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Apple's Software Quality Crisis

eliseomartelli.it

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Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#241

Post by legitster »

philistine wrote: post #230
legitster wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask what the fascination with the Apple trackpad is? My other daily driver is a Thinkpad and I actually vastly prefer using the smaller one on it. You're not flinging your wrist across the zipcode and the clicks are more tactile.

... I'm sorry but I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You might prefer a smaller trackpad, but then why? Just increase the sensitivity to reduce your finger movements. Anyway, Apple's trackpad is good because it perfectly captures intent, whatever the situation and the number of fingers . It's flawless. You got half your palm on the side of the trackpad while writing? Nope, not picked up. You quickly fli…

...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.

I'm not familiar with all of the trackpad gestures, but that's part of my big frustration with macOS in general - discoverability absolutely sucks. Half of the stuff I need to do is hidden behind a set of arcane keystrokes that I am apparently supposed to memorize.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#242

Post by bigyabai »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #136

The big sign of Apple’s deterioration has been iOS 18. It is a disastrous launch with a terrible photos app, worse autocorrect, bugs, … on their flagship product. Hard to trust where they go from here. At some point it’ll affect security.

You're only now realizing this? Software quality at Apple has been in a freefall since Cook's appointment. If you sincerely think iOS 18 is the turning point, then I don't even understand what you use your iPhone for.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#243

Post by nicce »

swat535 wrote: post #212

It's not just Apple guys, it's everywhere. Software quality has seriously declined across the board, from Spotify to Slack to core operating systems like Windows and macOS. I think a major factor is corporate culture, which largely ignores software quality. Another issue is that many engineers lack a solid understanding of CS fundamentals like performance, security, and reliability (perhaps this is why many are not a…

All of that can be summarized with Electron, web developers and high availability of workworkforce with somewhat low salary…

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#244

Post by nicce »

alberth wrote: post #30

Is this a real problem, or a perceived problem? I know people like to complain about Apple's software quality - but is this actually an issue - or just the popular thing to say?

I don’t have any issues, but I am that person who uses just web browser and terminal on Macbook. Almost all software comes from Nix package repository.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#245

Post by progmetaldev »

madeofpalk wrote: post #105
flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#246

Post by Kon-Peki »

mrweasel wrote: post #112
FredPret wrote: post #7

I would pay a premium for a system that never gets any new features except for bug & security patches. In fact, that's more or less what iOS was for a long time, and I loved every second of it. Once you have a good feature set, you can spend years and years ironing out 100% of the bugs and vulnerabilities and you'd build a rabid fanbase of crotchety tech-saturated users like me. I want something that Just Works.

iOS doesn't even need more features, it needs way less. Sadly that isn't how the world work. For my one use case I noticed that the newest iOS release doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3. The "Press home to unlock" and "X new notification" texts are now laid on top of each other on the lock screen. You're looking right at it when picking up your phone, so you can't miss it, yet Apple QA did.

> doesn't appear to be tested on the iPhone SE 3

Reminds me of the old days working at Motorola. Your feature branches were merged into a biweekly dev branch, which needed to be “sanity tested” before it could get merged into the branch that the QA folks validated. Every software engineer was on a lab rotation: when it was your turn, you and a couple others that made up your team went to a different building and descended into the hardware lab where you didn’t come out until you had created a working mobile phone network from scratch and tested it with a wide variety of phones -basically anything that could work. They had shelves with bins of everything: early unreleased smartphones (this was way before the iPhone), junky flip phones, RAZRs, StarTacs, bag phones, etc.

It was honestly a lot of fun to see the hardware side of what you were working on, and to ensure that documentation and checklists were always sufficient.

Apple is probably way too secretive to do anything like that :(

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#247

Post by chang1 »

tbeseda wrote: post #27

Anecdotally, Apple Music has deteriorated exponentially for me. iTunes was such a stable, usable piece of software, but I can't get reliable use out of Apple Music for the life of me. It _feels_ like a shoddy Electron app. But that's not fair to the actual Electron (or similar) apps that actually work. For all its many design and product flaws, Spotify actually works.

I am not an Apple Music subscriber and don't stream much music besides SomaFM, so I may not be in the norm.

I always have selected on the sidebar Library -> Songs with View -> Column Browser enabled. And I search only using the "Filter" text input on this view. It's as close to how iTunes used to be in the early days of OS X (sans brushed metal).

What I see on the screen is just mostly dense text except the small thumbnail at the top for whatever is currently playing. There is no other related artwork or graphics loaded. I fear once a re-write of this app happens, this view is gone... replaced with lots of fancy graphics and loads of whitespace padding everywhere.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#248

Post by LostMyLogin »

jmuguy wrote: post #93
flohofwoe wrote: post #68

Here's my personal canary in the coal mine that something must be fundamentally broken in Apple's software development process: - on a recent macOS version, right click on the desktop, select 'change wallpaper' => the new settings panel opens - click on 'Custom Color' - now hold and drag around the 'color cursor' in the color selection circle for a few seconds - stop dragging and notice how the color cursor continues…

For what its worth, I can't reproduce this on 15.3 (24D60). I don't have a "Custom color" option. I see "Colors" and I click a Plus button to add a new color. Also I have my system connected to a caldigit dock and I'm using a mouse, not the trackpad.

I am on 15.3.1 and when I attempt it, it stays in place on the color I selected without issue.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#249

Post by LostMyLogin »

gloosx wrote: post #183
flohofwoe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, yeah. It doesn't happen when adding a new color to the "Colours" row at the bottom even though this happens with the same color selection UI widget. I see this Custom Colour thingie at the top-right corner of the Wallpaper section, above a "Show on all Spaces" checkbox and left of a fairly big representation of the current desktop background. After a bit of tinkering: this Custom Colour element is replac…

I tried it, and apparently if you click if from the "+" button, it works totally okay for this popup and subsequent opening of that custom color popup, BUT, if you close the settings, open them again and press the "Custom Colour" colour directly, you will enter the bugged one.

I don't see Custom Color anywhere. Does anyone have a SS of where I should be looking? I'm on 15.3.1.

Re: Apple's Software Quality Crisis

#250

Post by hollandheese »

dkarl wrote: post #118

I have an issue with Messenger notifications on one device, a laptop. The messages get delivered just as quickly on this laptop as on other devices, but the notifications can take minutes to come up. Also, the number of unread messages sometimes gets stuck out of sync, for example showing 1 when I have no unread messages. I've tried rebooting, and I've tried disabling and re-enabling notifications. I'm still on Sonom…

Message notifications are just a mess. At this point it only notifies me for about half my messages no matter what device I'm on.
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