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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#621

Post by regularfry »

vvillena wrote: post #576
sofixa wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS and iPadOS are full of those undiscoverable "if you do this combination of buttons/swipes while at full moon, something happens". As a Mac user not by choice (work issued) I hate how impossible to discover these are.

These kinds of shortcuts are part of Apple software as a whole, and apparently have been a thing since at least OSX. These behaviors were supposed to be covered in the documentation, but I don't know how true this is nowadays. Special mention to all text input fields in macOS having Emacs-style shortcuts.

It goes back further than that. I remember being able to buy key-combo cheat cards for System 7, and I have no reason to think the shortcuts they covered wouldn't also have been present in System 6.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#622

Post by dsego »

epolanski wrote: post #65
pavel_lishin wrote: post #20

> I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey through three or four different interface designs, artifacts of half-implemented changes dating back to the last century. Whenever I find myself stuck outside of Appleland, I am eager to return “home,” flaws and all. Hard agree with this. I sometimes have to boot up a windows laptop to play M…

I use both Mac and windows extensively and I'm not sure what are you referring to. You can access most settings by Windows + "yourquery".

I recently discovered that I can change audio settings on a mac by using the opt+volume shortcut and it takes me directly to the sound panel. Now if I could only make it stay on the built-in microphone instead of always switching to the worse sounding airpods one.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#623

Post by regularfry »

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!

Depends where you look. There's been a QA process in all the (agile, some very forward-thinking) teams I've worked with for the last decade. That QA might be being done by other devs, but it's always been there.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#624

Post by simondotau »

detourdog wrote: post #185
simondotau wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand and appreciate the sentiment, but I see the intent very differently. Apple is not employing a frog boiling strategy, but rather being responsive to an increasingly sophisticated adversary. It’s like criticism of the quality of Google search dropping. It has absolutely tanked, but it’s not because the algorithm is worse, it’s because the internet has grown orders of magnitude and most of it uses the same…

The biggest struggle is that the original Macintosh was so simple to manage. The original concept of system extensions to expand the capabilities and the file structure built on the hierarchy with the desktop as the top level was broken with the shift to Unix. Suddenly the users file hierarchy started wherever the Home folder was located and it became an island of user controlled environment surrounded by complexity…

Simplicity is fine for a hobby project. An operating system having zero concern for any kind of security is a non-starter today.

It's amazing the rose tinted glasses people have about the original Macintosh environment. It was insanely janky and (unless you were ruthlessly conservative) insanely unstable by today's standards. By version 10.5 (Leopard) the modern UNIX-based MacOS was unequivocally superior to Classic MacOS in every metric other than nostalgia.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#625

Post by regularfry »

dijit wrote: post #432
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…

Ironically Linux Desktop environments have never been so robust. As much as I dislike systemd, if this is the reason, then I retract everything negative I ever said.

Seconded about the desktops: currently loving KDE Plasma over here. Less sure about systemd.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#626

Post by TuxSH »

joezydeco wrote: post #42
spudlyo wrote: post #32

I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their…

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…

xattr -cr should clear the "download" extended attribute and make it as if the software was compiled on the machine itself, bypassing the ever-so-annoying Gatekeeper.

For binary patching: codesign --force --deep -s - (no developer ID required, "ad-hoc signing" is just updating a few hashes here and there). Note that you should otherwise not use codesign as it is the job of the linker to do it.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#627

Post by octopoc »

troupo wrote: post #532
pjmlp wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a complete failure across the board to create any compelling graphics APIs for desktop platforms (both Linux and Mac) beyond DirectX.

That’s not the goal though. The goal is to play games on Linux. If Valve’s goal was to end up with a Linux-specific graphics api for most games that run on Linux then they provably would have tried to do so.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#628

Post by joezydeco »

plorkyeran wrote: post #200
joezydeco wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tool is built deep in our CI/CD chain. The whole thing is a house of cards built on a massive pile of tinder next to an open drum of kerosene. You want me to integrate XCode into that ? Last time I tried setting up an Apple developer license inside a large corporation, one that they paid for and not tied to me or my credit card, it was also a nightmare. And yes, it's also on principle.

Who said anything about Xcode? The codesign tool is part of macOS, not Xcode. The CLI tool for notarization is bundled with Xcode, but you don't have to use it; they have an official REST API that you can use directly.

Do you have any notes on how to run it inside a Gitlab pipeline via a Linux Docker instance? I'd love to learn how to do this, then.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#629

Post by TuxSH »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #66
spudlyo wrote: post #32

I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their…

> Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass sudo spctl —-master-disable

Don't disable SIP, clear the downloaded/quarantine extended attribute instead. This clears all extended attributes: xattr -cr and bypasses the obnoxious GK.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#630

Post by lapcat »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #290
cjk wrote: post #286

As a former Apple employee that left in part due to declining software quality (back in 2015!), and the relentless focus on big flashy features for the next yearly release cycle, I could not agree more. I recently had to do a full reinstall of macOS on my Mac Studio due to some intermittent networking issue that, for the life of me, I could not pin down. Post-reinstall, everything's fine.

Also as a former Apple engineer.... I've explained in another thread how this kind of thing happens. It may be the same at other large companies. Bugs come in (via Radar) and are routed to the team responsible. Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious example — there are of course n…

> Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious example — there are of course no engineers in the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not.

It's unclear how much explanatory value this has, because the Snow Leopard that everyone is pining for was during the Jobs era. After all, an Apple that goes bankrupt and out of business isn't going to make any software updates.

I find a stark difference between the Jobs era and the Cook era. Under Jobs, the early Mac OS X updates (Puma and Jaguar) came fast and furious, but then the schedule slowed considerably. Panther was 14 months, Tiger 18, Leopard 30 (delayed due to iPhone), Snow Leopard 22 months, Lion 23. Mountain Lion was the first release after the death of Jobs and came only 12 months after Lion. Thereafter, every Mac OS update came yearly, give or take a few months. That's a drastic change in release schedule.

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