your alignment with that segmentation. And it being a theater or not is a matter of functional soundness given a threat model. So is its tendency to become counter-effective.
Constraints are just constraints. Whether they're effective and whether you're disadvantaged by them are both separate, independent matters. Empirical too.