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Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

latimes.com

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Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#321

Post by magicalist »

wlesieutre wrote: post #298
matzipan wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Hangouts development team is dead or something.

Agreed. I'm unfortunately forced to use the Hangouts app on android since Google Voice was smushed into it (losing 90% of its best features in the process, like being able to mark voicemails as spam). So now I'm stuck doing my texting shoehorned alongside this other chat app that none of my friends use except by accident when they meant to send a text. Now Google's decided to split SMS back out into a separate SMS ap…

> Agreed. I'm unfortunately forced to use the Hangouts app on android since Google Voice was smushed into it (losing 90% of its best features in the process, like being able to mark voicemails as spam). So now I'm stuck doing my texting shoehorned alongside this other chat app that none of my friends use except by accident when they meant to send a text.

You can go into hangouts settings and turn off google voice handling.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#322

Post by kawera »

drhayes9 wrote: post #35
sithadmin wrote: post #19

>Mossberg pointed to "a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps." He fingered iTunes for the desktop ("I dread opening the thing"), and the Mail, Photos, and iCloud programs. As somebody that's used a Mac for 90%+ of all computing-related tasks since OS X was released, all of the above-mentioned apps/services have been dead to me for years. I honestly can't remember the last time I pur…

Do you have any recommendations for a music player that isn't iTunes?

Fidelia and Audirvana are both pretty good.

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/fidelia/

http://audirvana.com/

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#323

Post by LoSboccacc »

pyre wrote: post #204
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please express your opinions without using the term "brainwashing"? I think Safari and iMessages are vastly superior to Chrome and Hangouts and that doesn't make me an idiot.

Well, one thing about Safari is that upgrades seem to be tied to the OS. As a web developer, this makes testing things on different versions of Safari a bit difficult. Also, you have to upgrade the entire OS to get a new version of Safari, so if you were holding out on an OS upgrade you might be forced to upgrade if you need to test things on the latest version of Safari.

I hate ios safari with passion. Last release crashes a lot and it has the balls to blame the web page, so I have to run trough a lot of bogus crash bugs from users instead on working on real things.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#324

Post by jmspring »

unfamiliar wrote: post #315
jmspring wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iTunes started getting shittier and shittier even when Jobs was alive. I doubt people would get fired.

I think his solution to that problem was to move away from iTunes as the central hub towards iCloud as the central hub. That vision has mostly been achieved, at least from my perspective. I only use iTunes on OS X to listen to music or podcasts, very rarely for any syncing or direct interaction with my phone.

There need to be distinct apps:

- device management - content management - audio - video - photos

I've got a large music library, iTunes is horrible with it, trying to copy to device in iTunes is even worse.

Already photos (and camera taken videos) are treated differently (Photos app) than music/commercial videos.

iTunes is a frankenapp that really doesn't do anything well, aside from maybe be an avenue to buy things.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#325

Post by Mandatum »

mmastrac wrote: post #3

It's not just software. While I'm still a fan of Macbooks, I'm getting close to abandoning ship thanks to the increasingly un-repairability of these things. I have a Macbook from ~2008 that's still functional as a media PC thanks to memory/SSD upgrades and battery replacements over the years. My current Macbook Pro has memory soldered on to the motherboard and a battery glued to the case. The SSD is technically repla…

I upgrade every 2 years. It costs me about $1-2K for the "next" model's difference (after selling the old one on Craiglist/Ebay), however averaging the usage out over those 2 years I'm still getting really good bang for buck without hardware fault issues.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#326

Post by hackercomplex »

jjoonathan wrote: post #306
nostrademons wrote: post #159

It's kinda weird to read commentators talking as if this was the end of a golden age of Apple. From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attrac…

> anyone who used the whole integrated Apple software suite and never looked elsewhere has been missing out on some seriously nice features this whole time Ditto for anyone not using the Apple ecosystem. Better tested drivers installed by default, no OS license hassles, no issues created by malfunctioning (or maliciously functioning) antivirus, top download sites weren't infested with malware (no hunt for the real DL…

Why compare it to windows ? Compare it to Ubuntu or Chrome OS. You have Aptana, textmate, emacs, and web based IDEs. Ubuntu's "one button search" works better, it's called /usr/bin/locate.

If you're buying hardware devices that linux can't support well then you're doing it wrong. Support open standards and eschew manfacturers that don't support open source.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#327

Post by dzamo_norton »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #75
aditya wrote: post #20

Wow, that's a lot of media hoopla. Let's be real, Apple's never been a software company -- they've always made excellent hardware and good enough software that people will deal with because they want their amazing hardware. No one has ever said anything about any Apple software compared to what people say about their hardware. Software's not in their DNA and I think all this media attention will just fade after a whi…

It would be nice if there was better Linux support from Apple. I haven't tried it, but from reading guides it seems like installing Linux on a Macbook comes with a whole set of gotchas and workarounds.

For a long time I ran Debian in VMware Fusion in fullscreen mode on my iMac. There's a penalty but it's faster than you might think. My interest at the time was an effort to recover some sense of control over data privacy. Gradually I moved bits and pieces into the guest and these days I simply run Debian bare metal on a Lenovo. When my colleague wants to collaborate on a Keynote or Pages document she shares it on iCloud and I do pretty well editing in Firefox.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#328

Post by nostrademons »

jjoonathan wrote: post #306
nostrademons wrote: post #159

It's kinda weird to read commentators talking as if this was the end of a golden age of Apple. From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attrac…

> anyone who used the whole integrated Apple software suite and never looked elsewhere has been missing out on some seriously nice features this whole time Ditto for anyone not using the Apple ecosystem. Better tested drivers installed by default, no OS license hassles, no issues created by malfunctioning (or maliciously functioning) antivirus, top download sites weren't infested with malware (no hunt for the real DL…

FWIW, there are more options than just Apple and Microsoft. I was on RedHat from 1998-1999, Mandrake in 2000, back to WinXP in 2001-2002, Mandrake again from 2003-2004, XP again in 2005 but with Ubuntu running under VMWare, switched to mostly web-based apps from 2005-2007, but ended up going back to OS X Leopard (but again, with mostly webapps) in 2009. I had a System76 laptop running Ubuntu from 2013-2015, and of course all my workstations have been Linux (usually Ubuntu) since 2005.

I still have a soft spot for KDE circa 2003. It was as pretty or prettier than OS X, and also featured "No malware", but even moreso. Amarok is still probably my favorite music player ever, much better than iTunes. People in this thread say that Safari was one of the best browsers available when it came out in 2003 - well, it got that way by forking KHTML. Stability kinda sucked, but it was very usable.

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#329

Post by stordoff »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #276
largote wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clicking on an address defaults to fucking Apple Maps... Let me say that again: Apple Maps ...

Apple Maps' reputation is much worse than it deserves. These days it is better than Google Maps, in my opinion: Better map pins, better graphical performance, better rendering style, better search.

> Apple Maps' reputation is much worse than it deserves

I haven't used it since launch, so can't comment on its current performance, but AFAICT its reputation is due to how poor it was at launch. I tried it with three locations that Google Maps handled fine (small sample I know, but enough to put me off trying it further), and had problems with all three results (my house: low-res satellite imagery; my College: wrong website address; Cambridge Union Society: correct details, but location was about 50mi out).

Hopefully its now better, but that initial impression is hard to shake.

Edit: initially -> initial

Re: Apple fans are coming to hate Apple software

#330

Post by cmurf »

nostrademons wrote: post #159

It's kinda weird to read commentators talking as if this was the end of a golden age of Apple. From my perspective, their application software has always sucked. It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attrac…

It's all about churn. It's new and shiny. Oh you actually depended on those features? You want document format portability? Those questions don't enter the equation. Eventually they dump everything and replace it with something else. The quality varies from useful to bad, but ultimately it doesn't matter to them, it all gets replaced eventually. Because new is better. Stability, backward compatibility, support for open document formats - these things don't sell in Apple's world view.
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