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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#291

Post by CaptSpify »

petra wrote: post #225
mamcx wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Everything is more complex. Web apps is each iteration harder.. Native App development too (for example, .NET xaml is far harder than winforms and it than VB/Delphi).

And most of this is unnecessary complexity.why haven't anybody came up with better tools to attack that ?

Because we don't need better tools. If things are getting worse, that shows we had the tools already. The problem IMO: We keep trying new tools where they aren't needed.

#grumpy #getoffmylawn

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#292

Post by justinhj »

One thing I've noticed is that Apple product users (myself included) always think Mac and iPhone software was so much better 5 years ago. Is it really? I think if you look at it in detail there are features that take turns at being bad.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#293

Post by mergy »

wwweston wrote: post #134
nextos wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the trend with Snow Leopard. Also the tendency towards iOS-ification of Mac OS, so I decided to switch back to Linux. I think Apple's best hour came with Tiger and Leopard. Simple applications that did one thing well and were robust. Now there's a lot of feature bloat. A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So i…

IIRC, Snow Leopard was actually the best release -- essentially Leopard but with a focus on stability and performance, plus the code signing stuff. It's the last OS X release that felt like an improvement to me, and one of the last OS X releases that I trusted. Every one since has actually had feature regressions (let's make a formerly visible folder invisible!) or stability issues. I still have a 2008 Macbook Pro ru…

Absolutely. Snow Leopard was the pinnacle. I could run for months without a reboot and did a tremendous amount of heavy work on that old Macbook Pro.

Starting with 10.7 and seeing the decline coming, I was happy that Ubuntu ran very well on that laptop and that held me over until I left Apple hardware entirely.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#294

Post by mixmastamyk »

toyg wrote: post #283
mixmastamyk wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same for clock apps. That's where the alarm is, and personally I use it several times a day, to wake me up and to remember the occasional meeting or random events I would otherwise forget about. I hate ios Photos, mostly because of the white backgrounds however.

> That's where the alarm is Good point. I never really used alarms until Siri , because it was too cumbersome. Now setting and deleting alarms via Siri is probably the best voice-recognition experience I've ever had.

Interesting, its only a few taps to set an alarm, and I'd find "speaking to the cloud" cumbersome.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#295

Post by munificent »

dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

> the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications?

Ah, you've fallen for the illusion. Those "simple" Mac apps you love are fantastically complex to implement. It's the user experience that is simple, and it takes a ton of sophisticated engineering to pull that off.

You can think of it as there being a certain fixed amount of complexity in the user attaining some goal. You can make your software simpler by foisting the complexity on to the user: just make them do all of the nit-picky tasks.

If you want to make it simple for them to achieve their goal, your app is going to have to contain that complexity itself.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#296

Post by coldtea »

dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

>There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things.

You probably wasn't paying attention when Job was running things.

OS X 10.1 was a mess -- it took until several updates to become somewhat usable. The Finder was half-arsed for a decade. Mail.app had several issues. The Windows versions of iTunes was crappy. OS X releases that are now praised as "the best ever" etc, got tons of complaints for introducing bugs and instability. XCode has been historically crap (and it's much better now). And don't even get me started on the state of their Cloud offerings under Jobs.

Hardware wise the same. Every new release, from the original iPod to the iPad was met with complaints and bickering ("No wifi? Less space than a Nomad? Lame") -- even if it actually took wifi and batteries 5 more years to even start making practical sense to have on such a device for syncing. Aside from specs people complained about, there were also all kind of other HW issues, from the overheating G4 Cube, to the logic boards dying on G3 iBooks, to cooling goo spilling from G5 towers, the crappy "round" mouse, and lots of other stuff besides.

That said, I don't buy the "Apple software went downhill as of late" thing. First, because as said there were always issues. Second, because in normal use I don't see any particular decline. If anything things have got better, to the point where we complaint about trivial stuff. The thing is Apple of today puts out a heck of a lot more software and hardware products than the rosy Apple you remember.

I'd take iTunes in the back and kill it though -- as the latest redesigns are absolutely crap from a UX perspective. Then again, I wouldn't call that a programming quality issue -- more of a "idiotic focus and shoving on our faces of BS online music platform issue".

>Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer and it seems to increase with each release.

The opposite. XCode was "atrociously buggy" in the 3/4/5 era and before, and has gotten quite better in the 6/7 series (despite having to support a whole new language).

In fact a large list of early XCode 6 crashing bugs have been squashed months ago -- which was (as reported) around 90% of them.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#297

Post by jad »

dplgk wrote: post #10

There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this and I wish he was alive to tear some people a new one. I didn't like Jobs but respect his ability to achieve things. Perhaps, the years of oversimplifying applications has created an Apple that can't handle complex applications? Or, there's a chicken and egg question: XCode and the surrounding tools are atrociously buggy and hostile to the developer…

> There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this

Says everyone who disagrees with any decision Apple makes. "Steve would have had the same opinion about this I do!" Statements like this are just you projecting your own opinion onto him.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#298

Post by dolguldur »

ramenmeal wrote: post #200
graeme wrote: post #99

The decline seems real to me. A shortlist of things I've noticed: * Spotlight no longer finds things as easily. I used to use it for everything. Since updating to El Capitan, it has missed some exact match folders. Planning to switch to Alfred. * iWork was gutted in '13. People used to use Pages professionally. I'm now using Pages '09, and planning to transition to Word or Latex. I tested Pages '13 intensively, and i…

What annoys me the most is when my mba awakes from sleep, there are around 10 processes that update their state and it means my CPU usage is at 100% per core for a few minutes. The computer is unusable during that period.

This! I wonder whether this is part of some introduced obsolescence or also happens on recent models.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#299

Post by whitegrape »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #137
nextos wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed the trend with Snow Leopard. Also the tendency towards iOS-ification of Mac OS, so I decided to switch back to Linux. I think Apple's best hour came with Tiger and Leopard. Simple applications that did one thing well and were robust. Now there's a lot of feature bloat. A nice Linux set up with minimal software (e.g. xmonad, mutt, emacs or vim) is a joy to use, but takes time to set up and learn to use. So i…

Ubuntu has been doing the same thing as Apple with their new UI, trying to jump in on the tablet bandwagon, with this belief that tablets are the future. This is fairly stupid, considering that Ubuntu's marketshare was pretty much 100% PC, 0% tablets. They gave their main demographic a slap in the face, and they never really did acquire any tablet market. Now, according to DistroWatch, Ubuntu is below Mint and Debian…

Switch to a distro with rolling releases. I've been a happy Gentoo user for over a decade. It was a scary time when Gnome 3 came out and I had to mask a lot of updates, but eventually Mate became stable enough for me to switch over from Gnome 2. Total control the whole time. If something doesn't work, it's my own fault. Of course XFCE, KDE, etc. have been available the whole time too.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#300

Post by arc0re »

ktRolster wrote: post #91
nilkn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less about Snow Leopard having been supposedly perfect and more about how OS X feels like it's just floundered around randomly since then. In fact, for me, I can honestly say that OS X has almost strictly regressed in terms of my day-to-day experience. Spotlight now covers up way too much of the screen for almost no gain; if I'd wanted that, I'd have just used Alfred. Mission Control is still not as powerful and…

>how OS X feels like it's just floundered around randomly since then. Well said. For nearly a decade, every OSX was clearly better than the previous. The GUI kept getting more efficient, bugs disappeared. Now when there's a new OSX version, my first thought is, "Oh no, what's going to break?"

OSX is known to have a not so good window manager, in example. Well, instead of improving it, by implementing other WM's standards (look at almost all the Linux WMs and Windows', they have maximize buttons, they stack on the border of the screen, etc) they chose to not be smart and not, oh god not copy what works the best. They chose to "force" fullscreen instead of maximizing, to not implement stacking shortcuts, etc. They are going backwards. And sadly you can say that for a lot of things about OSX
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