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Apple’s declining software quality

sudophilosophical.com

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Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#551

Post by samstave »

Animats wrote: post #372

This has to be a management problem. Apple has total control over the hardware, total control over third party developers, and $203 billion in cash. What are they doing wrong? Apple has the resources to approach software like aerospace. Formal interface specs, heavy Q/A, tough regression tests, formal methods. It's expensive, but Apple ships so many copies that the cost per unit is insignificant. Microsoft did that,…

>Apple has the resources to approach software like aerospace. Formal interface specs, heavy Q/A, tough regression tests, formal methods.

I would think that what you stated, while true that they currently have these resources, would directly go against their product roadmap schedule, the consumption of said devices in that schedule and thus their bottom line ($203B in cash)

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#554

Post by wlesieutre »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #331
coldtea wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 y…

If you want "Cut" functionality in Finder, you can Copy (cmd-C) followed by Move Item Here (cmd-opt-V). It's non-obvious, but it's there.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#555

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

baudehlo wrote: post #544
bluedino wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Actually NT 3.51, which I used for dev and was great compared to my colleagues on plain windows.

Actually NT 3.1. 3.5 followed, then 3.51, then 4.0, then 5.0 (2000), and then the NT line ended as it was unified with the non-NT line.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#556

Post by marincounty »

perlpimp wrote: post #500
bluedino wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 regularly get asked to fix someones windows PC, no such problem with people who have Macs. With OS X there are waves of releases(major versions) if I remember correctly - some introduce swaths of new code/features/replacement code. Some other are more of a speedup and bugfix versions. Maybe I'm wrong.

I go places on my Windows pc that I wouldn't dare take my Mac. I expect it to need repair.

My pc is my beater car, and it needs repair--regularly.

My Mac is the classic car in the garage, that only gets used for work, or safe places.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#557

Post by wlesieutre »

thenewwazoo wrote: post #438
coldtea wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'll take a crack at that: - UI non-responsiveness: it is extraordinarily frequent that I will chord a tab change in Safari or in iTerm2, and the system will not respond for sometimes multiple seconds. It's the same with creating tabs in Safari. ⌘-t or ⌘-{ do not respond. - Application switching focus failures: ⌘-tab will raise another window, but window focus will not follow. This has caused me to lose work. ⌘-tab,…

As I read your comment I was thinking "Huh, I've never seen those focus failures on Mac, but they happen to me on Windows at work all the time."

Then I clicked Chrome in the dock, hit Cmd-Q, and watched Safari disappear while Chrome opened a new window. Guess it's not just you.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#560

Post by wlesieutre »

lips wrote: post #311
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…

Seems like many people are not making enough of the distinction between choices and bugs. Sure there are bugs in lots of stuff, and that's an entirely valid conversation, but there's also a layer of confounding choices. Some make sense from an "corporate" perspective, some... -iTunes bloat is a choice, and bugs. -Mail.app is mostly bugs. (non-standard .mbox was a choice) -Final Cut X was a choice. -Eschewing strong A…

> The app store(s) are a choice.

In that case, allow me to summarize some of the choices that went into building the Mac App Store.

- It's a web view. No local caching of layout or anything. If your network connection hiccups, instead of a reasonably rendered error message, you get this: http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png

- Text in the search box is blurry. I'm not 100% sure why, but I think someone made a choice to render it with its y-position at a half pixel increment. And then nudge it down so it comes into focus when you click on it. Because really, what sort of asshole would still be using a low DPI screen? http://i.imgur.com/gj3mqrz.png

- How many Install buttons does an update need? Eh, let's choose two. Two's a nice number. And have that "Update All" button stick around even though all updates were already installed. https://i.imgur.com/p9QoCqZ.png

- Earlier today, though it didn't lend itself to screenshots, my Xcode "Install" vs "Installing" button that couldn't decide what mode it wanted to be in and just bounced back and forth instead. Why choose one when you can be both!

- The "Check for Unfinished Downloads" menu. Do you know what happens when a download doesn't finish? Or why it's not presented in a sane way in the normal UI? Me neither. Instead of gracefully handling errors, let's choose to bury them in a secret menu that people will happen upon via StackOverflow searches when their installation keeps failing with no indication of why. https://i.imgur.com/xkgP0lc.png

A+ design work right there. Excellent choices.

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