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Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

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Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#231

Post by rogerrogerr »

dham wrote: post #218
mort96 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think parts of Liquid Glass on macOS looks pretty bad. But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me. What does offend me are all the bugs, as you say. It's still utterly broken all these months after the public release. Spotlight is a mess; I've seen it take DAYS before it has made an app in '/Applications' findable through search (even as the app shows up in Spotlight's long scrollable…

> But I don't care that much about how things look, so it doesn't offend me. So I'm guessing you use some default Mac editor (Xcode?)? You don't change your color scheme, you don't change your font, etc? Aside: Software devs are very weird, they spend all this time crafting their dev setup and but when it comes to their OS they just give up and whatever Tim Cook feeds them their in. Makes no sense. Anyway, off to Lin…

My IDE provides 98% of the pixels on my screen and provides 90% of the overall experience. That’s why it gets all the attention. If the OS is able to show my IDE on one screen and a web browser and UNIXy terminal on the other, it’s working.

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#232

Post by nout »

This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#233

Post by layer8 »

ptr wrote: post #178
runjake wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my last straw that caused me to disable Spotlight: Typing something into Spotlight, having it pull up the right result and highlight it, and me hitting the Enter key, and the search results suddenly updating after and highlighting some new result and then opening that instead. It’s not just Liquid Glass. It’s bugs like these where I realized Apple software was truly rotten to the core. Whomever is running th…

Apple software used to exhibit reasonable UX for “edge cases” just like the one you described. This was one of my main reasons for going Mac — they cared about the details. Sad to see that seems to be going away.

It seems to be that these things never last, as company culture inevitably changes.

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#234

Post by vdupras »

E39M5S62 wrote: post #130
rayiner wrote: post #64

> That was little more than a decade ago, in 2014. Not that I want to turn the clock back, but it would be really helpful if I could read clearly what’s on my display once again. I want to turn the clock back. It’s not a reflexive opposition to anything new. I thought OS X clearly got better from 10.0 to 10.4. But in the last vie versions it’s been a regression.

I booted a G4 Mac the other day, running 10.4.something. I was thrown back in time to a period where OS X was clearly their flagship software stack. Everything was coherent and cohesive - and shockingly - fast. I'd daily 10.4 again if it could operate on the modern internet comfortably!

Nevertheless, I also remember that in the 10.4 days, OS X had the reputation of being sluggish compared to Linux or even Windows (I guess it was Windows 7 at the time?). And it kinda was. Bouncing ball when launching an app.

How high the bar was back then.

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#235

Post by LoganDark »

nout wrote: post #232

This is a good time for trying Linux. If you are coming from Mac, then a distro with GNOME interface (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu...) will feel like at home after a couple tweaks. I recommend "Dash to Dock" to get the MacOS dock experience and "Search Light" to get the spotlight search.

I love GNOME Wayland; it has some of the best support for trackpad gestures of any Linux desktop experience I've ever tried. On the other paw though, client-side decorations are not the way to go on Linux, and I'm still incredibly frustrated that they insist on not even supporting server-side decorations at all.

Client-side decorations are for apps that are designed specifically for a certain desktop experience; server-side decorations are for compatibility with the many millions of apps that already exist!! (And for anything cross-platform / cross-DE.)

Apple gets away with it because macOS is largely monolithic, and doesn't really have swappable desktop experiences. GNOME does not get away with it because they're just one competitor in a large landscape of Linux and they should want to be compatible with Linux applications in general, not only GNOME applications.

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#236

Post by downrightmike »

apexalpha wrote: post #156
jjice wrote: post #43

I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. It's just insane how buggy the system has become. Even Messages will bug out, like deleting my first word if I type too fast after opening a conversation or auto scrolling and not letting me scroll down until I exit and re-enter. Unacceptable for the premium you pay for Apple software. Unacceptable for any software one is paying for. I hope they get their shit together and…

>I don't mind how Liquid Glass looks at all. I do, and the fact that it isn't even optional is crazy. Windows Vista vibes where they first looked at what the could technically pull off on todays' hardware. And mind you: Liquid Glass is very impressive! . It's just not necessary.

Who decided things that slide in place need to jiggle like jello?!

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#237

Post by btown »

pjmlp wrote: post #96
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost positive that it's because they want to make as many apps as possible VisionOS-friendly. I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.

It would help if it wasn't 3500 dollars, they did not embrace games, and were expecting developers to buy such devices for so little return in development cost, released at a time most headsets were already on yet again going down on another VR headset cycle. It was bound to fail since day one.

IMO one of the big misses for launch, and one of the most untapped markets for VR/AR, was business analytics & visualization. Any manager worth flying to a corporate retreat is worth getting a capex-treatable top-of-the-line device to see an extra dimension of data breakdowns. There would be a trendiness factor here, too, much like how every executive needed a Blackberry back in the day.

But one of my big takeaways from e.g. https://www.tableau.com/blog/exploring-spatial-computing-and... (2024) was that some of the most basic UX research around 3D visualization was left to the market to discover.

> During Tableau Conference 2024 in San Diego, we recruited 22 attendees to help us assess the usability, learnability, and potential utility of Tableau on the visionOS platform, along with broader perspectives on the potential for HMDs to create engaging experiences around data. Participants were tasked with a series of analytical exercises using one of three datasets. These tasks included specifying filter settings, changing data fields, and interpreting trends across various visualizations, such as bar charts, line charts, and a 3D globe. Examples of tasks included identifying the country with the highest CO2 emissions in Asia and determining when poultry production first exceeded beef production in South America.

If you want to launch a $3000 device properly, why are you making Tableau do this themselves?

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#238

Post by acdha »

kibwen wrote: post #123
DonHopkins wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple employees should have kidnapped Alan Dye from his office and deposited him on Facebook's doorstep wrapped up in a straightjacket with ribbons and a bow years ago before he finally left voluntarily.

Using Dye as a scapegoat feels like cope. The rest of the executives were fully content with this effort, and in the end he wasn't even forced out. There's no evidence that Apple will correct its course without him.

I agree that it’s a mark of shame that he left voluntarily, but I do think a lot of this traces back to Apple being more of a hardware company at heart. Jony Ive pulled off some industrial design which looked really nice and I think his history there meant that when he promoted the packaging designer to be in charge of UI people gave it too much credence, forgetting that Jony Ive also wasn’t experienced in that area and, as the history of UX botches shows, was about as good at it as a software developer would be at winging hardware design. People who’ve been successful at one thing just aren’t guaranteed to be successful somewhere else and loyalty to the company shouldn’t overshadow that.

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#239

Post by FireBeyond »

rootusrootus wrote: post #186
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This year I've had to perform many hard resets on my MacBook, iPhone and even Apple Watch because they've locked up. And they're all relatively new devices. Apple needs to get its shit together. I already expect to move away from their mobile ecosystem when it comes time to upgrade.

I recently upgraded (downgraded?) from an iPhone 15PM to a smaller iPhone 17P, and I have found myself wondering if I got a glitchy piece of hardware or if it's just iOS 26 bugs. I hardly had any problems with the previous phone, but on the 17 it's pretty routine that I have to close apps (including native Apple ones) which have become non-responsive. Frustrating, for sure.

Nope, that's iOS (I'm on a 16 Pro). I routinely have apps I can switch into but are entirely dead. They're not chewing CPU cycles, the phone is "cold". But very much so.

So very frustrated.

Re: Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

#240

Post by t1234s »

Using Liquid Glass on both a retina and non-retina display it looks like Apple is trying to depreciate non-retina displays just like they have done in the past with floppy disk, cd rom, and having useful ports. Tahoe on a non-retina display looks slightly but noticeably shittier than the previous version.
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