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Apple’s declining software quality

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#331

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

coldtea wrote: post #304
kps wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7. I'd always assumed it was simply that Apple no longer cared about computers; in Jobs' own words, “milk the Macintosh for all it's worth and get busy on the next great thing.”

> For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7 So what issues do you have with 10.11? Because I don't see anything to complain about. Then again, I also didn't see anything troubling in 10.10, 10.9 and 10.8, with the exception of their ill-fated transition to a new DNS backend, which they later reverted. A few bugs here and there, yes. Nothing I haven't seen since 10.2, or that's not comparable to the kind of iss…

Caveat: i havent used it on my main machine yet, so a lot of this is impressionistic; feel free to correct.

Still a total disregard of Fitt's law. Horribly inconsistent keyboard support. Behaviour that should be trivially configurable seemingly set in stone. Still, I think, impossible to cut a file in Finder. However many shots that take, apple can't get WiFi working properly. The transparency is an abomination.

If you want something more 'big picture', I think all the changes introduced over the lifetime of OSX have been a bit piecemeal with no overall, unifying process. For example, full-screen mode gets bolted on, rather than nicely integrated with other window actions. Notifications blossom into a side panel, but there's an overlap with bouncing icons in the dock. Etc. There are some great ideas there, but we could really do with an OS11 that picks the best ones and presents them together, in a clean interface, in which they all belong.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#332

Post by ConroyBumpus »

mattkevan wrote: post #170

There's a weird combination of things going on with these articles – a mix of: 1. Forgetting how truly crap things used to be MacOS is better now than ever. Systems 7-9 fell over about every 10 minutes, 10.3 was the first version of OS X to be good enough for work and 10.5 'Leper'- nuff said. 2. Ostalgie [0] Maybe Windows wasn't that bad after all... 3. 'Steve Jobs wouldn't have allowed it' Good grief – Apple have ha…

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my closet is a "System 7.5 sucks less" shirt. What's old is new again, I suppose.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#333

Post by Kalium »

coldtea wrote: post #296
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 vers…

I remember the initial Windows release of Safari. Apple insisted on doing their own font rendering, and the result was blurry headache-inducing text.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#334

Post by cableshaft »

rloc wrote: post #80
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #22

Is Apple's software quality truly declining? I've been an OS X user for a couple years now, and I'm perfectly happy with my laptop and its updates. Whenever I read articles like these, I wondered if the software quality has actually declined, or if it's received too many features to be properly maintained, or if now it has so many more users that the flaws have become more apparent.

I'm on the last El Capitan. Actually I have to restart the Finder every few days because the network drives either disappear or are no longer reachable. Sometimes the shortcuts disappear as well especially the ones that are located on a network drive (I tried both smb and afp). I've also noticed a lot of slowness throughout the OS. The spinning colored wheel shows up very often compared to previous OS versions and on…

That spinning colored wheel issue went away for me when I upgraded from 4GB RAM to 20GB. It was constant and terrible in El Capitan before I did that, though.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#335

Post by greggman »

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…

Clock has bugs. I've had alarms not go off 3 times in the last year. Pictures to prove it because when the alarm goes off it's no longer "on" (its switch is slide to the off position) so the fact that the switches are still on 30 minutes after the alarm time past means the alarm didn't go off. Nearly missed a flight.

Music once it went flat UI is now complete crap. It drives me nuts all the time and I use it often because there really isn't an alternative.

While I'm ranting one thing that's been bad from the beginning is the locked music UI. The next track button is just a few mm from the volume slider which means about once every 2 weeks I blow my ears out trying to skip to the next track. That "feature" carried over to the toolbar menu (or whatever the slide up menu is called)

http://imgur.com/a/gJ3QN

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#337

Post by doomlaser »

elsurudo wrote: post #323
_pmf_ wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs ... that's the guy with the skeuomorphic preferences, right? The one who, at the first iPhone release, told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough, right? Just to make sure we're on the same page here.

Not everybody hates skeumorphism, especially when not taken to an extreme (okay, Apple under Jobs often did take it to an extreme... like the leather Calendar app). But skeumorphism, when used properly, provides affordances and hints to the user. > told developers that they don't need native apps because using HTML + WebView is enough That's because the SDK wasn't ready for developers yet. You must remember that, fir…

No, they weren't going to do a public SDK, until after the huge sustained public outcry.

I understand the plan was to work with select third parties on a case by case basis, sort of akin to standalone game consoles.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#338

Post by egypturnash »

dolguldur wrote: post #298
ramenmeal wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My 2013 MBA is ready to go pretty much the instant I open it up.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#339

Post by graeme »

greggman wrote: post #335
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…

Clock has bugs. I've had alarms not go off 3 times in the last year. Pictures to prove it because when the alarm goes off it's no longer "on" (its switch is slide to the off position) so the fact that the switches are still on 30 minutes after the alarm time past means the alarm didn't go off. Nearly missed a flight. Music once it went flat UI is now complete crap. It drives me nuts all the time and I use it often be…

And that tiny slider that indicates where you are in the track. Very, very hard to move it properly. Wasn't so in the non-flat version.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#340

Post by ktRolster »

daheza wrote: post #31
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…

I haven't read much about Jobs but I wonder how he achieved the perfection in his product. Force the teams to work overtime to correct the bugs? Did he double the QA size in order to catch all these bugs? Did he demand that all code checked in must be at incredibly high standards, thus forcing the devs to QA more of their own code?

The Steve Jobs method: hire really good people and inspire them to work to the best of their ability.

Apple UIs were better because they were doing what ESR suggested at a time when the rest of the world was smashing every new option into the right-click menu. Occasionally I'll still hear someone say, "Oh, just put that in the right-click menu." The right click menu isn't a trashbin to dump things that don't fit elsewhere. In any case, here is ESR's UI advice: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

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