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If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

macworld.com

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Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#311

Post by mixmastamyk »

noneeeed wrote: post #231
makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

The current UX of notifications is terrible . After months of using it I still don't understand the mental model. A notification comes up, I hover and wait for the cross to appear and click it. But then some time later I unlock my machine or something happens and apparantly all my notifications are still there for some reason and I have to clear them again, only this time they are in groups and I have to clear multip…

Don't get me started on the new iOS podcast app. I used to know how to use it. Now I need to click five times at random to get anywhere, and still don't understand where I am. All the views look similar, but different. I just want to hear the oldest first and see if episodes are downloaded, that's it. Cue… "you had one job!"

Yes, been about six months.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#312

Post by brodo »

dekhn wrote: post #298

My belief is that Apple is milking Mac OS X for the last bits before finally releasing Xcode (which is basically the only real way to make iPhone apps) as a cloud service or porting it to Windows. I can't think of anything that, technically speaking, couldn't be done on Linux or Windows. once mac os x is gone, their OS surface is so tiny and locked down that they don't really have to worry ever again.

Highly unlikely. Apple never ever wants to be in the situation again that someone else controls their platform like Adobe and NXP did in the Mac OS 9 days.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#313

Post by dreamcompiler »

AlexandrB wrote: post #88
alphaomegacode wrote: post #70

As an anecdotal example that may be relevant, I wanted to upgrade to Monterey and my Mac Mini said there wasn't enough room. Hooked up a Western Digital external drive that I had used on previous Macs and launched Time Machine. And that's when it started. Time Machine presented what seemed like a stack of Finder windows in the middle, a timeline with hash marks on the right-side and the only button highlighted was th…

Time Machine has been neglected for so long . The UI was never great for power users, but at least it worked. For a novice computer user it was a pretty good "set it and forget it" experience. In the last 3 years it has become so unreliable (every time it tries to backup it claims the backup is corrupted and needs to be re-created) that I've given up and switched to Carbon Copy Cloner.

Same here. CCC is several orders of magnitude faster than Time Machine and it just works.

I stopped using Time Machine years ago when they started using hidden permissions on Time Machine backups that made it impossible to "garden" my family's backups on the network backup drive. Even as root, you couldn't delete old backups -- you had to log in to the particular user's computer to delete old backups.

And then they came out with APFS which didn't support the directory hardlinks which Apple invented and Time Machine depended on. WTF Apple?

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#314

Post by nixpulvis »

My favorite example of this was how, just after quitting my job on the iPhone hardware team, I needed to buy a new phone. So I went to the local Apple store back home in Colorado and got myself a shiny new iPhone X. It didn't take long for the winter to start rolling in and the outside temperature to start to drop. I suddenly began to notice that my fingers weren't registering on the touchscreen anymore, even with warm hands.

A few days went by and more and more people were reporting the same issue. It took a quick update to fix, but I still find it hilarious to think about all my ex-colleagues walking around in 65 degree weather all the time, never even thinking about this issue.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#315

Post by egypturnash »

egypturnash wrote: post #102

I recently moved from Mojave to Big Sur and I sure am feeling this. My Wacom tablet keeps on not being recognized when I wake from sleep. Safari's constantly using a huge chunk of my CPU and typing stuff into a text box in it is often painfully slow. There's a bunch of little constant aggravations and really nothing that's improved my life beyond "the latest version of Illustrator wouldn't work on Mojave". Which I ha…

I dug around and found a fix for the "constantly eats all my CPU" issue: Turn on "compact" tab layout.

Which then creates the problem that now I'm using the "compact" tab layout that everyone in the betas screamed bloody murder about until they added that switch, god this layout is really annoying if you have any extensions up in the toolbar and/or more than about four tabs. But at least I don't have to deal with using fucking Chrome or losing all my text expansion shortcuts because Firefox refuses to support those.

My inner paranoid wonders if this is a deliberate tactic to boost the numbers of people using the "compact" layout by someone whose next performance review is riding on that layout: "see, boss, look at what the telemetry says - everyone's switching to Compact! We should just drop the old look and give me a major bonus!".

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#316

Post by kemayo »

makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

I can understand Safari tabs. I assume that it all came about because they decided to change the location bar on iOS Safari, moving it to the bottom of the screen.

This is a good change -- it makes Safari much easier to use on iPhones with current screen sizes. But then they said "okay, we're making one big change to Safari... let's see if there's any other changes we can roll in, since we're making people learn new UI anyway". So they made all those other changes to how tabs behave in iOS Safari. And then kept on going and updated iPadOS Safari and MacOS Safari -- gets them a whole "we're improving Safari this year" slide in the keynote, etc etc etc.

...and then, to their credit, they listened to beta feedback and rolled back most of the poorly considered UI changes.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#317

Post by brodo »

handrous wrote: post #145
egypturnash wrote: post #102

I recently moved from Mojave to Big Sur and I sure am feeling this. My Wacom tablet keeps on not being recognized when I wake from sleep. Safari's constantly using a huge chunk of my CPU and typing stuff into a text box in it is often painfully slow. There's a bunch of little constant aggravations and really nothing that's improved my life beyond "the latest version of Illustrator wouldn't work on Mojave". Which I ha…

The latest Safari is by far the buggiest thing I've seen out of Apple in some time. It fucking crashed on me the other day! That in addition to multiple bad behaviors and glitches. But then, I don't do betas and usually wait until the first big patch to update the OS.

Today Apple Mail crashed on me while sending ab E-Mail. And I‘m still on Big Sur.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#318

Post by tomc1985 »

makecheck wrote: post #204

While this article focused primarily on things being left unmaintained, etc. there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse . When handed what must be a mountain of bugs and unfinished items, why the hell did they prioritize things like breaking notifications and Safari tabs, for instance? They’re in a position where engineering resources desperately need to be closing gaps…

> who wants to work on the broken things?

So much of whats wrong with modern SWE right here in this sentence

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#319

Post by setpatchaddress »

thelittleone wrote: post #300

I'm on a 2020 16" MBP. The screen blinks black as frequently and randomly as a human eye. The speakers audio pop frequently requiring reboot. Certainly not as bad as my lemon MBP 15" from 2018. But whether these continued problems are the fault of software or hardware I don't know. And does it matter? One of the draw cards of the Mac ecosystem is that the limited number of hardware devices should equate to more relia…

That's not a normal experience regardless of what's causing it -- you need to take that thing to your nearest Apple store.

Re: If Apple keeps letting its software slip, the next big thing won’t matter

#320

Post by gonehome »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #281
gonehome wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another annoying issue is with timers. When cooking we'll tell the one in the kitchen to set a timer. Then we'll ask what time is left. If another one hears the question it yells "there are no timers set" so we have to whisper to the closer one. Another thing that to me suggests nobody at Apple is really using these things.

what was simultaneously aggravating and hilarious was when trying to set up a stereo pair of Alexas, trying to whisper to one, and Alexa whispered right back!

I remember a funny story of a dad putting his very young kid to bed and whispering “play classical music” in order to use that feature and the Alexa screamed back at full volume “ALEXA IS HAVING TROUBLE CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET RIGHT NOW”.
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