11 ms·

I've read the article front to back twice. Carefully - and I'm still not 100% certain whether it's a troll, or for real. The interesting thing is, many of thi

I've read the article front to back twice. Carefully - and I'm still not 100% certain whether it's a troll, or for real. The interesting thing is, many of this persons problems come from Apple trying to support multiple platforms, instead of locking the person into a single unified environment. Others (like iPhoto starting to suck after 10,000 pictures) were an issue in the first couple releases - but it's not uncommon for people to have north of 100,000 photos, and get reasonable performance in recent releases. The difficulty hitting the search magnifying glass was interesting - I wasn't even aware that magnifying glass existed. You normally just scroll to the top - now I can do it faster. But - it makes sense - what's just one above the letter "A" - the search icon. All in all - I'm believing it's an article whose genesis was a user who got hit by an edgecase/bug on their iPhone, and then turned it into a generic rant about all things Apple. But the problems this person are having do seem to make it clear to me why, if anything, the OS X platform / iPhone are too flexible. There are lots (lots!) of users out there who would trade some of that flexibility for more predictable performance/ease of use. And thus, Sandboxing.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago
So do you really think that Mac Mail, Calendar and Adress Book are good tools for poeple who have a lot of mails, appointments and contacts? I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals. Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.
- taligent 14y ago
  I have 120,000 messages in Mail with 5 accounts going back about 6 years and about 20+ smart mailboxes. Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.
  - overcyn 14y ago
    I am jealous. 10000 messages and it very often takes 5+ seconds to switch between smart mailboxes. Admittedly the smart mailbox filters I have set up are pretty crazy but still... It's not like email metadata changes. The results should be cached.
  - liedra 14y ago
    I also have large mail accounts with Mail and haven't had any problems either. iPhoto is the big one I have a beef with, but Mail was always good to me (except with Exchange integration, but DavMail fixed that up).
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Those tools fall down when you connect them to external services - particularly exchange. Mail.App, in particular, was flawed in how it read from exchange servers from 10.7 through 10.7.3 - It's gotten somewhat better in 10.7.4, and I hear most of my remaining bugs have been resolved in ML. Calendar and Address book are fine as standalone tools, but never really (and still don't) cut it as "Enterprise workflow" tools. Microsoft Exchange + Outlook own the calendar work in the enterprise. The point I was really trying to make was that Apple's recent failings have been their attempt to work with others - they don't understand how to design/deploy/develop internet services. And they don't play (very) well with others. They succeed best when you stick to their walled garden, with perhaps the one exception that proves the rule being their web browser - which is pretty spiffy on both the mobile and OS X platform.
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
    Microsoft doesn't play too well with others either but you can customize and hack their software. They want you to do that and they make it easy for power users who are not professional programmers. Apple doesn't want that. Apple wants you to use it in one particular way or not at all. Both approaches have their benefits. At least with Apple products you always know where things are. If you open MS Office on a power user's machine you may find something completely unique to that user. It's very useful to them but totally unsupportable for anyone else. Office is the people's Unix shell in a way. Apple doesn't want to be that and it isn't.
- moystard 14y ago
  I don't know which one I hate the most between Calendar and Mail. Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server and often accept appointments or meeting, but if I restart the application, it seems to forget about it and the event is marked as new. Problem: If I reply to the invitation once again, the creator of the event will receive another email, bad bad bad... I also hate when Calendar complains 10 times in a row that it cannot connect to the platform when I am actually offline, extremely frustrating to have to deal with all these modal dialogs. Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes. All this to say that for a development environment, OSX is my OS of choice, but it is about emails, contacts, meetings and so on, the embedded applications are not good at best. I had a laugh yesterday when the MacWorld editor said about Apple that they were not only doing good OSes, but excellent applications as well during the TechCrunch talk about the iPhone 5. In my experience, I have always found Apple applications average at best, even on the iPhone.
  - flatline3 14y ago
    > Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server ... Ah, there's your problem. > Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes. I haven't had this problem. Then again, you sound like you live in the MS world, in which case the problem really isn't Apple.
    - moystard 14y ago
      Because the company I work for uses an Exchange infrastructure, I live in the MS world and thus it's my fault (or Microsoft's). My Android phone does a better job at handling Exchange accounts than my mac. All my work environments are Mac environment, I even coded on open source OSX projects for a while so I am not the kind of person to just dismiss OSX because it is not a MS platform. Like it or not, it is a reality that the Mail & Calendar are broken, the simple fact that Apple tries to convince everyone at each release that the new version is finally a good one is enough for me to see that they have trouble developing a good email/calendar clients. And again, Exchange is one of the most used corporate infrastructure, that's the state of the market, and Apple should support it the best they can.
Derbasti 14y ago
My iPhoto Library grew rapidly over the years. As in: it doubled its size, even though I did not add many photos. Thus, after a few years, I ended up with an iPhoto Library of 60 gigs that contained 30 gigs worth of photos. And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all. Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software. Edit: For the record, I used this tool to salvage my library: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/
- astrange 14y ago
  If you run into something like that, look inside the bundle with OmniDiskSweeper and see what's using up space. (For instance you might have switched your camera to RAW unintentionally, or told iPhoto to save pictures as 16-bit raw TIFF)
- jpxxx 14y ago
  If you're feeling up for a safari (har), go to your iPhoto Library, right-click -> Show Package Contents, and check out the sizes of each folder inside of here. (the terminal command 'du' or the freeware GrandPerspective.app works well) Pay close attention to the "iPod Photo Cache". Any sync to an iOS device that requires a down-res means a huge volume of quasi-thumbnails get stuffed here, one set for each target resolution.
- steve8918 14y ago
  I think the reason why your photos are doubling is because I believe you are importing them into iPhoto and then back into the iPhone. You will get two copies of all your photos on your iPhone because they get imported into iPhoto and then back out. It's super annoying, so I shut iPhoto completely off.
  - Derbasti 14y ago
    I don't ever put photos on my iPhone and I didn't sync my iPhone in the last year or so. Besides, I don't take all that many pictures with the iPhone.
nope0 14y ago
Pretty sure it's not a troll. He's pretty well known for his writings on search engines. It's a sign of the times when longtime Mac users are complaining. That's how bad things have gotten. I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke. If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them! But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing". While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  I supported the Macintosh Labs at SFU from 1991-1993. Those systems booted off of floppies (which I handed out at the front desk) - and one of my jobs at Harbor Center was, on a weekly basis, running anti-virus off the boot floppies to clean them off. I also supported the Macintosh Platform at Netscape (HUGE Macintosh house) from 1996-1998. A good portion of the time we ran into a tough problem on the Macs there (by then we had hard drives), our Mac Lead (which I was not) - had us do a "Fresh Install" of the operating system. That pretty much always resolved the problem, but seems kind of invasive nowadays. I sometimes think we view Mac History through rose colored glasses. I will agree with you - that damn beachball is annoying. Though, I am happy to say, that as of 10.7.4, it probably only spins for about 5-10 minutes of my day now in aggregate, as compared to the 20-30 minutes a day back in the 10.7.1 era.
kokey 14y ago
I do share his frustration with the contact list on the iPhone. I also have over 1000 contacts, which built up over the years of painstakingly migrating them between models of Nokia phones, often having to write scripts to do it with. Then I got a Macbook and it paired with my Nokia phone so easily and painlessly I was really impressed, and when I got an iPhone my contacts magically ended up on it and I was impressed even further. However, with this number of contacts, finding one is quite difficult. Apart from the alphabetical sorting by surname, scrolling to the top is impractical, or even through one letter of the alphabet. So, I have to rely on the search, and the button is hard to get to. A similar problem happens when you want to phone someone you've been messaging. If the message history is long, it's a long scroll to get to the top of it to get to the contacts options.
- Game_Ender 14y ago
  Tapping the bar which displays the time and battery life at the top of the screen will quickly scroll you top of most content on the iPhone, Contacts App and Safari included.
  - kokey 14y ago
    Thanks! See, I should complain more there is probably a solution for all these things, even though it's not that obvious to me.
    - ahlatimer 14y ago
      Or you can tap anywhere on the alphabet bar and swipe up. You can scroll through the alphabet like that as well, no need to tap exactly the right letter.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Doesn't touching the top bat take you to the top any more? It used to but maybe the new notifications messed with it?
- vikramls 14y ago
ttt_ 14y ago
So you are saying that the right away to face the challenge of supporting multiple platforms is to outright not do it? I can't respect a product/company whose future vision is less integration and not more. I really dislike Apple as a brand, but I admit they bring a lot to the table and that means driving competing products to raise theirs standards, though if their answer to difficult problems is to throw in the towel, then their role may progressively decline in importance.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago

So do you really think that Mac Mail, Calendar and Adress Book are good tools for poeple who have a lot of mails, appointments and contacts? I'm not so much complaining about Apple's software as I am quietly accepting of the fact that Apple makes pretty consumer gadgets not tools for professionals. Actually, I think it's a good thing that Apple's software is unsuitable for intensive use. It leaves space for actual software developers (us) to provide that.

taligent 14y ago
I have 120,000 messages in Mail with 5 accounts going back about 6 years and about 20+ smart mailboxes. Mail was one part of OSX I never actually had any problems with.
- overcyn 14y ago
  I am jealous. 10000 messages and it very often takes 5+ seconds to switch between smart mailboxes. Admittedly the smart mailbox filters I have set up are pretty crazy but still... It's not like email metadata changes. The results should be cached.
- liedra 14y ago
  I also have large mail accounts with Mail and haven't had any problems either. iPhoto is the big one I have a beef with, but Mail was always good to me (except with Exchange integration, but DavMail fixed that up).
ghshephard 14y ago
Those tools fall down when you connect them to external services - particularly exchange. Mail.App, in particular, was flawed in how it read from exchange servers from 10.7 through 10.7.3 - It's gotten somewhat better in 10.7.4, and I hear most of my remaining bugs have been resolved in ML. Calendar and Address book are fine as standalone tools, but never really (and still don't) cut it as "Enterprise workflow" tools. Microsoft Exchange + Outlook own the calendar work in the enterprise. The point I was really trying to make was that Apple's recent failings have been their attempt to work with others - they don't understand how to design/deploy/develop internet services. And they don't play (very) well with others. They succeed best when you stick to their walled garden, with perhaps the one exception that proves the rule being their web browser - which is pretty spiffy on both the mobile and OS X platform.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  Microsoft doesn't play too well with others either but you can customize and hack their software. They want you to do that and they make it easy for power users who are not professional programmers. Apple doesn't want that. Apple wants you to use it in one particular way or not at all. Both approaches have their benefits. At least with Apple products you always know where things are. If you open MS Office on a power user's machine you may find something completely unique to that user. It's very useful to them but totally unsupportable for anyone else. Office is the people's Unix shell in a way. Apple doesn't want to be that and it isn't.
moystard 14y ago
I don't know which one I hate the most between Calendar and Mail. Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server and often accept appointments or meeting, but if I restart the application, it seems to forget about it and the event is marked as new. Problem: If I reply to the invitation once again, the creator of the event will receive another email, bad bad bad... I also hate when Calendar complains 10 times in a row that it cannot connect to the platform when I am actually offline, extremely frustrating to have to deal with all these modal dialogs. Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes. All this to say that for a development environment, OSX is my OS of choice, but it is about emails, contacts, meetings and so on, the embedded applications are not good at best. I had a laugh yesterday when the MacWorld editor said about Apple that they were not only doing good OSes, but excellent applications as well during the TechCrunch talk about the iPhone 5. In my experience, I have always found Apple applications average at best, even on the iPhone.
- flatline3 14y ago
  > Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server ... Ah, there's your problem. > Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes. I haven't had this problem. Then again, you sound like you live in the MS world, in which case the problem really isn't Apple.
  - moystard 14y ago
    Because the company I work for uses an Exchange infrastructure, I live in the MS world and thus it's my fault (or Microsoft's). My Android phone does a better job at handling Exchange accounts than my mac. All my work environments are Mac environment, I even coded on open source OSX projects for a while so I am not the kind of person to just dismiss OSX because it is not a MS platform. Like it or not, it is a reality that the Mail & Calendar are broken, the simple fact that Apple tries to convince everyone at each release that the new version is finally a good one is enough for me to see that they have trouble developing a good email/calendar clients. And again, Exchange is one of the most used corporate infrastructure, that's the state of the market, and Apple should support it the best they can.

Derbasti 14y ago

My iPhoto Library grew rapidly over the years. As in: it doubled its size, even though I did not add many photos. Thus, after a few years, I ended up with an iPhoto Library of 60 gigs that contained 30 gigs worth of photos. And apparently, I am not the only one with this problem. And there seems to be no way to fix this. At all. Luckily, at some point I found some 3rd party software that can rebuild an iPhoto library by basically simulating the user dragging all his images there manually and re-applying all the tags and stuff by hand. Honestly, what they are doing is quite an achievement in the face of an utterly defective piece of software. Edit: For the record, I used this tool to salvage my library: http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/

astrange 14y ago
If you run into something like that, look inside the bundle with OmniDiskSweeper and see what's using up space. (For instance you might have switched your camera to RAW unintentionally, or told iPhoto to save pictures as 16-bit raw TIFF)
jpxxx 14y ago
If you're feeling up for a safari (har), go to your iPhoto Library, right-click -> Show Package Contents, and check out the sizes of each folder inside of here. (the terminal command 'du' or the freeware GrandPerspective.app works well) Pay close attention to the "iPod Photo Cache". Any sync to an iOS device that requires a down-res means a huge volume of quasi-thumbnails get stuffed here, one set for each target resolution.
steve8918 14y ago
I think the reason why your photos are doubling is because I believe you are importing them into iPhoto and then back into the iPhone. You will get two copies of all your photos on your iPhone because they get imported into iPhoto and then back out. It's super annoying, so I shut iPhoto completely off.
- Derbasti 14y ago
  I don't ever put photos on my iPhone and I didn't sync my iPhone in the last year or so. Besides, I don't take all that many pictures with the iPhone.

nope0 14y ago

Pretty sure it's not a troll. He's pretty well known for his writings on search engines. It's a sign of the times when longtime Mac users are complaining. That's how bad things have gotten. I've watched people struggle like he's describing. Too many upgrades. Too many authorizations. Too many restrictions. They are jumping through hoop after hoop just to do basic stuff. If they are young they probably don't know any better. But for anyone who has been around, this has gotten to be a joke. If you have stuck with Apple over the long haul, then you remember what it was like before OSX. When OSX was first introduced you had to upgrade your Mac hardware just to run it or it would be dog slow. Then it got better over time as we all upgraded but it has gradually become more and more annoying. How many people are staring at a spinning beachball at this very moment? Trying to appeal to PC users, all the Mac vs PC nonsense. Then trying to lock down people's music and other files and make them "subscribers", like they are some sort of media licensing company. Apple is no longer an alternative to the typical computer hassles. They have become a primary source of them! But only if you have been using Macs for many years can you see this. Noobs and fanboys are not going to notice. They will wait minutes for their Mac to boot and stare endlessly at the beachball and accept that this is "fast, start-of-the-art computing". While noobs suffer through iPhoto staring at beachballs, I will boot in seconds and process my photos, running in a background process, in half the time, using a more traditional UNIX without the Cocoa cruft. No hassles.

ghshephard 14y ago
I supported the Macintosh Labs at SFU from 1991-1993. Those systems booted off of floppies (which I handed out at the front desk) - and one of my jobs at Harbor Center was, on a weekly basis, running anti-virus off the boot floppies to clean them off. I also supported the Macintosh Platform at Netscape (HUGE Macintosh house) from 1996-1998. A good portion of the time we ran into a tough problem on the Macs there (by then we had hard drives), our Mac Lead (which I was not) - had us do a "Fresh Install" of the operating system. That pretty much always resolved the problem, but seems kind of invasive nowadays. I sometimes think we view Mac History through rose colored glasses. I will agree with you - that damn beachball is annoying. Though, I am happy to say, that as of 10.7.4, it probably only spins for about 5-10 minutes of my day now in aggregate, as compared to the 20-30 minutes a day back in the 10.7.1 era.

kokey 14y ago

I do share his frustration with the contact list on the iPhone. I also have over 1000 contacts, which built up over the years of painstakingly migrating them between models of Nokia phones, often having to write scripts to do it with. Then I got a Macbook and it paired with my Nokia phone so easily and painlessly I was really impressed, and when I got an iPhone my contacts magically ended up on it and I was impressed even further. However, with this number of contacts, finding one is quite difficult. Apart from the alphabetical sorting by surname, scrolling to the top is impractical, or even through one letter of the alphabet. So, I have to rely on the search, and the button is hard to get to. A similar problem happens when you want to phone someone you've been messaging. If the message history is long, it's a long scroll to get to the top of it to get to the contacts options.

Game_Ender 14y ago
Tapping the bar which displays the time and battery life at the top of the screen will quickly scroll you top of most content on the iPhone, Contacts App and Safari included.
- kokey 14y ago
  Thanks! See, I should complain more there is probably a solution for all these things, even though it's not that obvious to me.
  - ahlatimer 14y ago
    Or you can tap anywhere on the alphabet bar and swipe up. You can scroll through the alphabet like that as well, no need to tap exactly the right letter.
justincormack 14y ago
Doesn't touching the top bat take you to the top any more? It used to but maybe the new notifications messed with it?
vikramls 14y ago

ttt_ 14y ago

So you are saying that the right away to face the challenge of supporting multiple platforms is to outright not do it? I can't respect a product/company whose future vision is less integration and not more. I really dislike Apple as a brand, but I admit they bring a lot to the table and that means driving competing products to raise theirs standards, though if their answer to difficult problems is to throw in the towel, then their role may progressively decline in importance.