Apple’s declining software quality

> Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation

I haven't had these issues, but I have had significant issues with its performance. 15+ seconds to initialize. At least 3+ seconds needed to swap between transit options. Moving to navigation mode feels sluggish. And this is on a Nexus 6, with no issues with other apps.

When I choose "walk" as the navigation mode it puts an Uber route on there, which when selected gives me an ad to try Uber for the first time. I don't have Uber installed on my device. I don't want to take a fucking Uber, I want to see how long it'll take me to walk somewhere!

I get the feeling that something happened in the Google org responsible for maps. It was always a snappy app that was useful to me. Now it's slow and appearing to be an avenue for ads on the device that I bought directly from Google. Unacceptable.

You guys are scaring me. I have Lion on my Core 2 Duo MBP and Mountain Lion on my i7 MBP. I've been content but Google says that Chrome won't get updates for these after April and I've been thinking about upgrading. Now I'm thinking about just going back to Firefox.

I'm always baffled by heavy Calculator users, to be honest. I've never understood the popularity of dedicated calculator apps or widgets, on any platform. 90% of the time you can simply round numbers in your mind, and if precision is necessary for big numbers that's likely a job for Excel.

Same for clock apps. Clock in your taskbar, sure; but who would ever start a dedicated clock app? I barely touch Contacts and always from other apps. Photos is terrible, but that's been the case for a while now, the obsession with hiding the filesystem has degenerated in an unusable interface (sharing in particular is just mystifying).

Of your list, I do use Messages (you don't really get a choice, if you want to receive SMS texts...) and Safari (again, no real choice), as well as the Camera simply because I use it so little it's not worth my time looking for a better app.

Mac Mini is 1.5 years old, Mac Pro is >2 years old, 13" Macbook Pro is 1 year next month (and conspicuously absent from rumors of Apple's upcoming announcement event, gotta release those watch bands though).

The iPhone is definitely on a 1-year cycle, but it's not really something they put effort into maintaining on their computers. MacBook Air and iMac are probably the closest.

I blame iOS/Mac features tie-in like Continuity. OS X definitely gets the short end of the stick from that.

I think we're heading for a synthesis of these opposing trends, the common core being a fatigue with complex bloated user interfaces, and a return to simpler design. Personally I enjoy command line interfaces, especially in full screen with huge fonts, and I've been using Ratpoison (one of the first tiling X window managers) like this since like 2004. But I also enjoy, at least in principle, tablet-style UIs. Neither is based on overlapping windows, for one thing, and they are both helpful for my quasi-ADHD/OCD tendencies.

Mac OS now is in a weird limbo between the Unix heritage, the Mac heritage, and the iOS heritage. I think unifying these strands is an enormous challenge, but also really cool and inspiring. Maybe Apple are going to focus on making cars or whatever, and some weird little upstart is going to come along and make something totally new. You can see people starting to talk about Slack as an operating system, but that's still very primitive.

Chat and command lines are interesting because they represent a huge paradigm that's been overshadowed by the "GUI" paradigm, namely the paradigm of queries and responses: you ask the computer something and get something back, perhaps asynchronously. It's such a useful, coherent model. Easy to program with. Portable across interfaces. Good for exploration. Cognitively appropriate. Etc etc.

I think the complexity and bug-riddenness of most "modern" desktop operating systems come from an over-complicated and incoherent model of operation. Mobile represents a new start. It currently lacks in flexibility, but it's probably a good thing to start with rigid simplicity than to try for flexible complexity, and unless you can perfect a genius UI right away I do think those are the options, if you're aiming for the general public who don't want to learn vim.

I also think the divide between application programmers and computer users is politically a Bad Thing and also a result of exaggerated complexity. Unix was always about user scripting, and it managed that because of textual data, worse-is-better, and RTFM. Apple might not be the company to get back to this, because they're making tons of money from making shiny coherent appliances for people who pay to think as little as possible.

So just generally I'm not holding my breath for Apple to come up with a wildly new and interesting paradigm here. They're a dinosaur. A very pretty dinosaur. I'm more interested in startups with weird ideas, like maybe let's use e-ink displays, cheap ultralight computers, cloud servers, natural language processing, and the interactive fiction adventure exploration paradigm to provide a new style of terminal gadget that's even cooler than Linux. (If you steal this idea, please don't fuck it up.)