8 ms·

MacOS Sierra Beta

40 points by gregmolnar 10y ago

microcolonel 10y ago
This seems pretty underwhelming. Swift isn't even a platform feature. Metal is mostly useless for portable application developers, who probably wish it were Vulkan; and furthermore it may indicate that the quality of the OpenGL stack will degrade over time. Given how little time is actually spent entering payment details, I do it maybe once a month, I also don't see the point in Apple Pay on OS X except perhaps for completeness. The deeper platform features, especially the new filesystem, are exciting primarily because they're replacing vastly outdated predecessors.
berberous 10y ago
Are there APIs for Apple Pay and PIP that would let Firefox integrate those features if they desire, or are those APIs locked down for Apple only?
- Longhanks 10y ago
  Apple Pay: From https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/703/?time=908 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/703/?time=9...: "You take an Apple Pay server URL, and this URL is provided from Safari. You send this URL to your web server, which then requests the merchant session." -> Seems like Safari only :/ PiP: From https://developer.apple.com/macos/ https://developer.apple.com/macos/: "And if you use a custom video player, it’s easy to add a Picture in Picture control using the JavaScript presentation mode API." -> Seems like it's possible for 3rd party browsers to implement it!
  - pducks32 10y ago
    They have said that Apple Pay for the web would converge with window.Payment but atm they do not feel the spec is acceptable enough.
    - berberous 10y ago
      Not familiar with Apple APIs. Is that supposed to mean that they plan to eventually open up the API so that other browsers could implement it, or no?
      - pducks32 10y ago
        No so the window.Payment[1] isn't in the right place yet—according to Apple—to be ready for their use. You can read more in [2]. So eventually ApplePay.js would (I presume based on their language) disappear to some extent and all browsers could use the Payments API and Apple wouldn't need their own custom solution. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2016Jun/0013.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2016...
- mhurron 10y ago
  I'm wondering myself if/how they're going to do that. There are a lot of iPhone users that use Windows.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
wlesieutre 10y ago
Since there's no context, the news today is Beta 4. The betas have been on a roughly 2 week release cycle.
orky56 10y ago
Looks like Safari is getting some much needed updates with extensions and the upcoming community engagement. Apple Pay in Safari will allow Apple to add another device type to its payment ecosystem. Overall Safari is getting stronger and is moving in the right direction to keep pace.
- legulere 10y ago
  Still Apple Pay seems to be americo-centric with only supporting credit cards. In Europe SEPA wire transfers and direct debit is cheaper, safer and has a wider use-case (you can send money to any bank account).
  - whyenot 10y ago
    The fact that there may be a better option than ApplePay for 517 million people in Europe... that doesn't on it's own seem like great evidence that ApplePay is "america-centric." The vast majority of the world does not live in Europe's SEPA area.
    - yladiz 10y ago
      Disregarding the kind of payment, it does currently rely on NFC in terminals to work, and there are a lot of developed countries, e.g. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, that don't have that technology or don't support it. For example, South Korea does have the infrastructure for Apple Pay in many places (e.g. NFC enabled terminals) but their infrastructure isn't set up for it. Even beyond this, there's a lot of countries that support contactless card payment unlike the US, which makes using Apple Pay even less useful and limits its acceptance. From what I've read the vast majority of Apple Pay payments are done in the US, so it's not unfair to call it "America-centric".
      - mhurron 10y ago
        > Disregarding the kind of payment, it does rely on NFC in terminals to work The point of Apple Pay in Safari is to move it to online transactions.
eknkc 10y ago
Anyone using the betas? I'm thinking about installing the iOS 10 beta to my main phone but couldn't find any decent info on its stability for a daily driver. macOS is more dangerous anyway so I'd only get into iOS beta.
- heavymark 10y ago
  Have been using the iOS and MacOS betas since day one without a problem as my day to day devices. There are certainly bugs and crashes here and there but no deal breakers. However, I wouldn't recommend it for most anyone, since when things do break I can easily find work arounds, where the average person may not, and if compatibility for something you rely on breaks then you are out of luck if you don't have extra mac laptops or phones to work on. These betas are far more reliable than previous years. To note, you have a typo in your title. "macOS" is a thing, "MacOS" is not.
- doh 10y ago
  Don't do it. I had to revert back as it rendered the phone useless. It has so many bugs, that even simple things were not working properly (for instance if you have a group of applications and you want to open one, the first action that happens when you tap on the icon will change the mode to editing [when the icons are dancing and you can move/deleted them]). I would wait for a while.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  Running both, iOS 10 beta has been pretty stable mostly, much better than previous iOS betas, and Mac OS Sierra beta too. They're good enough for daily use but obviously not for any critical stuff.
- c0g 10y ago
  I use it as a daily and it's fine. Occasional freezes (a few day a day) and very occasional crashes (once a week or so). 6s+.
- aaronbrethorst 10y ago
  I've been running Sierra, iOS 10, and watchOS 3 since the first beta. Battery life on iOS sucks if you use any apps that make heavy use of GPS, but it's not OMG UNUSABLE bad. Just annoying. watchOS 3 is fantastic, like beta 1 was better than the release version of watchOS 2.
okket 10y ago
Looks like go(lang-1.6.3) is broken again in this beta, worked nice in beta 3.
- MikeKusold 10y ago
  Do you have a link to a discussion around this? A quick search of their GH issues as well as mailing lists didn't turn up anything.
  - okket 10y ago
    Well, I have a go utility I use (Syncthing) that does not work anymore and the go compiler itself does not compile anymore (Xcode 8 beta 4 installed). Both worked fine in beta 3. Google fixed go for Sierra recently, lets hope they do it again: https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/24967/ https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/24967/
  - okket 10y ago
    Now there is an issue, even with a first hint of a fix (not tried yet) https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16570 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16570
  - okket 10y ago
    Go 1.7-rc5 with a fix for macOS Sierra beta 4 is released [0], see also this issue [1] [0] https://golang.org/dl/#go1.7rc5 https://golang.org/dl/#go1.7rc5 [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16579 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16579
Haul4ss 10y ago
I am using the public macOS and iOS betas. They are buggy. Do not enroll in the macOS beta if you have your user account login linked to iCloud, as there have been documented problems with this. My wife still can't get in to her account on our Mac; I'm hoping they fix this in Public Beta 3. All things considered, it probably wasn't worth enrolling in the betas. I don't want to risk messing up my devices by stepping back to production versions, so I'll just ride these out and get off the beta profile when the final versions are released in the fall. Hopefully the public betas get more stable as we approach release time.
- matwood 10y ago
  For me, the iOS betas have been fine since the first developer beta. I usually skip the OSX betas because they require use of the latest XCode which will not let me submit updates to the app store until closer to release.
- mrmondo 10y ago
  Interesting to see the other side. I've always used the iOS betas and they've always had the usual expected bugs before say the last pre-release version, but with iOS 10, for the very first time I've found it to be really very usable. It does destroy your battery life like all betas - but it'll have so much debugging turned on and it is... well... beta! But yeah I'm loving iOS 10 (dev) beta as are my coworkers so much that we've put it on our personal phones and are really happy with everything but the battery life and the odd springboard crash every few days or so.
  - Terretta 10y ago
    I've had opposite experience, prior betas were very usable, no issues, while iOS 10 has first weirdly notable bug in a "public" beta for me: Certain Apple first party app background processes don't seem to be updating status as background tasks progress: - App Store Updates tab doesn't show progress in the circles. Shows initial circle, appears frozen, until app is ready to open and moved to the recently updated section. - Photos "Uploading n items" status doesn't update until changes to time stamp of when done updating or Now. Leaving and coming back, force quitting, even rebooting, doesn't seem to cause these screens to update until background process is complete. However, they are definitely progressing in the background as the tasks eventually finish, then screens update to show completed.
JulienSchmidt 10y ago
GPGTools (MailGPG etc) and rustc / cargo stable are broken with macOS Sierra. Moreover there seem to be a few memory leaks. Finder eats up more and more RAM until it requires a force-relaunch. Unfortunately the same seems to be true for the kernel, which therefore requires a sporadic reboot. I also encountered the calendar notification service using 100% of the CPU a few times. I'd wait for a later beta release or the final version.
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  What's broken about Rust? Can you file an issue :)
sdfjkl 10y ago
Meh. A bunch of silly gimmicks. Meanwhile, drag & drop still randomly breaks in Finder, using certain USB 3.0 devices on my mid 2012 MBP causes reproducible kernel panics and Mail.app occasionally crashes while downloading emails. Maybe have some of the gimmick crew look at all those crash reports I keep sending instead?
rrggrr 10y ago
I prefer as little interaction with Apple's data centers as possible, but that is the opposite of the direction MacOS is headed. A quick review of increasing number of web services I pay for each month makes for depressing reading and I see the handwriting on the wall... soon I'll be paying apple to view my files.
Udo 10y ago
I've been a Mac-only user for about 15 years now, and I'm teetering on the edge of abandoning the platform. A lot of technically-minded people I know are considering the same. The hardware is outdated, underperforming, and overpriced - and what's worse is Macs are now completely user-unservicable. So I'm weary when I read about an OS update nowadays (it used to be I was excited), because OS X has been getting slower and more tedious to work with for a long time now. Metal: it's good that Metal exists, even though Apple has no ambitions to introduce performant or even recent graphics adapters into its PC products. Some people may even have wished for Metal adoption beyond Apple, but that's not happening. What's conspicuously missing from Sierra is Vulkan support, so gaming on the Mac is basically a prohibitively walled garden that can only be tackled economically by the big graphics engines (which have mostly ignored the platform) and pre-existing iOS developers. Swift 3 and Apple Pay: this should not be an OS feature, or at least one that is featured as spots #2 and #3 on the bullet point list. Picture in picture: in a better world, this would be a window management feature, but OS X is reducing its windowing capabilities in anticipation of a full merge with iOS, it seems. So this is going to be a specialized video component feature instead. Even on the screenshot they chose to show this off with, it's clear this is drastically worse than just lining up non-fullscreen windows side-by-side.
- pducks32 10y ago
  "..feature merge with iOS" macOS is not becoming iOS ever, unless you mean apps being migrated over which I also find very hard to believe.
  - Udo 10y ago
    > macOS is not becoming iOS ever I wish I had your confidence, but even if they keep the Mac line and name, the only UI improvements they have been championing lately are tablet-mode activities.
    - pducks32 10y ago
      Sure I'll give you that the design is merging, but they are a single company; wouldn't you expect the design to merge. And I—as a software developer—would appreciate more platform convergence. (I'm looking at you SCNLayer). Though I am completely with you when it comes to feature stuff. I know their engineers work very hard but I wish they would spend time looking at some of their interface changes and really work extra hard to help non-techies "get" them. They seem to be doing that on iOS 10.
carmella2224 10y ago
I came across some guy online when I was looking for how to increase my credit score when we had Morgage crisis. I first thought it was fake then I contacted them Alphacreditservices@groupmail.com . They were prompt and delivered fast . I can always recommend people with any type of credit issues to them.You will thank me dozen times

40 points by gregmolnar 10y ago

This seems pretty underwhelming. Swift isn't even a platform feature. Metal is mostly useless for portable application developers, who probably wish it were Vulkan; and furthermore it may indicate that the quality of the OpenGL stack will degrade over time. Given how little time is actually spent entering payment details, I do it maybe once a month, I also don't see the point in Apple Pay on OS X except perhaps for completeness. The deeper platform features, especially the new filesystem, are exciting primarily because they're replacing vastly outdated predecessors.

berberous 10y ago

Are there APIs for Apple Pay and PIP that would let Firefox integrate those features if they desire, or are those APIs locked down for Apple only?

Longhanks 10y ago
Apple Pay: From https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/703/?time=908 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/703/?time=9...: "You take an Apple Pay server URL, and this URL is provided from Safari. You send this URL to your web server, which then requests the merchant session." -> Seems like Safari only :/ PiP: From https://developer.apple.com/macos/ https://developer.apple.com/macos/: "And if you use a custom video player, it’s easy to add a Picture in Picture control using the JavaScript presentation mode API." -> Seems like it's possible for 3rd party browsers to implement it!
- pducks32 10y ago
  They have said that Apple Pay for the web would converge with window.Payment but atm they do not feel the spec is acceptable enough.
  - berberous 10y ago
    Not familiar with Apple APIs. Is that supposed to mean that they plan to eventually open up the API so that other browsers could implement it, or no?
    - pducks32 10y ago
      No so the window.Payment[1] isn't in the right place yet—according to Apple—to be ready for their use. You can read more in [2]. So eventually ApplePay.js would (I presume based on their language) disappear to some extent and all browsers could use the Payments API and Apple wouldn't need their own custom solution. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2016Jun/0013.html https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2016...
mhurron 10y ago
I'm wondering myself if/how they're going to do that. There are a lot of iPhone users that use Windows.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

wlesieutre 10y ago

Since there's no context, the news today is Beta 4. The betas have been on a roughly 2 week release cycle.

orky56 10y ago

Looks like Safari is getting some much needed updates with extensions and the upcoming community engagement. Apple Pay in Safari will allow Apple to add another device type to its payment ecosystem. Overall Safari is getting stronger and is moving in the right direction to keep pace.

legulere 10y ago
Still Apple Pay seems to be americo-centric with only supporting credit cards. In Europe SEPA wire transfers and direct debit is cheaper, safer and has a wider use-case (you can send money to any bank account).
- whyenot 10y ago
  The fact that there may be a better option than ApplePay for 517 million people in Europe... that doesn't on it's own seem like great evidence that ApplePay is "america-centric." The vast majority of the world does not live in Europe's SEPA area.
  - yladiz 10y ago
    Disregarding the kind of payment, it does currently rely on NFC in terminals to work, and there are a lot of developed countries, e.g. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, that don't have that technology or don't support it. For example, South Korea does have the infrastructure for Apple Pay in many places (e.g. NFC enabled terminals) but their infrastructure isn't set up for it. Even beyond this, there's a lot of countries that support contactless card payment unlike the US, which makes using Apple Pay even less useful and limits its acceptance. From what I've read the vast majority of Apple Pay payments are done in the US, so it's not unfair to call it "America-centric".
    - mhurron 10y ago
      > Disregarding the kind of payment, it does rely on NFC in terminals to work The point of Apple Pay in Safari is to move it to online transactions.

eknkc 10y ago

Anyone using the betas? I'm thinking about installing the iOS 10 beta to my main phone but couldn't find any decent info on its stability for a daily driver. macOS is more dangerous anyway so I'd only get into iOS beta.

heavymark 10y ago
Have been using the iOS and MacOS betas since day one without a problem as my day to day devices. There are certainly bugs and crashes here and there but no deal breakers. However, I wouldn't recommend it for most anyone, since when things do break I can easily find work arounds, where the average person may not, and if compatibility for something you rely on breaks then you are out of luck if you don't have extra mac laptops or phones to work on. These betas are far more reliable than previous years. To note, you have a typo in your title. "macOS" is a thing, "MacOS" is not.
doh 10y ago
Don't do it. I had to revert back as it rendered the phone useless. It has so many bugs, that even simple things were not working properly (for instance if you have a group of applications and you want to open one, the first action that happens when you tap on the icon will change the mode to editing [when the icons are dancing and you can move/deleted them]). I would wait for a while.
Synaesthesia 10y ago
Running both, iOS 10 beta has been pretty stable mostly, much better than previous iOS betas, and Mac OS Sierra beta too. They're good enough for daily use but obviously not for any critical stuff.
c0g 10y ago
I use it as a daily and it's fine. Occasional freezes (a few day a day) and very occasional crashes (once a week or so). 6s+.
aaronbrethorst 10y ago
I've been running Sierra, iOS 10, and watchOS 3 since the first beta. Battery life on iOS sucks if you use any apps that make heavy use of GPS, but it's not OMG UNUSABLE bad. Just annoying. watchOS 3 is fantastic, like beta 1 was better than the release version of watchOS 2.

okket 10y ago

Looks like go(lang-1.6.3) is broken again in this beta, worked nice in beta 3.

MikeKusold 10y ago
Do you have a link to a discussion around this? A quick search of their GH issues as well as mailing lists didn't turn up anything.
- okket 10y ago
  Well, I have a go utility I use (Syncthing) that does not work anymore and the go compiler itself does not compile anymore (Xcode 8 beta 4 installed). Both worked fine in beta 3. Google fixed go for Sierra recently, lets hope they do it again: https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/24967/ https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/24967/
- okket 10y ago
  Now there is an issue, even with a first hint of a fix (not tried yet) https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16570 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16570
- okket 10y ago
  Go 1.7-rc5 with a fix for macOS Sierra beta 4 is released [0], see also this issue [1] [0] https://golang.org/dl/#go1.7rc5 https://golang.org/dl/#go1.7rc5 [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16579 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16579

Haul4ss 10y ago

I am using the public macOS and iOS betas. They are buggy. Do not enroll in the macOS beta if you have your user account login linked to iCloud, as there have been documented problems with this. My wife still can't get in to her account on our Mac; I'm hoping they fix this in Public Beta 3. All things considered, it probably wasn't worth enrolling in the betas. I don't want to risk messing up my devices by stepping back to production versions, so I'll just ride these out and get off the beta profile when the final versions are released in the fall. Hopefully the public betas get more stable as we approach release time.

matwood 10y ago
For me, the iOS betas have been fine since the first developer beta. I usually skip the OSX betas because they require use of the latest XCode which will not let me submit updates to the app store until closer to release.
mrmondo 10y ago
Interesting to see the other side. I've always used the iOS betas and they've always had the usual expected bugs before say the last pre-release version, but with iOS 10, for the very first time I've found it to be really very usable. It does destroy your battery life like all betas - but it'll have so much debugging turned on and it is... well... beta! But yeah I'm loving iOS 10 (dev) beta as are my coworkers so much that we've put it on our personal phones and are really happy with everything but the battery life and the odd springboard crash every few days or so.
- Terretta 10y ago
  I've had opposite experience, prior betas were very usable, no issues, while iOS 10 has first weirdly notable bug in a "public" beta for me: Certain Apple first party app background processes don't seem to be updating status as background tasks progress: - App Store Updates tab doesn't show progress in the circles. Shows initial circle, appears frozen, until app is ready to open and moved to the recently updated section. - Photos "Uploading n items" status doesn't update until changes to time stamp of when done updating or Now. Leaving and coming back, force quitting, even rebooting, doesn't seem to cause these screens to update until background process is complete. However, they are definitely progressing in the background as the tasks eventually finish, then screens update to show completed.

JulienSchmidt 10y ago

GPGTools (MailGPG etc) and rustc / cargo stable are broken with macOS Sierra. Moreover there seem to be a few memory leaks. Finder eats up more and more RAM until it requires a force-relaunch. Unfortunately the same seems to be true for the kernel, which therefore requires a sporadic reboot. I also encountered the calendar notification service using 100% of the CPU a few times. I'd wait for a later beta release or the final version.

steveklabnik 10y ago
What's broken about Rust? Can you file an issue :)

sdfjkl 10y ago

Meh. A bunch of silly gimmicks. Meanwhile, drag & drop still randomly breaks in Finder, using certain USB 3.0 devices on my mid 2012 MBP causes reproducible kernel panics and Mail.app occasionally crashes while downloading emails. Maybe have some of the gimmick crew look at all those crash reports I keep sending instead?

rrggrr 10y ago

I prefer as little interaction with Apple's data centers as possible, but that is the opposite of the direction MacOS is headed. A quick review of increasing number of web services I pay for each month makes for depressing reading and I see the handwriting on the wall... soon I'll be paying apple to view my files.

Udo 10y ago

I've been a Mac-only user for about 15 years now, and I'm teetering on the edge of abandoning the platform. A lot of technically-minded people I know are considering the same. The hardware is outdated, underperforming, and overpriced - and what's worse is Macs are now completely user-unservicable. So I'm weary when I read about an OS update nowadays (it used to be I was excited), because OS X has been getting slower and more tedious to work with for a long time now. Metal: it's good that Metal exists, even though Apple has no ambitions to introduce performant or even recent graphics adapters into its PC products. Some people may even have wished for Metal adoption beyond Apple, but that's not happening. What's conspicuously missing from Sierra is Vulkan support, so gaming on the Mac is basically a prohibitively walled garden that can only be tackled economically by the big graphics engines (which have mostly ignored the platform) and pre-existing iOS developers. Swift 3 and Apple Pay: this should not be an OS feature, or at least one that is featured as spots #2 and #3 on the bullet point list. Picture in picture: in a better world, this would be a window management feature, but OS X is reducing its windowing capabilities in anticipation of a full merge with iOS, it seems. So this is going to be a specialized video component feature instead. Even on the screenshot they chose to show this off with, it's clear this is drastically worse than just lining up non-fullscreen windows side-by-side.

pducks32 10y ago
"..feature merge with iOS" macOS is not becoming iOS ever, unless you mean apps being migrated over which I also find very hard to believe.
- Udo 10y ago
  > macOS is not becoming iOS ever I wish I had your confidence, but even if they keep the Mac line and name, the only UI improvements they have been championing lately are tablet-mode activities.
  - pducks32 10y ago
    Sure I'll give you that the design is merging, but they are a single company; wouldn't you expect the design to merge. And I—as a software developer—would appreciate more platform convergence. (I'm looking at you SCNLayer). Though I am completely with you when it comes to feature stuff. I know their engineers work very hard but I wish they would spend time looking at some of their interface changes and really work extra hard to help non-techies "get" them. They seem to be doing that on iOS 10.

carmella2224 10y ago

I came across some guy online when I was looking for how to increase my credit score when we had Morgage crisis. I first thought it was fake then I contacted them Alphacreditservices@groupmail.com . They were prompt and delivered fast . I can always recommend people with any type of credit issues to them.You will thank me dozen times