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Apple’s declining software quality

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611–620 of 723 posts

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#611
I have noticed corner situations of the iOS UX degrade over the time I started with a 3GS to now. This degridation was most obvious when they moved to the new flat design theme. Here's some examples:

1a) The title bar colour changing feature occasionally bugs out. It will show white over white, or some other non-contrasting colour. This happens with no particular reason as far as I can tell

1b) The title bar sometimes stays on top of a 'fullscreen' app, meaning that for example you have the top title bar icons and text sitting over the camera display view. This happens with no partiuclar reason as far as I can tell.

2a) I have noticed that in the portrait/landscape rotation, sometimes the app veiw gets bugged to sticking one way when the screen display itself rotates. For example, All of the content of the app rotates back around to a portrait orientation but is still trapped in a landscape layout on a portrait display. This is rare but seems to have no particular cause that I can recreate.

2b) The above can sometimes happen in the camera app. When you rotate the camera the icons (flash, hdr, etc) rotate for you. Sometimes rotating it causes them to 'stack up' on one another as if they adjust in one axis but not the other. I most noticably found this when I rotated having had the flash options open (force flash, auto, no flash) and they all collapsed to being on top of one another rather than closing that selection pane.

3) The 'zoom back to home screen' animation sometimes interacts strangely with folders. In that the icons of the folder will do the 'fly out' animation but only confined to the final size of the folder GUI box on the screen. It looks buggy and seems to be a corner case situation. I can't recreate it when I intentionally open a folder > lock my phone > unlock my phone but I've noticed it many times so I should try to pay more attention to its causes.

4) Since iOS9, I can press my 5S's home button to get the screen to light up and recognise my thumb print, but sometimes it will activate siri even if I press it very rapidly. This is a 5S that I purchased in November so I don't believe the home button is faulty. My suspicion is the screen initiation routines on the 5S are a little laggy and sometimes the button registers as a press-and-hold for Siri.

5) Right now I have 2 'unread' emails in one email account, despite there not being any as verified by Outlook on my home PC and the 'unread emails' folder which I added to the mailboxes screen of Mail. I suspect if I remove and re-add the account it'll clean this up but Mail is the only place reporting 2 unread emails.

6) Some apps can have their text input boxes bug out, whereby I can't tap the input cursor part-way back in the window and as I delete text it highlights words and goes wierd. I suspect this may be a buggy implementation in the app itself but I'd have expected that to be a pretty robust UI object, so I figured I'd include it.

Anyway, the above are just examples of the sort of lack of polish I'm noticing build up over time. As said, the biggest increase in it came when they switched to the flat UX design, because I suspect they created so many new UI changes that there were inevitably fresh bugs that had been stamped out in the old design. Nevertheless, a number have stuck around and it's frustrating because I noticed more polish and less of these little rough edges back in the 3GS and even my 4S days on iOS5.

The biggest bugbear is that I don't really know of an easy way to submit these bug reports. I guess I have to jump on the apple dev boards or something but there's no nice way of going 'here's a bug, please consider looking at it or asking me for more information if needed!'.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#612
I have tried every iphone since the iphone 3. I always sell it on ebay 3 months later. Usually it's because of the battery issues. My new 6s is the one exception. Everyone is talking about how much the suck even with more revenue and a better product.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know if Apple owns the hardware quality title anymore. The Surface line from Microsoft is astounding in quality, and it's only a few generations old. This latest line did have some bugs (mostly due to Intel,) but overall when I walk into a Best Buy, and I feel a Surface Book and look over at a MacBook, one feels like the future, while one feels like it's hugging the past. The problem with Apple, and I've…

There's still nothing that truly competes with the MBP. IMO it's the only thing they have left that's clearly better than the competition.

The Pro line is rarely upgraded, you can get a Razer laptop with better specs, for a similar price, but you'll have to trade out the silver for black and a stupid logo. Otherwise...eh, the Pro line is less than impressive these days. I honestly think the iPad Mini and iPhone are their only superior devices now. Of course all they need is the iPhone, that's basically their only real money maker.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#614
post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9 women combined can't make a baby in 1 month

That just means involving more people _right now_ won't speed things up. But you can "make 9 babies in 9 months" if you plan early and involve enough people. I.e. know how much Q/A people you need and hire them upfront.

Yeah, and have them twiddling their thumbs while there's no product to test?

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#615
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well it depends what you mean by custom. I create custom views all the time and its even better now we can render them 'live' in IB: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/xcode_help-I...

Ooh I forgot about that feature. It does at least answer my big problem with IB: you execute code you didn't write and can't read. I'll have to give live rendering another look.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Isaacson book really leveled him for a lot of people. OP is right about him not putting up with crap. Sure, not everything that came out of Cupertino was rock solid. But I think as much of an aesthete that he appears to be have been, it's also pretty evident that he was incredibly shrewd and knew he had to ship at some point. The cruddy software might be coming from Apple repositioning itself from an innovation…

> That Isaacson book really leveled him for a lot of people. To me it actually had the opposite effect: after reading it I had a newfound respect towards Apple and Jobs. The book was honest and fair, I don't know why people think it does a disservice to him since everyone knew he was an asshole. This is coming from someone that avoids Apple products, FWIW.

That's the book that uncritically repeats Jobs' (completely bogus) claim that Apple invented the switching power supply.

http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-powe...

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speak for yourself. I used an old G4 PowerBook for grad school, and it travelled over 100,000 air miles, and into the various labs where I had to work, and also to far-off Asian countries for holiday. Plus, I didn't have to buy a developer kit: it came free with the machine.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So Cmd-C Copy can retroactively remove the file instead of copying it?

I think you're proving his case rather well.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#619

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,…

I don't know if it's fair to compare Microsoft's efforts with Windows and Apple's with OSX. Windows runs on hardware from a variety of different vendors. OSX is pretty much commercially locked down to Apple's own hardware (unless i'm missing something?). It's actually a shame that it isn't damn hear flawless.

OS X runs pretty well on non-Apple-certified hardware. I have a Hackintosh I've been running on desktop for a few years. There's a large community around these things and users' experiences are mostly positive. Of course, this is due to the dedicated efforts of a small group of hackers.

My hardware configuration matches no Apple product.

Re: Apple’s declining software quality

#620
I've been using Apple hardware since cutting my teeth on an Apple //e and then progressing through a continuous chain of Macs now totaling well over a dozen since the late 80s, and my perception is not that things have gotten worse of late—it's been up and down the whole time. My take on this is that Apple has actually improved at their traditional weakness of cloud services to the point where now people use it enough to complain.

Cloud services is the one area where newer companies like Google and Facebook have a distinct advantage over Apple and is really the only threat (Android can never be as stable as iOS because of the vertical integration). Cloud services are amazing because they add so much value in the mobile era where you can easily operate from multiple devices without syncing nightmares. Google's cloud services are the thing which makes Android better than iOS in the areas its superior.

Up until now Apple's offerings were so ridiculously terrible than no one even used them, whether it was iDisk or MobileMe or whatever other branded services they churned through—they were utterly unusable. In the iCloud era it's actually become usable which exposes all the warts in new features which would have been hitherto impossible, whether it's iCloud app developer woes, message syncing issues, or Photos complaints, these things have all become usable now and at least arguably competitive with Google's offerings in the same spaces.

Sure there are warts, and sure it's annoying OS X doesn't get the love it deserves as iOS drives the company, and sure they're struggling with the scope of maintenance they're now saddled with, but that's not really the sky-is-falling narrative that tech bloggers have been pining to snap onto the Tim Cook era.

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