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I’ve been an Apple user for 40+ years, and I really don’t want to tally up my lifetime customer value to Apple. However, I don’t trust them for software which i
by s1mon 4y ago
I’ve been an Apple user for 40+ years, and I really don’t want to tally up my lifetime customer value to Apple. However, I don’t trust them for software which is supposed to support collaboration. Personally focused software, great OS, and beautiful hardware yes, collaboration, no.
I almost never work in an environment with 100% homogeneous hardware and OS. A large portion of my career has been working as a contractor or consultant. Each new client has a different stack of tools. Any tools for collaborative work need to be as cross-platform as possible. For many of my jobs the tools also need to work in all regions without VPN (no Google in China).
Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that.
Until Freeform works on Windows and Android, it’s not collaborative, it’s a walled garden.
- danielvaughn 4y agoJust a few days ago I needed to edit a CSV file from a codebase I was working on. Opened it up in Numbers, changed a couple of cells, saved it. Later I realized none of my changes were in the CSV file. Turns out Apple saved it as some kind of other proprietary file. From now on I'll just open my files in VSCode, because that's easier than worrying about getting sucked into the Apple ecosystem.
- ceejayoz 4y agoI've also had this experience; it's a major UX fail. I uninstalled Numbers/Pages after it.
- ezfe 4y agoExcel will just silently modify everything and "save" it back as a CSV. I would rather that both Excel and Numbers only saved to CSV as an Export option.
- ceejayoz 4y agoNeither one is good, but at least Excel warns me formatting will be lost. I wish they'd warn you on first operation that CSV can't handle, and ask.
- reaperducer 4y agoOpened it up in Numbers, changed a couple of cells, saved it. Later I realized none of my changes were in the CSV file. Turns out Apple saved it as some kind of other proprietary file. Yes, the Numbers program saved it as a Numbers document. Just like Excel saves Excel files. That's why it's called "import," not "open." When you pressed Save, a Save As dialog popped up asking for a name. If you had just saved it to the same file, there would be no Save As dialog. It wouldn't ask you for a name because it knew the name. This is standard across every app on every Mac going back decades. I don't use Windows very often, but I believe it's the same there, too. You aren't asked for a filename if you're updating the same file. It doesn't sound like an Apple problem, it sounds like you didn't pay attention, and when the computer did what you asked, you blamed the computer. There's nothing Apple or Microsoft or anyone else can do about that.
- GordonS 4y ago> Just like Excel saves Excel files Not if, like the OP, you open a CSV file first, then hit save.
- ezfe 4y agoYou're right, Excel does save back to CSV. It discards half your changes because they can't be saved in a CSV, modifies anything that could possibly be a date, and rounds random numbers, THEN it saves it as a CSV.
- rchaud 4y agoBefore discarding non-compatible changes, it'll tell you, and offer to save as XLSX. If you're just editing some values, you can save back to CSV with CTRL+S no problems.
- ezfe 4y agoNo, you can't. It will import and re-export every cell, not just the one you modify. This includes interpreting dates and rounding numbers that exceed Excel's max value (instead of interpreting as a string) They have a small banner at the top to warn about this, but it doesn't even address the things that were already lost the instant you opened it.
- _Algernon_ 4y agoIt sounds like you need to export instead. CSV export isn't under save because it doesn't retain all the details of the document (such as formatting). This behaviour is standard and can be seen in MS Excel, LibreOffice, etc. as well.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> CSV export isn't under save because it doesn't retain all the details of the document (such as formatting). This behaviour is standard and can be seen in MS Excel, LibreOffice, etc. as well. Office warns me my changes will be lost and offers to change to XLSX. Numbers just changes it silently, without warning.
- brazzledazzle 4y agoAnd I thought the Excel UX for this was annoying. Silently saving another copy of the file is terrible.
- irskep 4y agoLibreOffice will happily re-save CSV in place. That's the only reason I have it installed! But Excel does require the same workflow as Numbers.
- Technetium 4y agoIf you are concerned about retaining formatting in comma separated values, you have MUCH bigger prerequisite problems to figure out.
- scarface74 4y agoYou mean how it’s worked in every spreadsheet app that I’ve used since 1985?
- brazzledazzle 4y agoExcel warns you and allows you to save it as a CSV. Still annoying but not as bad as it apparently works in Numbers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drewmate 4y agoI think the walled garden is the whole point here, and you are not the target for this app. It’s no coincidence that the sample they show on their devices is for a student (high school?) newspaper. This is like the blue texts in iMessage. Get them while they’re young, and they’ll be hooked for life. Imagine the shame of being excluded from a high school group project because, “we’re all doing it in Freeform, sorry.” Better ask mom for an iPhone just to be safe. - Drew ( sent from my iPad)
- mensetmanusman 4y agoNo one is serious about iPad in education anymore. Way too expensive and easy to break.
- alex_suzuki 4y agoI haven‘t checked recently, are there any good alternative tablets, running Android maybe? I personally think iPads are insanely powerful and without (serious) competition.
- smoldesu 4y agoHaving used an iPad for my last couple years in high school, the machines were a total joke. Totally useless for english and history classes, and barely usable for math and science courses. When people weren't using them for classwork, they became instant distractions. The administration tried implementing MDM but ended up finding that the only solution was taking away the iPads during instructional time. Not to mention, ushering in iPads actually forced our computer science classes to shut down, since students no longer had machines with Python interpreters on them. The iPad is insanely powerful and without serious competition, but completely useless in a classroom setting. Most people would prefer the laptops we had, teachers and students alike.
- HDThoreaun 4y agoI don't see why students need a seriously powerful device. Students are given chromebooks because all the applications they need are on the cloud.
- brookst 4y ago> it’s not collaborative, it’s a walled garden. I’m not following the dichotomy here. “Collaborative” doesn’t mean open and universal and free and cross platform… it means collaborative. I also wouldn’t use Freeform (or Pages, or Reminders) in a professional capacity where I need to work with lots of people in heterogenous environments. But I love Freeform (and Reminders) at home with family. I find them very collaborative AND a walled garden. The two seem like entirely compatible attributes.
- epolanski 4y agoI tried to read your message few times with an open spirit but I don't buy it. The moment I, for any reason, I cannot collaborate unless I get my hands back on an Apple device (and possibly Apple id which is even more complicated) it stops being a collaborative software.
- gandalfgreybeer 4y agoI sort of have an idea on what he meant. Everyone in my family and close friends have at least one Apple device and the “collaborative” environment in that sense is wonderful, especially with Reminders, notes, sharing files etc. It however fails once you go outside. Might be a stupid analogy so let’s net focus on this but I sort of see it like this:in my country, we can speak our language and it works for collaboration. Once you go outside, it fails. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful as a “collaborative” tool for that environment. I think you and op just might have different scales of where you think it should work well enough.
- goosedragons 4y agoMore like everyone entrenched in the ecosystem. I can't imagine this is a super great experience for someone who only has an iPhone SE but non-Apple everything else. Especially when the creator is used to the canvas of their 27" Studio Display.
- kyawzazaw 4y ago
- turtlesdown11 4y ago>Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that. or maybe they do understand, and are self selecting away from people like you...
- sgc 4y agoWho would ever only want to work for a company that exclusively uses Apple products? That is an insane level of fanboyism that doesn't indicate a fully rational actor.
- turtlesdown11 4y agousing .pages to select away from job applicants also does not indicate a fully rational actor
- howinteresting 4y agoHow would I open a pages file? I use Linux. I'd have a similar reaction to .doc or .docx as well, though at least I can open those files. .pdf is table stakes.
- sbuk 4y agoLibreOffice opens application/x-iwork-pages-sffpages files.
- PascLeRasc 4y agoPeople who value their sanity and/or are opposed to having ads and tabloid headlines built into their work computer.
- tomjen3 4y agoSimple: Person hates Windows. Person wants to work for a company that is willing to pay the cost of tools, and using Apple is a good proxy for this. Unfortunately in hiring all we have a (frequently imperfect) proxies.
- sonotathrowaway 4y agoI haven’t tried programming with Xcode in a while, I wonder if it’s still aggressively hostile to collaboration.
- culopatin 4y agoOut of the choices out there, Apple allows for the easiest collaboration. Airdrop for me is the biggest player, integrated iMessage into MacOS and every other OS. Planning a trip with just these two things is much easier than whatever I could’ve accomplished between two Linux or two windows computers. Unless I used WhatsApp or something like that, but that’s WhatsApp allowing collaboration, not Windows
- snarkyturtle 4y agoCollaboration on Keynote is truly terrible.
- ezfe 4y agoCollaboration on Keynote works much better than in Powerpoint...Google Slides is the only one better, but Slides is a dumpster fire...
- brazzledazzle 4y agoPowerpoint is setting a real low bar. Microsoft 365 feels almost the same as it did when it was SharePoint Office Web Apps.
- reaperducer 4y agoUntil Freeform works on Windows and Android, it’s not collaborative, it’s a walled garden. Perhaps the solution is for Android to make a better app, and better apps in general, that will draw people away from the iOS ecosystem. Competition is supposed to be good. So compete. All I ever hear from the Android side is a lot of "walled garden" pearl clutching. Seldom any innovation, and evidently no innovation good enough to break the magical spell of Apple. When Android does innovate, and Apple chooses to adopt a method, then it's all "embrace, extend, extinguish! It's Micro$oft all over again!" As if Android never gets sloppy seconds on features, or half-baked mimicry of Apple products and services. It's this continuous whining and moaning that makes Apple, and Apple users, tune out the Android dev bros. They're just reactionary and it's easy to not take them seriously. The bottom line is the same now as it's always been: Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
- smoldesu 4y agoCompetition is great until your competitors use their power to prevent third-parties from distributing software freely. Then it becomes a monopoly, by modern standards.
- IOT_Apprentice 4y agoUntil Direct X games work on macos, it is not collaborative, it is a walled garden. Until all PS5 games work on Xbox X I can't collaborate in multiplayer, the reverse is true as well. Walled gardens exist throughout computing.
- error503 4y agoMany games support cross-platform play these days, so yes you certainly can collaborate between PS5 and Xbox X, if you choose the correct 'applications'.
- howinteresting 4y agoMore and more DirectX games now work on Linux, and many games have crossplay. In general the trend has been to move away from walled gardens.
- jmull 4y ago> Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that. Hiring is hard enough. You want to know something you can't possibly know, so you have to use very imperfect, approximate signals. I don't know why you'd want to kneecap yourself on purpose like this. You might as well just roll dice and hire when 7 comes up.
- smoldesu 4y agoHonestly, I kinda get it. I'm tired of people pushing Xcode dotfiles and __MACOSX folders to the main branch. If you're not conscious of the machine you use and the formats you employ, how can you be expected to collaborate effectively?
- kitsunesoba 4y agoI would take that to mean that the person in question doesn't know that .gitignore exists or why it's useful more than anything else.
- adwww 4y agoI'm honestly mortified if I somehow manage to push a .DS_Store to a PR...
- jmull 4y agoI've been doing this for decades and I don't even know what an Xcode dotfile is. Maybe you mean .DS_Store files? That's probably best described as a Finder dotfile... For that, maybe just add the line ".DS_Store" to your .gitignore (or the equivalent for your SCM software)?
- projectazorian 4y ago> Hiring is hard enough. You want to know something you can't possibly know, so you have to use very imperfect, approximate signals. I don't know why you'd want to kneecap yourself on purpose like this. You might as well just roll dice and hire when 7 comes up. In this case the signal is that the candidate would probably be a difficult colleague, since they couldn’t be bothered to spend the extra 30 seconds it takes to export to PDF from Pages. Or they didn’t know how, also a disqualifier.
- ezfe 4y ago> when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier Do you indicate the format you need to receive?
- naravara 4y agoI mean, they can they just have to convert it. Is it that different from sending it as a PDF because you need to have installed a PDF reader or Acrobat to read it? The only reason .docx files are more easily readable is because everyone makes a point of natively building in the ability to convert them because it's so ubiquitous. But it's a Microsoft format that Microsoft put a lot of effort into locking down as much as they could get away with, only backing off on it when they started getting into anti-trust trouble.
- alexfromapex 4y agoI guess you don’t realize Microsoft has been doing this with .docx and .xlsx for years. They claim it’s an open standard but it doesn’t work flawlessly in anything but their software. It’s more subtle but the same type of walled garden trickery.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoSomeone's CV in .docx would be readable at least and, most of the time with intact formatting (especially if the author didn't use spaces as indentation), even if opened in some {libre,star,open}office or whatever, heck, on modern Windows you can open .docx in Wordpad, ie you don't even need MS Office on Windows to open .docx. But I don't even know what is the Pages[0] format, extension, what apps can open it on Windows.[1] [0] like really, I never in my life needed this. [1] yes, you just can open it in 7z, but the similar can be done with .docx too.
- bink 4y agoI don't mean to be dis-charitable to your comments but it sounds like you're saying that people should use the currently bigger walled garden over the currently smaller walled garden?
- justsomehnguy 4y ago.docx, as the data interchange format, is not a walled garden, compared to Pages. Sure Pages is readable on every Apple OS, but .docx is readable on almost anything moder, with a loss a loss of formatting or not.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- matwood 4y ago> Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that. Windows users can't even read some doc versions. Resumes should either be text or pdf. Anything else is a gamble.
- kitsunesoba 4y agoThere's also a high chance that even if the .doc file is readable, that it'll be displayed incorrectly, even if the user is opening it with Word but especially if they're using something else that can open Word docs (WordPad, TextEdit, LibreOffice, Pages, and many others). Absolutely agree that PDF is the best choice. Readable and correctly renderable by just about everything, and even fixes the problem of missing fonts.
- Ken_At_EM 4y agoIt’s a red flag to me if someone sends a resume in anything other than a PDF. Why would you send your source code instead of your binary?
- arkitaip 4y agoApple's approach to collaboration is particularly embarrassing when you have tools like Figma that enable teams to work seamlessly across devices and platforms.
- lostlogin 4y ago> when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages This just seems crazy. People don’t pdf them first? A .doc CV is equally disgusting in my view.
- patrickmcnamara 4y agoIf it doesn't open in my web browser, I'm probably not gonna open it.
- User23 4y ago> Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that. As someone who can remember the 1990s, when .DOC was the standard file format for any kind of business and much academic work, I find this terribly amusing.
- RobotToaster 4y ago>Even though I have a Mac, when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, because they don’t understand that Windows users can’t read that. Libre Office can open mac pages documents.
- s1mon 4y agoYes, there are solutions if everyone is onboard with the arrangement. However, sharing a .pages or .key file with a prospective employer or client is asking them to do extra work, and is rude at best and a deal killer at worst. As a corollary, sharing .7zip or .tar or .rar when a .zip would do just fine are equivalent mistakes.
- avidphantasm 4y agoFor me sending anything but a PDF is a deal killer. It's just odd to me to send your resume in a document format that supports editing. Take the time to make it into a PDF.
- tomjen3 4y agoIf you buy a subscription to Acrobat (not Reader), you can edit PDFs. Office is also supposed to be able to open and edit them. Mac Spotlight can open and edit PDFs to some extend, including copying and pasting pages to put different PDFs together.
- Aaronstotle 4y agoI have worked at lots of small start-ups in the Bay Area, all of these companies were 100% Mac exclusive. I could see this tool being a decent competitor to something like the google drive suite
- LeoPanthera 4y ago> when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier I'm utterly astounded that anyone sends a resume in anything other than PDF. Sometimes employers require .doc or .docx, and that's a disqualifier. For me.
- drooopy 4y agoAmen to that. There have been multiple times in my career where I've stopped the process the moment when a recruiter asked me to fill in a shitty looking .doc or .docx file with the same info that is in the .PDF file that's containing my CV that I've already submitted.
- zikduruqe 4y ago> when a prospective job applicant sends a resume in Pages, it’s a disqualifier, I mean, you could ask them if they could export it to PDF and not just kick them to the curb.