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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

#461

Post by omosubi »

moosedev wrote: post #297
jjice wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it". And managers get promoted by "growing" teams…

Compensation driven development

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

#462

Post by aetherson »

1123581321 wrote: post #390
dreamcompiler wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is an ever-evolving trash fire. It's become very difficult or impossible to get it to display a list of albums created by a given artist, and then play album X. "Oh no" Spotify says. "I think what you really want to do is play and then a whole bunch of random songs by other artists you've never heard of, right? That's what I'm going to do for you." I realize it's still actually possible to get Spotify to do w…

Spotify pays a discounted royalty rate when they can kick you over to random plays. Business over user experience, for sure, although they might say you wouldn't pay them a higher monthly subscription to compensate if they didn't do this. Can't say why or how they arrive at such a tight list of random options; perhaps it's an attempt to give you something predictable while fulfilling royalty obligations. Maybe it's j…

My guess is that attempting to diversify what they play for you leads to much worse results, at least for the modal user. I don't think that music recommendation services actually work that well except by identifying very popular stuff.

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

#463

Post by jyounker »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #307
koyote wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is also a huge problem with things being touched for no reason and making them worse. I have never been a big fan of Apple's software, but I must say that this is not just an Apple problem, it's a software industry problem. The amount of software I use daily that has actually improved in the last 5 years as opposed to getting worse is getting frustratingly low as the years go on. I have just upgraded to the l…

We have come to a point where we have large companies employing thousands of people who need a purpose. Fix your bugs. There are plenty. It’s not that they have no purpose. They want to add things to their resume so the next place will give them a pay bump or get that promotion. If your strategy was to hop around between jobs every 12+ months or climb the ladder, would you bother making things better? You’ll be gone…

Sadly there is much truth to this.

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

#464

Post by alwillis »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #311
noneeeed wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I haven’t used it in a while but when I did, it was pretty bad.

One annoying bug: if you switch to a different podcast sometimes, even when the new podcast starts playing, it continues to show the cover art of the previous podcast for a while. Super annoying.

What’s even more frustrating is how buggy streaming music to a HomePod mini is.

Even though I’m the only person in my household using it, I frequently get errors that I can’t play something because someone else is playing something, which turns out to be something I played a while ago.

Things seemed better before the latest HomePod software upgrade…

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

#465

Post by alwillis »

jjice wrote: post #274
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…

This is something so many big companies do, and I hate it. Every 6 months it seems Spotify has to change their UI and make it harder to find what I want. Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. My assumption is that it keeps people employed, even if they aren't necessarily needed. It at least takes away from more important issues being taken care of.

I used to enjoy using Spotify before they added podcasts; now it’s kinda a UX/UI mess.

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

#466

Post by perryizgr8 »

stillblue wrote: post #450
perryizgr8 wrote: post #417

This looks like an appropriate thread to post my safari rant. Here goes. I've been trying to use safari on my laptop ever since I found out that it enables much better battery life compared to chrome (almost 2x). But there are just so many stupid annoyances. The address bar is non-deterministic. I enter first three letters of a site I visit very often, and press enter. In chrome, it always takes me to my site. In saf…

Is this on an M1 Mac? Is the difference in battery usage enough to shift to safari? I quit safari a while back cos it did some very weird things and I've been using Chrome but it is very heavy on memory and battery life.

No this is a 2020 Intel Macbook 13. In my experience the battery life is wayyyy worse with Chrome. I don't even use the browser that much. Most of the time it is open in the background with 10-12 tabs.

With Chrome, I was running out of juice in 2-3 hours. With Safari it is easily 5-6 hours before I need to reach for the charger.

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

#467

Post by Waterluvian »

“Much as I would like to be able to find routes that take advantage of my local bike lanes, I still have to turn to Google Maps for that.”

Kind of a weird sentence that both tries to pretend like Apple is the only way to do things and betrays that it’s inferior to products that already can.

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

#468

Post by arthur_sav »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #147
arthur_sav wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we had more options though. Between Windows and Apple there's no other real competition. Linux is cool and all... but not user friendly (not even Ubuntu)

I don't understand this attitude. I spend countless hours trying to keep my wife's work computers working. Getting windows to connect to a printer is a frequent ordeal and fixes seem to always be ephemeral, things soon breaking again. Her Macs are not as bad but still have lots of hiccups. Meanwhile I've been on Ubuntu for more than a decade and as far as I can remember, for example, printing consists of printer just…

It's been 4-5 years since i last used it.

I remember feeling like it was a full time job - always some issue or inconvenience. Struggled with basic multimedia stuff and of course the biggest issue, almost no apps.

You could say the real issue is not Ubuntu itself but the ecosystem.

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

#469

Post by jyounker »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #233
AlexandrB wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ever since they stopped building wireless routers, Apple has forgotten Time Machine in favor of pushing iCloud backups for separate services. But there’s still no good alternative to Apple’s old routers. I tried to buy a new router for gigabit internet last year, and the interfaces are so piss-poor and the performance so pathetic across the board that I ended up getting the last generation of Airport Extreme instead.…

I can highly recommend Eero. They Just Work, and they work much better than Apple's networking ever equipment did.

I just replaced the previous generation of equipment in my partner's house (1920's plaster and lath construction) with a set of eero6s. A set of four gives full strength signal throughout the entire place (including the basement)s and all of the outside areas. (Not really that impressive though because it's a small lot.)

There's no drop at all as you wander from zone to zone.

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

#470

Post by riversflow »

gcanyon wrote: post #239
noneeeed wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me the issue is notifications that appear, then disappear, and I can’t find them again, or what they refer to. If it’s important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc. I will high five the person who tells me how that feature exists and I’ve just missed it.

> important enough to do a notification, it’s important enough to keep in a notification log that I can go through chronologically, search, group, sort, etc.

In light of a grandchild comment to this one about notification center on iPhone, I'll offer that on Mac you can do a two-finger swipe from the right side of the touch pad to get notification center. It doesn't have search, but they are grouped in stacks chronologically. There is no default hotkey, but you can set one in system settings.

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