221–230 of 571 posts
I was just in the process of installing Catalina, guess I'll just click on that "Cancel" button now.
All the nightmares are nightmares until they're not nightmares. Weird launch day bugs like the I bug on iOS 11 are distant memories. Yeah, these bugs are bad, but to me articles like this really feel a lot like a broken record. Every September and October, when the major releases come out, there are bugs. And then by the time you're on 10.xx.2 or iOS xx.1.3 a month later they're just a bad memory. If you don't want b…
That cavalier attitude is fine for NEW features, but not for basic apps and foundations of an OS. iOS 13 shipped with the Mail app broken. That's almost as bad as not being able to make calls. Would a BlackBerry ever ship with a broken email app?
Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…
I feel like there are people who get around the secrecy/isolation veil, they just have long-standing friends in other projects and can rely on them to push features and bugs though the bureaucracy. If you don’t have that, well, expect your Radars to sit in “punted from this release” until the end of time.
I'm not sure if anyone has seen this yet, but Catalina is letting me login without entering my password! I have two users on my machine. 1. I "lock screen" from the Apple menu and close the lid. 2. I reopen the lid and it does not ask for password. 3. I start using laptop and lock screen suddenly pops up, but asks password for the wrong user. 4. I hit random key and the screen goes away, and i can continue working. A…
I've never seen a bug like that on Windows. Honestly, it feels like a lot of Mac users live in a bubble where Windows is a buggy pile of crap. Meanwhile most Windows users around the world are getting on with life on a stable OS with a great choice of hardware. While nothing's perfect, Windows is in a really good place at the moment.
Can I just say how happy I am with Xfce. It's a Linux desktop environment that looks like in the early 2000s. It's fast. There are no unnecessary frills. It just gets the job done. Its release cycles are measured in several years, and keep it minimal. I used to be on Windows, then macOS, then Ubuntu and now this. As a developer with soon to be 20 years of experience, it's the best environment I've had.
So was I until I switch to a 4k monitor and realize that there's no real, stable, functional fractional scaling on Linux, even less so on XFCE, unfortunately.
And there's nobody else to blame for that -- we've known for ages that 4K and fractional scaling was going to be a thing, just like we've known for ages that touchscreens were going to be a thing.
But nope, let's just measure everything in pixels. It's like the majority of native developers on Linux all looked at responsive design on the web and thought, "I'm pretty sure that's just a fad." Everybody just dug in their heels almost on principle or something and refused to make it a priority, and now we're behind both Windows and Mac when it comes to high-resolution touch devices.
And I still run into people who argue that what we should just scale the physical size of a pixel for the entire desktop by a percentage, just so we can keep building fixed layouts that absolute position all of their elements. At a certain point, it feels more like a cultural problem than a technical one.
Everybody else is doing responsive design. QT already supports `em` units (well, sort of[0]). We could be using them on Linux.
[0]: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-reference.html#length
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So was I until I switch to a 4k monitor and realize that there's no real, stable, functional fractional scaling on Linux, even less so on XFCE, unfortunately.
By using a combo of xrandr and Xfce's hi dpi setting, I've managed to make my linux desktop more stable, functional and consistent across a 4k screen and a 1920*1200 screen next to it than Windows can manage. Sure, I had to put in a bit of effort, but now that I have the results are excellent, there's no scale jumping or even the weird rendering MacOS does when moving windows around.
Now that I'm older, it's just a waste of time.
Go back and watch old keynotes with Steve. Almost always, whenever he’s talking about a new feature or piece of hardware, he starts with the “why.” Not everyone will agree with the “why,” of course, but it’s still given.
Why do we want to get rid of the CD drive on MacBook Airs? (We see OTA software updates and media downloads as the way of the future and it wastes space.)
Why do we want to migrate from PowerPC to Intel? (We need better performance-per-watt so we can build MacBooks that have better battery life and don’t overheat.)
Why do we want to not have a physical keyboard on the iPhone? (Because the buttons and controls can’t self-specialize for each application.)
There are obviously exceptions to this rule, but by and large it’s fairly accurate. Now, watch the most recent keynotes. Has there been even a single second dedicated to WHY we need Apple TV+? Apple News+? Apple Arcade? Thinner keyboard mechanisms?
No, and it’s because we all know what the answer is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of the fascinating NYT story about the lead up to the original iPhone announcement event: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s... . A choice excerpt: > The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it m…
Great read! Thanks for sharing. Highly encourage anyone who is on the fence about reading the whole thing to go for it. Steve, and others like him, do make me wonder. On the one hand, I work four days a week, never stay late at work, and live a good, steady life. But on the other hand, I see these super-stars, these drive-people-to-the-edge, sleep-on-shop-floor types, and see how much change and drive they create, it…
I can add something to the list which is Sidecar i.e. using an iPad as secondary screen. It was a real nightmare to set it up as it’d not detect the iPad despite meeting all the requirements. I found no fixes online so I had the idea of logout & login again (iCloud) so that it might detect it. Well, it detected I had an iPad but the connection would time out every single time. After rebooting both the Mac and the iPa…
Wish your experience was better than this. For me, sidecar is total game changer and the best!
It's all very depressing. Like most of us here, I have become increasingly frustrated with the state of Mac (touch bar, bad keyboards, odd choices that fit neither creators nor developers well, and so on). No point rehashing it all. But where does that leave us? I spent a year on Windows 10 not so long ago, on upper end laptop hardware with HiDPI screen, and it was less fun and more problem prone than macOS - especia…
I switched from macOS to Linux [Fedora now] about a year and a half ago, out of the same frustrations that affect a lotta folks -- It took a little while to adjust, but since there are a lot of similarities between the Linux and Darwin command lines [and Linux package management being better than homebrew by my lights] , it wasn't very long before I was like "Damn, why didn't I switch 20 years ago!!!" Plus now my har…
I've used Linux several times over the years and the hardware never totally works. I've always had trackpad issues, issues with suspend and hibernate, wifi issues, screen resolution issues, battery life issues, sound issues, driver issues etc.
It 'works' in terms of you can technically do work on it, but you have to make a huge number of concessions and this is before considering it has less application support.
[Edit]: The replies suggest this is mostly still the case, people say it works flawlessly - except for [insert issue here]