3 ms·

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is

by tacker2000 2y ago

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within the settings app.
- tacker2000 2y ago
  I was talking about the settings app in macOS.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.
    - il-b 2y ago
      There is no reason for the delay to be more than 100ms. The 1 sec delay must be due to some extremely inefficient lazy init or a bunch of io happening when you switch between screens
      - mananaysiempre 2y ago
        We’re (largely) not running OSes from spinning metal anymore, so even if there were some I/O that needs to happen (there shouldn’t be), a second would be an indication that the app was doing it badly. A modern SSD will read multiple gigabytes in a second, if the reads are sequential and you don’t wait for each one to complete before starting another. Unfortunately, we as a species have not figured out the programming tools necessary to make that natural.
brailsafe 2y ago
They appear to be launching each settings screen as a separate app and retaining it until Settings is quit. How many resources this requires, or how much this contributes to the lag, I don't know, but... Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.
- wpm 2y ago
  That’s not too different than the old app, but instead of .app bundles, the UIs and stuff were bundled in .prefPane bundles.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    They're not .app bundles, they're .appex (extension!) bundles from /System/Library/ExtensionKit/.
- tacker2000 2y ago
  Yea some other commenter mentioned that they most likely re-wrote the whole thing Swift. So is Swift just too crappy for this kind of UI, that accesses low level system stuff? or are the devs just incompetent? Who knows…
  - throwaway290 2y ago
    SwiftUI is not swift. It's about framework not language. But even that doesn't matter I think Apple has decent QA for low level stuff (remember how they quietly converted every iphone to APFS and back just to test that it will work later) but bad QA for final GUI. Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.
userbinator 2y ago
Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? At least some of them are actually web pages: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/ https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...
- OkGoDoIt 2y ago
  Hmm, and using React even! No wonder it’s slow and bloated.
  - ngcazz 2y ago
    You gotta wonder if this has been a reaction to a shrinking Cocoa/ObjC and SwiftUI talent pool
    - tacker2000 2y ago
      Could be that nowadays a lot of UI code will probably converge on web-first stuff like React, since it has a larger talent pool, as you said, and is inherently cross platform. Microsoft's newer apps like Teams are also built in React.

lotsofpulp 2y ago

I use an iPhone 13 mini, and I experience no delays within the settings app.

tacker2000 2y ago
I was talking about the settings app in macOS.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Oh, I see. There is a slight delay (closer to 1 second or less) switching menus inside of Settings on my M3 Air.
  - il-b 2y ago
    There is no reason for the delay to be more than 100ms. The 1 sec delay must be due to some extremely inefficient lazy init or a bunch of io happening when you switch between screens
    - mananaysiempre 2y ago
      We’re (largely) not running OSes from spinning metal anymore, so even if there were some I/O that needs to happen (there shouldn’t be), a second would be an indication that the app was doing it badly. A modern SSD will read multiple gigabytes in a second, if the reads are sequential and you don’t wait for each one to complete before starting another. Unfortunately, we as a species have not figured out the programming tools necessary to make that natural.

brailsafe 2y ago

They appear to be launching each settings screen as a separate app and retaining it until Settings is quit. How many resources this requires, or how much this contributes to the lag, I don't know, but... Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.

wpm 2y ago
That’s not too different than the old app, but instead of .app bundles, the UIs and stuff were bundled in .prefPane bundles.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  They're not .app bundles, they're .appex (extension!) bundles from /System/Library/ExtensionKit/.
tacker2000 2y ago
Yea some other commenter mentioned that they most likely re-wrote the whole thing Swift. So is Swift just too crappy for this kind of UI, that accesses low level system stuff? or are the devs just incompetent? Who knows…
- throwaway290 2y ago
  SwiftUI is not swift. It's about framework not language. But even that doesn't matter I think Apple has decent QA for low level stuff (remember how they quietly converted every iphone to APFS and back just to test that it will work later) but bad QA for final GUI. Most of cocoa/objc stuff was written long ago and back when QA was better. If this was cocoa and objective c today it would be equally buggy.

userbinator 2y ago

Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? At least some of them are actually web pages: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-macos/ https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma...

OkGoDoIt 2y ago
Hmm, and using React even! No wonder it’s slow and bloated.
- ngcazz 2y ago
  You gotta wonder if this has been a reaction to a shrinking Cocoa/ObjC and SwiftUI talent pool
  - tacker2000 2y ago
    Could be that nowadays a lot of UI code will probably converge on web-first stuff like React, since it has a larger talent pool, as you said, and is inherently cross platform. Microsoft's newer apps like Teams are also built in React.