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This comes up whenever the Mac App Store is mentioned, but it deserves being repeated until it's fixed: The Mac App Store is an awful program. It's incredibly

This comes up whenever the Mac App Store is mentioned, but it deserves being repeated until it's fixed: The Mac App Store is an awful program. It's incredibly slow. You make a great point- I'm glad there's now a public face and hope that it's a sign Apple is taking the issue seriously.

wlesieutre 11y ago
That reminds me, I have a screenshot of the App Store where it downloaded all of the store page data, but didn't get the stylesheet. And since it's just a shitty webview in a box and not a full browser, there's no obvious way to make it reload. These sorts of things happen when you download your whole program's page layout off the internet. How idiotic would it look if you pulled up a playlist view in iTunes and everything turned into an unstyled HTML bulleted list? Don't have the computer with that screenshot handy, but I can post it later.
- kybernetyk 11y ago
  >And since it's just a shitty webview in a box and not a full browser, there's no obvious way to make it reload. cmd r usually does the trick (or store -> reload page in the menu).
  - projct 11y ago
    The larger point is that most Mac users wouldn't know to do this, I think.
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      Right. I fixed it by relaunching, but I shouldn't have had to. And the even larger point is that that Apple's software updater shouldn't need a Reload function any more than Windows Explorer should need me to mash F5 after I save a new file. It's crappy design through and through. But it's 2015, so everything is a web view. Because reasons. If Apple rewrote Finder to display folder contents as a web view so that they could reuse a frontend between icloud.com and local file management, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Working in the Finder? iCloud Drive is a web view! Heck, let's use that to display the local filesystem too! Back it with a server on localhost that examines directory contents and generates a webpage to pass to the Finder! Code reuse! Efficient development! Future benefits from optimizations to webkit that will still be slower than the native software it replaced! Even better, you can do away with all that WebDAV and SMB crap! When you want to browse files on another Mac, its filesystem webserver can generate the folder listings and serve them over HTTP with file downloads over WebRTC when you open something! It's the future! HFS2, all read/write actions to be handled with AJAX passing JSON objects back and forth. Coming soon in OS 10.13, you saw it here first. I might be slightly annoyed at the recent direction of "everything is webpages" software development. Ah well.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Screenshot as promised: http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png Only have the "Check for Updates" screen, but I have to assume the same can happen in any section of the store. If this were built as a native app (or even cached the CSS for common pages), you'd at least get a usable layout, even if your connection sucks too much to get images or even download software. It's a joke as-is. You get the "there are 5 updates" badge on your dock icon, the store app knows what the updates are, but can't display the list properly without a connection to the internet.
  - vitd 11y ago
    Can you send the screenshot to them with a suggestion of shipping the CSS with it? I think you can file bugs at http://bugreport.apple.com/ http://bugreport.apple.com/.
  - increment_i 11y ago
    That does seem insane -- why not just make a cocoa app for it?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jonknee 11y ago
  > How idiotic would it look if you pulled up a playlist view in iTunes and everything turned into an unstyled HTML bulleted list? That's effectively the iTunes Music Store (well, and App Store and all the other stuff they sell). I have seen HTTP error codes instead of page listings and rendering issues.
- brisance 11y ago
  The obvious way to make it reload is to quit and re-launch the app. What may seem insane to you may make perfect sense to someone else. Engineering is about tradeoffs after all. In this case I suppose they wanted the flexibility to vary the layout dynamically, although in this case for some reason it failed to load.
draw_down 11y ago
It's really fine. The problem is not the app itself, not by a long shot.
- JonathonW 11y ago
  Not really. The big problems that are driving developers away are policy problems (mandatory sandboxing that's inadequate for the kinds of apps people want to write on OSX, lack of upgrade pricing, long delays in app/update approval, etc.), but, as a user, I've been seeing issues with the app itself for a long time. Things are particularly shaky around app updates: stuff like clicking an update button and nothing happens, or clicking an update button and nothing appears to happen but the update starts downloading anyways and a progress bar doesn't show until several minutes into a download, or Xcode updates that take (quite literally) several hours to install (after downloading) if you're not running on an SSD. These are things that got ironed out years ago on iOS, but I've not seen major improvements to the Mac App Store app since it was released nearly five years ago. If anything, it's gotten worse with subsequent releases of OSX.
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  It's not fine- the app is an awful user experience. I get that people disagree with the App Store policies, but at least there's some argument to be made that it's for the best of the users. There's absolutely no defending how bad of an app the App Store is...
  - themartorana 11y ago
    I've always held that Apple is brilliant at OS and software development... development - see OSX and IOS and libdispatch and ARC and Swift and Objective-C and so on and so on... And terrible at using those tools to build software - see almost every app I can't uninstall on my iPhone, iTunes, Mac App Store, and so on, and so on... (Yes, not all of these things were invented there, but Apple became the steward of them.)
samstave 11y ago
Start tweeting him. Nothing like tweet shaming to get a company motivated.

wlesieutre 11y ago

That reminds me, I have a screenshot of the App Store where it downloaded all of the store page data, but didn't get the stylesheet. And since it's just a shitty webview in a box and not a full browser, there's no obvious way to make it reload. These sorts of things happen when you download your whole program's page layout off the internet. How idiotic would it look if you pulled up a playlist view in iTunes and everything turned into an unstyled HTML bulleted list? Don't have the computer with that screenshot handy, but I can post it later.

kybernetyk 11y ago
>And since it's just a shitty webview in a box and not a full browser, there's no obvious way to make it reload. cmd r usually does the trick (or store -> reload page in the menu).
- projct 11y ago
  The larger point is that most Mac users wouldn't know to do this, I think.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Right. I fixed it by relaunching, but I shouldn't have had to. And the even larger point is that that Apple's software updater shouldn't need a Reload function any more than Windows Explorer should need me to mash F5 after I save a new file. It's crappy design through and through. But it's 2015, so everything is a web view. Because reasons. If Apple rewrote Finder to display folder contents as a web view so that they could reuse a frontend between icloud.com and local file management, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Working in the Finder? iCloud Drive is a web view! Heck, let's use that to display the local filesystem too! Back it with a server on localhost that examines directory contents and generates a webpage to pass to the Finder! Code reuse! Efficient development! Future benefits from optimizations to webkit that will still be slower than the native software it replaced! Even better, you can do away with all that WebDAV and SMB crap! When you want to browse files on another Mac, its filesystem webserver can generate the folder listings and serve them over HTTP with file downloads over WebRTC when you open something! It's the future! HFS2, all read/write actions to be handled with AJAX passing JSON objects back and forth. Coming soon in OS 10.13, you saw it here first. I might be slightly annoyed at the recent direction of "everything is webpages" software development. Ah well.
wlesieutre 11y ago
Screenshot as promised: http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png http://i.imgur.com/5xNgwMH.png Only have the "Check for Updates" screen, but I have to assume the same can happen in any section of the store. If this were built as a native app (or even cached the CSS for common pages), you'd at least get a usable layout, even if your connection sucks too much to get images or even download software. It's a joke as-is. You get the "there are 5 updates" badge on your dock icon, the store app knows what the updates are, but can't display the list properly without a connection to the internet.
- vitd 11y ago
  Can you send the screenshot to them with a suggestion of shipping the CSS with it? I think you can file bugs at http://bugreport.apple.com/ http://bugreport.apple.com/.
- increment_i 11y ago
  That does seem insane -- why not just make a cocoa app for it?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jonknee 11y ago
> How idiotic would it look if you pulled up a playlist view in iTunes and everything turned into an unstyled HTML bulleted list? That's effectively the iTunes Music Store (well, and App Store and all the other stuff they sell). I have seen HTTP error codes instead of page listings and rendering issues.
brisance 11y ago
The obvious way to make it reload is to quit and re-launch the app. What may seem insane to you may make perfect sense to someone else. Engineering is about tradeoffs after all. In this case I suppose they wanted the flexibility to vary the layout dynamically, although in this case for some reason it failed to load.

draw_down 11y ago

It's really fine. The problem is not the app itself, not by a long shot.

JonathonW 11y ago
Not really. The big problems that are driving developers away are policy problems (mandatory sandboxing that's inadequate for the kinds of apps people want to write on OSX, lack of upgrade pricing, long delays in app/update approval, etc.), but, as a user, I've been seeing issues with the app itself for a long time. Things are particularly shaky around app updates: stuff like clicking an update button and nothing happens, or clicking an update button and nothing appears to happen but the update starts downloading anyways and a progress bar doesn't show until several minutes into a download, or Xcode updates that take (quite literally) several hours to install (after downloading) if you're not running on an SSD. These are things that got ironed out years ago on iOS, but I've not seen major improvements to the Mac App Store app since it was released nearly five years ago. If anything, it's gotten worse with subsequent releases of OSX.
ohitsdom 11y ago
It's not fine- the app is an awful user experience. I get that people disagree with the App Store policies, but at least there's some argument to be made that it's for the best of the users. There's absolutely no defending how bad of an app the App Store is...
- themartorana 11y ago
  I've always held that Apple is brilliant at OS and software development... development - see OSX and IOS and libdispatch and ARC and Swift and Objective-C and so on and so on... And terrible at using those tools to build software - see almost every app I can't uninstall on my iPhone, iTunes, Mac App Store, and so on, and so on... (Yes, not all of these things were invented there, but Apple became the steward of them.)

samstave 11y ago

Start tweeting him. Nothing like tweet shaming to get a company motivated.