451–460 of 723 posts
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Interface Builder is superb once you get the hang of it.
It does a great job of getting you from zero to an app, but it breaks down terribly once you try to do anything custom with it. The fact that it hides code from the developer drives me nuts.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/xcode_help-I...
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> I blame the stock market pressure towards growth This is because almost everyone's retirement fund/401k/IRA is now directly tied to the stock market in one form or another. There are no more pensions, so people need growth in order to retire and live a reasonable life in your last years.
There are still pensions and they are also tied to the stock market. Pension funds also have greater influence over CEOs and they need growth every quarter because they are so underfunded (i.e. most pension funds are capitalized based on extremely unreasonable expectations of stock market growth). So, the reality is that pension funds exert a much greater pressure on CEOs to create short term gains than individual in…
It happens that CEOs manipulate the business to show a short term profit at the expense of long term, but if investors find out about it the stock will promptly tank to reflect the long view.
A common related idea is that CEOs gut businesses to satisfy Wall Street. This makes no fiscal sense at all. It can very well be true that Wall Street and CEOs often have conflicting and/or mistaken ideas about which way a business should turn, but it is never about gutting a business.
And yes, if a business can make more money by being "parted out" than as a business, then parting it out makes sense.
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I don't think it's the stock market. If anything, it's the CEO not focusing on making products that make people's lives better and instead focusing on what everyone else in SV (and the tech industry in general) is making.
Since when are the two mutually exclusive ? And I am confused what Apple could be doing that the tech industry isn't already doing. There aren't many raw innovation areas to get into now. It's all about execution and innovation at the micro level. For me Apple's foray into health e.g. Apple Watch, HealthKit, ResearchKit as well as their pretty amazing stance on encryption and privacy is absolutely about making people…
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Nah, I think it's a perception problem. As someone whose starry-eyed Mac obsession predated Windows 95 - Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio, and it was buggy under Jobs. I remember getting plenty of sad Macs under System 6 and 7, and early versions of OS X weren't any better. We just didn't care because Steve Jobs was really good at distracting us with promis…
>> Apple's software has always been buggy. It was buggy under Sculley, it was buggy under Amelio... Classic Mac OS was buggy by design - it didn't have multitasking and memory protection, it was single user... Windows had that same problem before 2000 (well, NT 4, but not many people used that). I use OS X daily and I use Windows 7 daily. I have far fewer issues with OS X for whatever reason that may be. My computers…
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…
Pretty simple solution...if you don't want to be beholden to external shareholders, don't go public. If you're pre IPO, fund your company through debt, which is extremely cheap at the moment with interest rates at historical lows, or sane, sustainable equity rounds through investors who you know and trust and are in it for the long haul. If you're post IPO, pull a Dell and exit the public markets so you can refocus o…
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…
On the WiFi issues I have noticed that when using a normal 2.4GHz router in combination with any Bluetooth mouse, keyboard etc. causes lots of issues for me. Typically I would be getting really slow speeds and intermittent disconnects. Switching to a 5GHz WiFi router solved a lot of problems in the WiFi department for me on both El Capitan and Yosemite.
Bluetooth interferes with 2.4GHz Wifi, therefore most Macs with bluetooth keyboards/mice struggle a bit on networks at this frequency.
5GHz is pretty much a requirement these days to get the best from a newish Mac.
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> Microsoft finally got a handle on security & software quality just as the world ceased to care about them. Not quite. They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass. Competition, true honest to market competition, spurs improvement. The thing about Apple is that they may have competition on hardware, but they have no competition on Software. If you buy a Mac or a iPhone, you have already throw…
> They got a handle on security when Linux list a fire under their ass. I have my doubts that all 0.02% or whatever of PC users who are dedicated to using Linux as their desktop OS influenced Microsoft to do anything but if you have data to show otherwise I'd be interested in it.
But to manage all those desktops you need server, and with MS the billing pr active user etc.
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> iTunes was decent or even good You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.
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.
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> iTunes was decent or even good You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.
| You clearly never used iTunes for Windows. IME, every terrible thing about iTunes applies equally to both platforms.
The sentiment in this thread rings true to me. Usually the techies (ie HN readers/commenters) are ahead of the curve, so it will only be so much time before the cries from the general populace become louder. Meanwhile, last time I was on an airplane (December), every single older woman over the age of 60 had an iPhone . This means that it's not only reached critical mass (the late majority on the technology adoption…
I wouldn't discount all the people who don't give a shit about being hip, but just want their devices to be safe and kick ass. Apple haters seem to often have the misconception that people like Apple products for their style appeal. It's easy to think that, and not wonder if there are possibly some more important reasons.
So, if we're not buying them for style... they're not working as well... they cost $800... they have questionable tax and manufacturing practices... at what point does the public call it all into question?
This thread, in my opinion, is a sign of bigger and worse things to come for the company. The canary is singing.....