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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#461

Post by jjcob »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #222

Snow Leopard was macOS moving so slowly people thought Apple were abandoning the Mac. Apple changed how they tied OS updates to hardware sales in this era and this left a lot of Macs on Snow Leopard for half a decade. So people remember that last point update – which was as close to a low-term-stability release as Apple has ever had. But to get there, Snow Leopard received 15 updates over 2 years and it was really ju…

Snow Leopard introduced GCD, which was a HUGE new feature. It completely changed how we wrote async code. It just wasn't a huge user facing feature.

Snow Leopard also introduced the Mac App Store (in a point release), which was a user facing feature.

I think the "zero new features" mostly meant "no flashy user facing features". It had a lot of new features for developers.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#462

Post by troupo »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #196
nextos wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient. The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple,…

What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly so far down, beneath dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just happen one day seems futile.

> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities?

That their own products depend on it because they developer their products in Mac. And that the professional people they pretend they cater to depend on Macs, and steadily move away.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#463

Post by Etheryte »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #292
joezydeco wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My group makes a custom executable to reflash a hardware device we produce. We build it for Linux and Darwin. Trying to get the program to work with our Mac users has become harder and harder. These are all internal developers. Enabling developer mode and allowing Terminal execution isn't enough. Disabling the quarantine bit works - sometimes - but now we're getting automated nastygrams from corporate IT threatening…

There's extensive documentation. Examples: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/code-sign... https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin... There are dedicated sections of the developer web forums: https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-topic https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-topic... ...and there's an apple developer support person, Quinn, who appea…

I don't really think saying documentation exists says much when Apple is notorious for having documentation that's either borderline or downright useless. It's generally the norm that some random blog post from a decade ago is more useful than their documentation, and I say this from firsthand experience.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#464

Post by dijit »

pjmlp wrote: post #445
dijit wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an actual dyed in the wool game developer. There’s no such thing as “native”, all the things you’re talking about are translation layers for hardware instructions themselves, and the overhead for doing software based translation is significantly less than hardware accelerated virtual machines- and we as an industry love those. The reason for this is because the translations are very cache friendly and happen in us…

So how many of those ported game engines are actually making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today? There is certainly such thing as native, one thing is the platform where the APIs were originally designed for and battled tested, and the other is other platform emulating / translating them, by reverse engineering their behaviours with various degrees of success. Valve's luck is that so far Microsoft/XBox Gaming has…

> So how many of those ported game engines are actually making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today?

Not sure, Unreal Engine is pretty popular though and Snowdrop is increasingly common for Ubisoft titles.

https://www.protondb.com/app/2842040 https://www.protondb.com/app/2840770/ https://www.protondb.com/app/365590

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#465

Post by citrin_ru »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #439
aylmao wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I found annoying at a previous big-tech work, was how the focus on top-level metrics (read, revenue-linked metrics) meant we couldn't fix things. There were a lot of smart people, very interested in fixing things— not only because engineers tend to like fixing things, but also because we, and everyone around us, were users too. For example, many things related to text input were broken on the site. Korean w…

You're implying that buggy software has no impact on the bottom line. I'm not so sure. Users weigh the availability of features against the quality of features. Getting bugs fixed is not necessarly the highest priority for users either. It's a trade-off. Our use of Microsoft 365 is a pretty good example of that. I moved our company to Microsoft 365 because it had some features we wanted. Then I moved the company off…

Even if buggy software has an impact on the buttom line, managers can continue pretending it doesn't and not allocate any budget to fix them. They assume bug fixes somehow will be squeezed in between the work they really value - new features or better completely new projects. Because creating something new (asking debelopers to create) is the easiest way for a manager to get a promotion. It was many years ago when I last seen a manager (with the power to set priorties and not just translate them form above) who pays more than a lip service to quality and cares about maintenance.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#466

Post by pjmlp »

boudin wrote: post #446
pjmlp wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean translating Windows and DirectX APIs is great, there is hardly a Linux gaming ecosystem. Proton is the acknowledgment of Valve's failure to entice game studios, already targeting Vulkan/OpenGL ES/OpenSL on Android NDK, Switch (which has OpenGL 4.6/Vulkan support), or on PlayStation (Orbis OS being a FreeBSD fork) to target GNU/Linux. I rather have the real deal, not translations.

It's not really a failure. Linux distribution and diverse ecosystem brings a level of complexity. The only way to support it long term is to either having your team continuously update and release builds of the game to cater for that which is an impossible task to ask for a lot of studios. The initial approach of runtimes did help but it's still has its limitation. If now a studio just need to test their game under a…

So it is not really a failure when the solution is to adopt Windows and Direct X translation API?

I thought only Apple had a distortion field.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#467

Post by pjmlp »

dijit wrote: post #464
pjmlp wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how many of those ported game engines are actually making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today? There is certainly such thing as native, one thing is the platform where the APIs were originally designed for and battled tested, and the other is other platform emulating / translating them, by reverse engineering their behaviours with various degrees of success. Valve's luck is that so far Microsoft/XBox Gaming has…

> So how many of those ported game engines are actually making a different on GNU/Linux gaming today? Not sure, Unreal Engine is pretty popular though and Snowdrop is increasingly common for Ubisoft titles. https://www.protondb.com/app/2842040 https://www.protondb.com/app/2840770/ https://www.protondb.com/app/365590

Yet most games don't make use of Unreal targeting capabilities of GNU/Linux, rather Proton.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#468

Post by wickedsight »

chii wrote: post #380
hamstergene wrote: post #375

I keep being tempted to write same post but named "Does all software work like shit now?", because I swear, this is not just Apple. Software in general feels more bugged as a new norm. Most websites have an element that won't load on the first try, or a button that sometimes needs to be clicked twice because the first click did nothing. Amazon shopping app needs two clicks every now and then, because the first one di…

> first job 13+ years ago any QA... such QA jobs no longer exists. Ever since the software dev world has moved to doing one's own QA during development, software has been consistently worse in quality. May be there's a correlation there!

The problem is Agile. Not the way it was intended at some point, but the way it has become through Agile consultants and SAFe. Also the fact that it's become the default for any project and that Waterfall has become a bad word.

Companies abuse Agile so they don't have to plan or think about stuff anymore. In the past decade, I haven't worked in (or seen) a single team that had had more than 2 weeks of work prepared and designed. This leads to something build 4 weeks ago needing a massive refactor, because we only just realized we would be building something conflicting.

That refactor never happens though, because it takes too much time, so we just find a way to slap the new feature on top of the old one. That then leads to a spaghetti mess and every small change introduces a ton of (un)expected issues.

Sometimes I wish we could just think about stuff for a couple of months with a team of designers before actually starting a multi-year project.

Of course, this way of working is great when you don't know what you'll be building, in an innovative start-up that might pivot 8 times before finding product-market fit. But that's not what many of us in big corp and gov are doing, yet we're using the same process.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#469

Post by tannhaeuser »

> Yes, they work and are still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11, but they feel like software developed by people who don’t actually use that software

I would have to agree here (and Apple also don't seem to assess feedback for their GUI changes), but unfortunately this thread is already on a software quality meta tangent rather than listing individual annoyances so here's my short list in the hope actual bugs can be discussed:

- window focus management broken: when you minimize or close a window, another random window of that app you're closing the window of is put into front even when that window is minimized; or other completely unrelated apps get focus

- index/Spotlight not showing file locations (full paths) after searching; the fsck?

- gestures being introduced that do stuff that you hit inadvertently and leave you in a state where you don't know how to undo its effects such as the super-annoying "fullscreen" mode when dragging windows around or pressing Command-F since Sequoia. Requires you to fscking research how to leave fullscreen mode (while not as cringe as Windows help "communities", the level of talking past another is getting there, options being discussed that don't exist in Sequoia's Dock/Desktop settings)

- update or feature nagging (I don't care I could use my iPhone as a webcam right now, go away)

- sometimes difficult to find mouse pointer on large screens

- older problem but I know at least one person on the verge of leaving Mac OS because of it after 20+ years of loyalty (or outright fanboyism tbh): in a German locale, you can't switch off PC gender-neutral language which is not only pushy and annoying but also space-inefficient as fsck

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#470

Post by Cthulhu_ »

drooopy wrote: post #447
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #438

I'm still waiting for them to remove Launchpad (which seems like a half assed step towards unifying desktop and tablet systems), and I've yet to meet anyone that uses their weird new desktop management system, the thing with the windows on the left side. That just reminds me of the GUI experiments they did in the 2000s, with 3d environments and whatever Ubuntu (or gnome/kde/whichever) tried to do. I'm hoping they're…

Launchpad has to be one of the worst ways to find and open applications on a Mac. That new window-managing system is honestly so unintuitive, so bad, and so bizarre that its mere existence feels like some sort of practical joke. I wish that in the next version of macOS, they would strip away all those useless features and systems that they've shoehorned over the past two decades and have the OS look like how Panther…

I appreciate that they did UI experimentation and stuff but... not to the end user's expense. I wonder if anyone at Apple themselves actually use these features.
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