361–370 of 723 posts
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The 'maximize' button now making a window take over your whole screen being one of the oddest. And disappearing scroll bars - why?! Didn't this company write the HIG book?
you can force the scroll bars to be always visible. Look in your general settings
System Preferences -> General
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…
This is the key. We're definitely spoiled by how solid a lot of the basics are.
I can fault them for some of the cloud service issues nowadays, but even those work better than they did in years past.
Apple has always had strange hardware and software issues, just like everyone else. Just today I was trying to buy Windows 10 to install it on a PC I'm building, and the MS storefront and my Live account couldn't sync the deletion/addition of a credit card until I logged out of everything, closed the browser, and logged back in. No one is getting this stuff working flawlessly.
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Agree on all the items. Not just Apple, I see similar issues with Google. Google's Youtube IOS app has issue playing video correctly. It can't even buffer the segments correctly. Google latest Android Map crashes all the times 1-2 minutes into the navigation, extremely dangerous when I have to restart the navigate while driving. I can't depend on it at all. I have to roll back to the default factory install older ver…
All iOS issues with Google software, I suspect, have more to do with Apple being dicks to Google than with Google fucking up. Remember, Apple is really trying hard to rid iOS of all Google programs. Remember Apple Maps?
And yet, here we are five years later, and Google Maps is still on the iPhone, shows no evidence of leaving, and Google's iOS apps are ALL still present and better than ever, and Google is still the default search bar in Safari. Meanwhile, Apple Maps is a great product too and has been worked on and polished for several years. "Remember Apple Maps" betrays a mindset where you read one article a few hours after it was released, half a decade ago, and you have no updated impression of the product at all. Apple Maps is, in fact, rock-solid for me right now. It is, in fact, now superior to Google Maps for transit directions, and in some other ways.
So really, I'm not sure what you are talking about, at all.
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iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out (until about 4.0?). Compared to its contemporaries, Music Match, which was a bloated piece of junk, and Winamp 2.x which while awesome, had a steep learning curve to get really useful (J for the win) and had an extremely unpleasant UI.
> iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out It forced a bundled QuickTime install (still does I believe), and back then, it tried hard to become the default media player on your system (even reverting your "no" choice after updates). This led many people to remove QuickTime, only to discover now their iTunes refused to work. It would fail halfway through sync's and upgrades of iDevices routinely, had a generally…
Whip the Lama's A WinAmp is still better.
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…
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>>Or, perhaps, at some point, software becomes too complex for humans to deal with. I'd say rather that things need to be simplified and features removed in order to improve quality. Every new Mac or iOS release touts XXX number of new features. If you want to offer the best products, having more features isn't necessarily a prerequisite.
I can't upvote this enough. So many products have been ruined by feature creep, it's sad to even think about it...
Feature creep is necessary for closed applications.
The ideal is a set of simple tools around a simple and open file format. As soon as you lock in folks to your application (as Apple loves to do), you're on the hook for being all things to all people, or getting panned that your software is only for the lightest casual usel
It creates a push towards constant acceleration in all things- shorter release cycles, more product categories, etc. This supplies the continuous growth that shareholders demand right up until the point where it kills the host.
Also, "success hides failure". If you're a titanically successful corporation, any internal argument along the lines of "we shouldn't do X anymore, we should do Y instead" can be shot down with "well, look at how successful we were while we were doing X! X must not be so bad after all." It degrades an organization's ability to be reflective and self-critical.
These are problems for all successful companies, which become bigger and bigger problems with increasing success.
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 bet it would be easy to find an "OS X is on a slippery slope..." article for each OS X release.
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Its interesting to think about - is feature creep uniquely in the domain of software? I don't think so. There is plenty of software that has been immune to it (think everyday developer tools, command line stuff, etc). Often the apps with the least amount of feature creep are the ones where they are bounded by the APIs they talk to, i.e. if the API (which they don't control) is static, they can't really add any more f…
Awesome analogy about context switching. It's definitely true. The "unix philosophy" never really worked well for GUIs and that's been a big problem for composability.
Ironically, it is the "handoff" features that Apple was traditionally best at. BUT, I have this feeling that most of what we hate can be described as "too little, too soon". After all, it could be argued that Apple is aiming for an environment which is "document focused" with their focus on standardized APIs (Adobe is working on this, too), but none of this works yet, because software is still written from an "Apps" POV. In the real world, we change the tool relative to the job, and the best tools are specific single tasks. given the experience so far, I'm far from convinced that a 2D GUI should ever try duplicate that.
I blame the stock market pressure towards growth. The stock market rewards growth at the expense of everything else. It's like a kid pinching his arm to blow up a mosquito that was biting him- it's forced to grow and grow and grow until it pops. It's no longer acceptable to simply run a profitable business with happy employees and customers. It creates a push towards constant acceleration in all things- shorter relea…