makecheck

The overwhelmingly most common one I see is cyclists not stopping at STOP signs (or worse, red lights), and the real crazy ones appear to not even slow down.

It is illegal to run a stop sign, and it is certainly possible a car (crossways or turning) will arrive first and have right of way. So a car is turning, why should it expect a cyclist to come plowing through on a whim?

Again: it is ILLEGAL for cyclists to run stop signs. You have to stop, just like a car. (And in case you think it’s no big deal, I see plenty of cars that aren’t too good at stopping either. You want to hit them?)

And it hasn’t evolved with cloud/sandboxing/magic-paths/whatever. Like today on the Mac I used the popup directory path to try to navigate to the parent directory (since it showed it to me, and it was selectable) and it couldn’t; it just threw me to my home folder as if that was my request. I can only assume it was some weird cloud thing but when path navigation itself is a question mark we have problems.

Unfortunately impossible to read on my mini screen…

Seems like the viewport is fixed so zoom is disallowed. (Sites should never do this.)

This is also one of the many cases of Apple not following their own guidelines. They suggested that Touch Bar items should act statically like keyboard keys and not be used to display status, etc. (In reality, plenty were abused for that, I guess the allure of a dynamic colorful display was too great.)

So in this case, all they had to do was make it key-like and it wouldn’t have had any of the features that could trigger this problem.

Brings back memories; the Apple Platinum look appeared around the time when 90% of the UI was black-and-white or at least boring so it really seemed to instantly transform the Mac into a professional-looking tool.

I can’t wait until they release it (oh wait, they did, decades ago; now we just have — whatever — the Mac is now).

A really cool example of good debugging especially without the source.

Also a good reminder that the slow thing may not be what you think and if you aren’t profiling you don’t really know what’s going on.

And an even better reminder that typical “metrics” trying to assess developer value can be pretty meaningless. This is the kind of code change that would drastically improve everything but show up as a blip on some of the pathetic measurements out there, e.g. hardly any lines of code or whatever.

Proper up-front never occurred because Apple refuses to implement a simple free-trial-period mechanism. And it is impossible to filter store searches in a way that tells you which apps would behave roughly in that way (therefore anything with IAP I just assume must be a gambling/gem-bags/garbage model).

The only way to really deter this stuff is to make it cost the sender something per spam. Bonus points if the user can feed back into the system to discourage truly unpopular notifications.

Like any organization, things have to be reliable and some open-source doesn’t really have the support model figured out.

And if cost is an issue, that is more an indictment of how schools are funded: if there doesn’t seem to be room in the budget for buying software and/or support, why is that the budget?

“…in that order” is the full quote, and omitting that from the title really changes the point.

Ultimately if you don’t work on the first two, it isn’t enough to have the third. Persuasion is really important because you’re usually not working in a vacuum.

Lots of great and specific points in these threads, many of which I have personally seen.

SwiftUI was really promising at first, and even fun to use (nothing like ripping out entire UI files or pages of code). Yet, issues were almost immediately apparent.

A major concern is that it seems to take Apple a really long time to address even basic issues, e.g. years go by and things still broken since day 1 are there, while other things are randomly introduced. And of course, “Feedbacks” have the usual dice-roll effect: will you even get a response, much less see any indication that the reported bug will ever be fixed? (Or will Apple just wait 2 years, close your bug as “probably fixed in this OS update, please confirm”, and repeat the whole thing?)

And the thing is, this is not hard to believe. If you auto-complete in SwiftUI (what else can you do, there is rarely good documentation?), some of the APIs are truly scary: levels of complexity and variation that really make me wonder if they can truly test, much less support, every variation of every API. I would strongly argue that some things just have way too many options instead of a handful of clear starting points.

SwiftUI also occasionally changes behaviors (e.g. subtle or gross layout differences). Worse, it is easy for Apple to not call any of these changes “breaking” because apparently you are just supposed to let SwiftUI figure out what is needed in any situation. Except that kind of “trust us, we’ll come up with something” approach is not great for writing stable production software.

The auto-generated hierarchies can do truly weird things. For example I realized at one point that an “auto-saved” window layout auto-generated preference names based not on a simple string but the entire SwiftUI view hierarchy, which was huge and indecipherable and of course would become a different value if any part of the window or view hierarchy was modified. So I discovered I had dozens of preference settings scattered throughout my defaults, 99% of which were completely obsolete because they were based on previous incarnations of the view I was developing, and they all had names that were almost impossible to type (so how do I delete them while preserving the rest?). What do you even do with that?

Yet another major concern is that SwiftUI is very dependent on Combine which is not necessarily the future given other developments in the Swift language. So what if they just decide to, say, deprecate Combine and move further toward actors and async APIs? How much of SwiftUI might just fundamentally change in, say, WWDC this year, completely invalidating years of effort people have put into it?

Not limited to games, either; “pre-animation” makes regular software feel sluggish too. Having actions taken immediately is critical.

Their need to develop so many cross-platform apps should have been more than enough justification to do an outstanding job of Catalyst/SwiftUI/whatever-is-recommended. They could have iterated internally to get those really good at handling every last important detail and make it a great experience.

Instead, they did things like: just forget about proper keyboard support in a lot of places, have really awful performance at times, weird gaps where entire UI elements were just not there, etc. And that’s before even getting into the apps, where they were clearly doing things lazily like leaving iPhone elements in place exactly as they were no matter how awful an experience that was on the Mac.

Almost every app they have now should not have been released in its current state, much less left more-or-less-still-broken 1-2 years later! It is certainly possible to embark on major updates like this but you do that internally, only releasing something when it is not full of obvious flaws (and certainly not worse than some previous version it replaces).

Well whether you add “site:.edu” or not, Google still does the thing where they just spit out a pile of extra “matches” that don’t contain your search phrase AT ALL. Just thrown into the list, as if they have any business being there (oh wait, they do have business: Google’s business).

Frankly, if it’s not reliable as a tool, it has no real value and I can’t believe it has come to this. Imagine if every time you ran `ls` in a shell with a glob pattern, it just decided to sort of “add in” a few other files loosely based on your query (or heck, files that aren’t based on it at all)? Oh, now imagine if `rm` did that.

Sadly this happens with lots of search tools now. Why the heck is the default state on a new Mac to funnel what you type to everything, e.g. I searched for “Chrome” and hit Return and the FIRST thing it did was throw me into the App Store and call up some not-even-a-web-browser scam app with Chrome in its name, instead of selecting the Chrome already installed on my computer and opening it? More and more it seems that you have to turn off all kinds of poor defaults to put tools into a useful state, or there is simply no way to get them there at all.

What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

There’s also a tendency for companies to be super proud of what they’ve done so they neglect methods like A/B testing and instead just bet the farm on their great new design. After all, it cost a lot of money and looks cool to the decision-makers so what could go wrong? Um, maybe before you throw out all of your packaging everywhere and double-down, you could tone it down a little and try it out in a few small markets first? Then watch and see if sales are going up or down? Then think about going further?

And at this point there is also a tendency to ignore history. This is far from the first big failed redesign; what is going on that no one is looking at past failures (plenty of which have had high costs to other brands too), and imagining that there might be a downside?

Hypothetically if you’ve documented how you expect contributions to be, and someone doesn’t follow that, then at least they can’t say that they couldn’t have known what you wanted when you reject it.

The thing that is hard for people to get is that time costs a ton of money. If you use software without contributing back at all, you’re getting a lot for free but at least you’re not actively costing the project. If however you “contribute” in a lazy way, it starts to actively cost the maintainers to deal with this. So: feel free to contribute but read up on what a project wants and try to show that you’re at least meeting their effort halfway in terms of sufficient detail, following coding styles and request templates, etc.

I tried for a really, really long time to implement backward compatibility (and was even impressed with things I came up with) but Apple makes it incredibly hard. Certain hard boundaries can be crossed, e.g. some point where the compiler/runtime support changes. At a certain point you are looking at practically two implementations if you want the same code to not look somewhat antiquated on newer systems UI-wise, too. And of course, Xcode just starts outright refusing to compile which means you might need older Xcode versions and even older hardware.

The worst part is that for every 5 cool things they add, they do at least one really stupid annoying new thing on macOS that makes using newer systems annoying.

For example, if there is one thing I recommend everyone do right now, is set this on newer macOS:

`NSAlertMetricsGatheringEnabled = 0`

It completely removes the majority of those stupid iOS-style alert boxes and returns them to the older sane layout.

The worst part of all of this is that their stores DO have heaping mountains of apps that should be removed: the outright scams, the useless apps full of trackers, etc. Absolutely no effort whatsoever is being placed into removing things that are truly harmful.

There is a very clear hierarchy here, and it isn’t “developers first” or even “developers 7th”. Instead, it is: whatever makes an absurdly rich company even richer is A-OK, the “curated experience” will be sure of that.

I think it would have been interesting if Netflix had shopped around its tech stack, kind of how companies that make games can also sell game-making engines.

Maybe they could have had a huge windfall by offering to be the “AWS” behind every “$CHANNEL+” streaming service. In other words, instead of having 14 kludgey apps that all suck in at least one way, we get 14 services but with a smooth implementation.

I don’t see how content is a long-term win for them.

The upsells on TurboTax are getting a lot more shameless in recent years. I saw the exact same one pop up at least 2-3 times.

The one that really aggravated me though was the one at the end: after you FILE your taxes, they present this damned progress-bar looking thing as if you are somehow “not done” yet, as if this totally optional product sale is a required step!! No, no, no, that is just misleading garbage, and it is so annoying to have to constantly hunt around the page for the magic text to get around these things. I mean, I couldn’t even reach the page that lets me download my forms as PDF until I skipped this upsell.

What’s more, the product itself is getting more expensive but worse. On desktop, the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?) with all kinds of things unnecessarily hidden. On page after page, there is more than enough space to show everything but instead it’s giant white space everywhere; they HIDE things behind disclosure arrows, and with no logic whatsoever; e.g. on one page it shows the 2020 numbers by default but hides all the 2021 numbers behind arrows!?

Guess what isn’t an insultingly-small, truncated experience on desktop? The ads, the upsells. THOSE are full-page, taking full advantage of screen space and even scrolling off the edges.

Really shows their priorities.

There are lots of variants of this kind of unnecessary “friction” and I wish that legislation would be able to ban all of these awful behaviors instead of just specific examples of them.

For example, my cable company peppers its web site with ways to “upgrade” your plan easily online. Great, guess what’s missing: an easy way to downgrade anything, e.g. to fewer channels or slower Internet. Obviously they do this for exactly the same reason as the call-us-to-cancel crap but it is just different enough that they could probably keep doing it and still be in compliance with a poorly-written law.

And on the off chance something actually requires talking to a human, it is well past time to end this wait-hours-on-hold crap. Why can’t I log into my profile on the company web site, type in my phone number, describe my issue and then say CALL ME whenever the hell you manage to find an employee who is free to discuss? Furthermore, such calls could be punctuated with texts, e.g. “thank you for contacting us, please expect a call in about 10 minutes” or whatever. That stuff would have been straightforward to implement 10 years ago, much less now.

An app of any size could need:

- web hosting

- $99/year fee (also to Apple)

- having to spend time re-fixing things you already did, that broke because Apple likes to update its APIs or release new devices with unexpected new requirements

- eventually buying entirely new hardware when Apple obsoletes something (and eventually, they threaten to deny app updates or kick you out of the store if, heaven forbid, you can’t update your screenshots to match the latest devices or whatever)

- additional hardware to test sufficiently to know you have released something that is stable for more people than just the developer

- and, uh, frankly, a continuous need to eat and be sheltered and pay bills if this is actually your job

In fact, almost any cost I can think of is in some way a continuous thing.

What’s actually broken are the notions that:

- somehow software should be cheap (it is not cheap to make)

- somehow paying an outrageously small one-time fee means infinite updates and no real costs after that (see above)

It’s like they walled-in the garden, look only at the walls when there’s a problem, and meanwhile the scammers are parachuting in.

It’s absolutely soul-crushing to see the software market warped by broken store models. Legitimate developers can’t seem to convince people to pay anywhere near enough to sustain a business, and meanwhile scammers get millions.

He makes a good point that work computers especially benefit from sane defaults so anything the OS doesn’t do well out of the box (even if fixable 3rd party) is no-go for many users.

I guess I truly don’t understand what most sites are thinking here. If they actually want me to have the slightest clue what their site is about, they have to let me USE it first. How can it possibly help them (it certainly doesn’t help me) when they interrupt scrolling literally 1-2 seconds after arrival, or possibly blocking every other possible action on the site for some reason? Do they really think I will see all that and say: “oh I am SO glad you asked, let me just get right on that!!”? Nope, sorry: I leave immediately, every single time. In fact if I am really enraged, I will go out of my way to set up a few blockers to make sure I never see any part of that site on any other site, too.

My main issue with Notes right now is that somewhere along the way we became OK with software having no Undo at all, combined with the power to instantly sync your typo everywhere so it is truly gone forever, combined with UI that basically encourages accidents. So if I am perfect when typing with a tiny virtual keyboard, nothing goes wrong; otherwise, I could lose things in ways that are interpreted by the software as me choosing to lose them, which is bogus.

Also, how do you reproduce even the demo software from a paper that’s been out for a year (an eternity in software maintenance time?). Git repo might be gone, some dependency broken, or maybe they used some system that isn’t around anymore.

I’m sure there are talented recruiters but generally I’m lucky if they connect any dots properly. Things like: “I see you have years of experience on X, here’s an opening in Y”, or “I found your resume <that clearly states objectives, including where I would work>, here’s a job in $faraway_city!”.

In other words, they barely seem to read resumes or anything else so if they totally screw up key details of the position, that is probably par for the course.

(Insert rant about losing StackOverflow Developer Stories, which actually allowed explicit tagging of things like preferred tech which made matching really easy.)

One of the things that bugs me about spreadsheets is that they encourage people to set up very fragile unnamed things, like “the value of row X” or whatever. Then the spreadsheets become gigantic and hard to understand but the owners still swear by their data. Meanwhile in the back of my head I’m thinking: this thing could be totally wrong by now and you have not really set yourself up to see that happening.