> Safari now uses machine learning to identify advertisers and others who track your online behavior, and removes the cross‑site tracking data they leave behind.
> Safari now uses machine learning to identify advertisers and others who track your online behavior, and removes the cross‑site tracking data they leave behind
I'm starting to like the business model of buying the product more and more.
There was a recent thread somewhere (here, reddit, FB?) asking "What feature would it take for iPhone users to switch to Android?" - the answer for me is, Google changing its business model (or else completely open-sourcing all of Android and all of its core apps (mail, maps, browser).
I agree, the good thing about Apple and Microsoft is I know what they want to sell me.
Apple want me to buy relatively expensive devices on a regular basis and ideally a cloud subscription.
Microsoft want me to buy subscriptions to their cloud services and ideally devices running their OS.
In both cases the value for them is fairly clear and they have limited incentives to do anything that might jepordise those revenue flows.
Companies like Google who (IIRC) get over 90% of their revenue from advertising, need to make money by selling information about me to 3rd parties for advert targeting, which I'm not so keen on.
Personally I prefer to pay someone for a product/service directly.
And yet, microsoft started incorporating ads inside of windows 10. The business models helps, but if you can both sell a product and get ad revenue, why wouldn't you ?
In apple's case, they have a fairly small but dedicated marketshare that cares deeply about those issue. That's why I trust them to not sabotage their product. Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to care.
Too late to edit, but that's really what I meant. It's true that windows isn't a monopoly in the truest sense, but it feels like one because of the huge marketshare and vendor lock-in they have.
> There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to.
For a lot of people there isn't.
Take my dad for example. He sells weight scales for retail (think butchers, greengrocers, cheese shops, etc). Those scales are pretty much embedded PC's nowadays, they connect to the internet and can be remotely accessed to update product prices, promotions, get the daily sales numbers but also things like changing the logos and text on the receipt and a million other things.
The manufacturers of those scales sell a piece of software to do that, but it's always a 100% Windows app, held together with all kinds of (outdated) MS technology like Visual FoxPro. Often they have licenses that require hardware dongles, have bizarre drivers to communicate with the hardware and it feels like it's al held together with spit and ducktape.
There is no Linux or OSS alternative, the protocols aren't even published and no one cares to reverse engineer them as the market is just tiny, and the target audience has no overlap with the techies that are interested in Linux and the like.
And that's just one example, there are tons of crappy, outdated, proprietary apps like that out there. Apps with tiny user bases no one cares about so no OSS options will ever emerge.
But all of that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination.
It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.
It's a monopoly for those users * innumerable_similar_niches.
Which translates into a pretty large part of the small business market that doesn't have any de facto choice.
And WINE et al. aren't a scalable solution because invariably these things depend on odd Windows quirks and/or are generally terrible from a code/standards quality perspective. And there's functionally no way to address that because the historical-Windows-in-fact API is "every odd behavior every release of Windows has had over the years."
Your example may be a monopoly (if there are no alternatives then Microsoft has a monopoly in that market, whether they actively pursued on or not, just as the first entry in a market has a monopoly until other entrants appear), but when talking about operating systems in general, Microsoft hasn't had close to a monopoly in a while. They still have significant market penetration and the majority of desktops, but credible alternatives exist in most cases, and more and more people are using them (thus the importance and interest in this MacOS release).
I haven’t used OpenOffice much? But it feels much less polished than Office or iWork. I guess there’s Google Docs, but even that’s limited compared to even iWork. Is there anything actually decent that can be used for “Office” stuff on Linux?
Unfortunately they don't (and probably can't) do it for everyone. What is needed is bug level compatibility with msoffice (including visual basic) and seemless interoperability (including add ons). Not only is this an insanely difficult target - it is also a moving and potentially hostile one to interoperate with. I've massive respect for the libreoffice developers but I don't envy them the task of msoffice interoperability.
Office 2003 and Office 2007 upwards don't have bug level compat. it's even worse if you used special things in your .doc files the chances are/were high to render them different between the older and the newer versions. basically nobody cared as soon as a lot of people moved to ooxml.
Also Office 2003 and LibreOffice4/5 have way more in common than Office 2003 has with 2010/2013/2016.
Bare in mind I've been often on the other side of this discussion....
None of this really matters - if you tell someone word ate a word document then they are sympathetic whereas if you tell them libreoffice ate a word document the reaction is much less favourable. I do not like this.
My solution - I just refuse to use any office software.
well just wanted to say that the conversion between ribbon caused a lot of people problems.
especially the older personal really dislikes office 2007+ upwards.
basically I barely use any office software and I'm on mac where Microsoft Office is basically bloat software. And for my needs, LibreOffice/The Mac stuff or just a text editor is most of the time's more than enough.
Outlook is actually a pretty good product on Windows, however on Mac it is as good/bad as the built-in mail app. (actually it share's a lot with it, i.e. account's go over apple exchange integration and search uses spotlight and so on).
LaTeX and Org mode are much better and more usable than either Office or OpenOffice for me. I haven't needed to do more than copy-paste into Office documents for the last 4 years. Of course, that's not at all relevant for general market share, but there are viable alternatives depending on how technical you are and your exact needs/restrictions/use-cases.
Within large organizations, I don't think there's any replacement for Excel.
Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.
That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet.
Excel is programming. It's just not the kind you do or like. The number of programming things people have done in Excel and Access is astounding, as is the number of people who've learned to program without realizing it as a result of using those tools.
Could they be better? Sure. But don't knock it as not "programming" on that basis -- PHP is also bad.
I've read a lot of crappy code written by physicists (my past self included) who lack training and/or don't care about code quality. While I hate proprietary, monolithic programs, I'm not sure replacing them with R would lead to saner results or fewer errors. I would certainly prefer python and org mode to excel and word, thought.
Although it's a nice thought, the benefit of excel is it's comparatively low barrier-to-entry, ubiquity and transparency (in terms of other people being able to understand how a calculation was derived).
It's not realistic to expect everyone in a company to learn python, and I'm not convinced that replacing shitty excel documents with shitty code would introduce less errors.
Also the concept of 'minimum viable product' in excel is typically adding a couple of columns and adding titles to them. To develop something for others to use in python will take much longer.
> People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming.
I'm sorry that the democratization of computing hurts you so, but Excel has done more for normal people who just need to push numbers around than perhaps any device since the pocket calculator. And it has exposed more people to functional programming than anything else has, ever.
Again, I have to ask, what sophistication does Excel have that Google spreadsheet does not also offer?
COM and VBA scripting?
Access database sourcing?
Google spreadsheets even has analogies to this functionality (albeit in Google flavors).
It's certainly not the formula and pivot table capabilities which Google spreadsheets has pretty good parity with. At one point in time you could argue that excel handled larger files better, but more recent versions of Google Spreadsheet seem to handle larger files pretty well.
All the strong arguments for keeping excel usually boil down to "well, we built this giant thing using proprietary MS scripting/plugins/db access that we're too entrenched in it so it won't work on Google (and should probably be done in an actual programming language anyways)"
I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features. As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets. You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
> I don't agree that deep integration is the same as sophisticated features.
PowerPivot is a sophisticated set of features.
> As a base product without the extras, excel has no advantage over google sheets.
Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.
> You could equally build your stack to the same degree of sophistication on proprietary google tech.
You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
> Sure, if you define all the very real advantages Excel has as “extras”, that's true. It's also not meaningful in the real world where the artificial distinction between “base product” and “extras” has no meaning; the actual product of Excel that businesses get has features for which Google Sheets has no equivalent.
The distinction isn't artificial: you can build upon excel as if it's a programming platform, but that doesn't make excel itself more powerful - all you've done is built yourself into a proprietary tech stack. With enough time you could do the same thing in Google sheets with Google's proprietary scripting interface. Comparing the two apps at baseline there is no difference in sophisticated features. PowerPivot is a plugin.
> You could, if Google offered equivalent proprietary tech for the purpose, which it doesn't.
Yeah, actually it does - you just won't be solving everything with an xls file and you might actually be using a more appropriate tool for the problem, but I guarantee Google has an equivalent offering.
I hear this argument a lot and I still don't buy it. I use more advanced functionality than 90% of my coleagues and I don't find google spreadsheet stops me in any way.
Tell me something excel can do that Google spreadsheet can't.
If you're using excel as a programming interface it's going to be hard to dig out of that. Of course, one could argue that excel was never a good place for that sort of thing in the first place.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're a LaTeX user, your needs are specialized beyond what the average office worker needs out of a word processor. Point taken though.
Really ugly ads, too. There's just like 2 or three random cut-off strings of text randomly sprinkled around my login screen on my SP3, with little searchglass icons next to them. They're always totally incoherent and I'm not even sure how I would interact with them if I wanted to (clicking does nothing).
Both. Maybe, more their stuff. Comes installed with nagware for Office and Skype. Advertises their and third party cloud storage. Advertisements on screensaver. All can be disabled/removed. The ad I saw on screensaver was for a video game. Maybe Microsoft was the publisher or something but they definitely weren’t the creator.
What markets is it that you feel Microsoft have a monopoly in?
Desktop/Laptops is now a 3-way split between MS, Apple and Google with chromebooks.
Mobile is a split between Apple and Google with MS out of it.
Cloud is Amazon out in front with MS in second place.
Office is the one area where MS could be considered to have a monopoly but even there I think cloud players are gaining ground and also (AFAIK) there's no advertising in paid for versions of MS Office.
I only have a Windows PC for gaming. I'd gladly switch to Linux if all games were also available there. (I tried wine and stuff like that ages ago, but that was just a pain.) Windows has effectively a monopoly on gaming PCs.
One third of the games I've purchased on Steam are available on Linux.
I guess the perception of whether or not Microsoft effectively has a monopoly in the gaming PC market segment really centers around the games you play.
Poor coverage exactly because it has single digit desktop market share. There's not enough market, therefore it doesn't get enough product. The end result is that if you want a broad choice in games, you need Windows.
Fortunately there's been a lot of great games coming out for Linux too recently, mostly thanks to cross-system frameworks like Unity, I assume. And that's great, but not really enough to threaten Windows' position in the PC game market.
I understand where you're coming from, but the market share doesn't really figure into my argument of coverage. If the idea is "should I adopt or not," and I like gaming, then the % coverage is a highly important statistic. I can still step back and say "well isn't that nice, Linux has 1/3 of games ported and only 500 people use it! Good for them!" Won't change the fact that I need to use windows if I want to play all games.
Windows also has a monopoly on enterprise and government PCs. There aren't too many 100k-employee organisations out there whose desktop SOE is non-Windows.
If you take only desktop (which is what I was thinking about), windows is waaaaaaaaaay dominating the game. Chromebook might as well not exist (I haven't seen one, ever. I'm in europe though), so the only contender is Mac. But with all the lock-in and momentum Windows has, sure it might not be a monopoly in the technical sense, but it sure as heck feels like one.
How is Android profit calculated? Does it include the value of the data collected with it? How do you calculate iOS profits? Can you separate the value of the hardware from the software?
You just mean desktop computers right? Because browser share polling shows that windows use is way down across the world, at least to browse the web. The most popular alas inChina, for example, is by far Android.
They also have suggested apps in the Store live tile, and on the top of the programs menu. Some of those are not directly from MS, but again at least half are at the moment (Minecraft, etc).
Easy to turn off the live tiles and the suggested apps, and you can very quickly type to find any app so many people probably don't even look at the programs menu.
Windows 10 has been frustrating, I could understand them doing this with Basic but you have to pay a hefty premium for the Pro version and you still get this crap.
This is the most petty complaint about Windows that I've heard because every consumer-oriented OS has these type of "advertisements".
Heck, on iOS not only am I forced to look at apps that I don't want, I am also forced to use them! On the Macintosh OS, whenever I want to see what updates are available, I have to first look at the featured apps in their store. Even Ubuntu installs a shit-load of crappy programs that I don't want.
At least in Windows, you can disable them and pretty much never see them again. I've been on Windows 10 for years now and I think that I saw a Candy Crush launcher tile appear once and then it was gone forever.
Every OS has this ? I mean, this is literally windows putting ads on the equivalent of the IOS launcher. No OS does that !
I don't really care about the built-in crapware (well, I do, but let's save this for another debate). That the OS actively fights for the user's attention is ridiculous. I don't really mind "ads" for their built-in products. The Edge popup[0] was almost cute, the OneDrive explorer ad[1] was understandable. But this[2] or this[3] ? That's just corporate greed at its finest. Sorry.
I did turn off suggestions when I got my win10 PC last year. Went through a couple of articles online, hit a variety of settings... and I still get ads on that box. It's only my gaming machine, so I just gave up on blocking them.
A part is removable, the rest you can hide. The ones you cannot remove are usually the ones the iOS SDK's are built on top of like Map Views or Web Views.
Try clicking a hyperlink from Messages. You’re forced to use Safari. Try clicking an address in your contacts. You’re forced to use Apple Maps. Try replacing either one of them. You cannot.
True for Apple, not for Microsoft. Windows 10 is stuffed with tracking and telemetry and puts ads in front of you (screen saver, start menu, etc). They are absolutely NOT famous for respecting your privacy or wishes.
Does it collect personally-identifiable Information? Suppose, for sake of discussion, they collect something inoocuous, like whether you prefer to maximise windows. Say a single bit of information. True or false. Would you still be opposed to the telemetry? I’m trying to understand if the objection is about specific data being collected, or to the idea at all.
Right, no one would care about telemetry if you could turn it off. MS could have it turned on by default, even. I'm sure the amount of data they would miss would be minuscule in comparison to the amount of negative press they've received about this topic.
Why do you feel that way? Do you feel tracking whether you prefer to maximise windows is a privacy violation? Or is the objection that your IP address is included when the telemetry is uploaded to Microsoft?
I'm not opposed to it because its MS or because I fear for my privacy. As a purchaser of a product, I don't want to enlist my compute resources to collect information that is of value to the seller - for free. I have already paid my dues, so to speak. Of course, in theory,I could benefit from the telemetry. But that should be my choice, and at the bare minimum, I should have some assurance that any telemetry information I provide, isn't used to simply make me purchase a new product, but to improve the existing product.
Anyway, how many UWP apps are you running? Do you think every Win32 desktop app is now magically tracking you? Nope.
So, let's compare how many UWP apps that you actually want to run (I don't use any of them) and see if they're tracking you as much as all the mobile apps you're running. There's no contest here.
You are able to turn it down to "Basic" using the GUI, and if you are using the enterprise edition thru corporate volume licensing you can turn it down further to "Security" with admin tools.
There is no way to turn it off completely, and since its cranked up by default, that is where it will stay for the majority of installations.
As an anecdote, even Microsoft employees I've spoken with think it's overreaching and underhanded.
Incorrect. There are in fact three ways to completely disable it. You can get the Enterprise edition [0] or modify your registry configuration [1] or by a third party tool [2].
Even if you don't want to do any of those for some reason, reading about the Basic level of telemetry - it's nothing. At least it's nothing that I care about.
I’m a single-person sole proprietorship, and I have two seats of Windows Enterprise with Software Assurance as part of an Open Business agreement; “volume” doesn’t imply “high-volume”.
Bringing this back to the the story, one is assigned to a Mac Pro, where, per Microsoft’s bizarre licensing terms, it qualifies as an “upgrade” to the bundled copy of OS X (upon which I run it under VMware, permissible via further licensing gyrations).
Last time I asked, Enterprise SKUs were only available if I took 50+ licenses. Being a single person sole proprietor like yourself, that was obviously non-starter.
Another option was Action Pack, where I would get 10 licenses for a very nice price, with a bunch of other products, but that would be only usable for development or testing, not for production (i.e. not for daily use while running the company).
The problem with Windows tracking is not that apps track you (here the solution would be easy: just don't use the apps), but that the system itself snitches on you.
Are you starting an app or search for document, using the windows shell? Your phrase goes to Bing. That's much harder to avoid than just not using an app.
I did disable Cortana (it doesn't even work in the language version I want to use), but according to the firewall, it still tries to connects to bing.com.
They can track network connections or system calls for Win32. Also which DLLs the apps use. Any DLLs provided by MS can be instrumented and track any information that goes through them.
If Microsoft let me buy Windows without that, I would have paid for it. Alas, If I spend $200 on Windows 10, I get the same tracking landmines than the person who spent 0 a few years ago.
A free version with ads and telemetry isn't free, it's just monetized differently. And the vast majority of the cost of developing it is either sunk or defrayed by the paid versions.
The default exists because not everyone has the same reaction to the telemetry as you. For those who do, they have some means of bypassing that (for now).
And yet, Apple has been pushing me in a direction I don't want to go with their recent OS X versions. I paid a lot of money for my mackbook and was quite happy with Lion, but was recently forced to upgrade because apparently Lion is way too out of date.
So now I'm on Sierra, and I absolutely hate it. I thought it'd mostly just be uglier, but it bugs me with updates I don't want or need but am not allowed to ignore. And I hate their in-your-face notifications blocking an important part of my screen. (How about at the bottom next to the dock? Or in the menu bar? Just not over an active working window.)
More or less hopelessly entrenched in the Apple ecosystem here, but I totally agree with you. The non-stop annoying notifications was one of the main bullet points that I listed when leaving Windows 10 years ago, and now they've finally found me again..
Here's the funny thing about that notifications preference pane: I can tweak the way any kind of notification is displayed, except for updates. There the only options are: update now or pretend to update now.
"Hey, have you tried Safari? It's pretty great. Why don't you give it a try?"
"Umm, hey there...me again. You still haven't tried Safari? What's wrong? Want me to launch it for you?"
"Ok, this is getting a little awkward. We worked pretty hard making Safari, and you won't even try it? I'm trying to not be insulted here, but you're not making it easy."
"Listen motherfucker. You know that Keychain thing that you don't really pay much attention to. Well, I control that. If you want to see your Gmail password again, try motherfucking Safari. Clicky clicky, you lazy fuck."
My favorite is the, "a keynote upgrade is available" on each launch. Only to find out after clicking its "only after you update your OS!" (I'm was on mavericks)
And the "please use iCloud..."
On cars we used to call them "guilt buttons" for plastic shaped like buttons on the dashboard for options you didn't purchase.
I don't use Safari, I use Chrome normally but Firefox sometimes. Never seen notifications like that, to be honest. Like the sibling comment, I wonder what the criteria for that nagging is. Maybe it's A/B testing, and you fell in the unlucky category?
Notifications at the top-right, covering the top-right of whichever window is active. Fortunately most of them can be dismissed, but those concerning updates cannot, which is extremely annoying. I've once already accidentally triggered a 15 minute update, which can be extremely inconvenient when it happens at the wrong time.
I've found a way to get rid of the update notifications, though: click "details", which opens the app store with a list of your pending updates. As long as you leave that open, the notification won't reappear.
You can hide the notifications until you want to open notification center to see what they are by turning on Do Not Disturb in the settings. (Set it to be active on a timed basis, from say "7:01AM to 7:00am" to cover a full 24 hour spread.)
I really wish this wasn't on by default, or at least it prompted you to change this on install. Auto-downloading updates cost a month of valuable internet as it blew through the ISP's data cap in a single day.
To be fair, if you're on a laptop or are just regularly using full-screen apps, top-right notifications are going to cover a chunk of your screen which you might be using. Of course, so would notifications absolutely-anywhere in that situation.
"86.5% of Alphabet’s revenue still comes from their advertising business, which is driven by searches in web browsers"
That's a hell of a lot.
I wonder how quickly their other revenue sources are growing? A ton of companies are using Google products in a paid capacity. They're really very good.
Google doesn't sell user information. Also, Microsoft also has a search engine and ad business that do the exact same thing and just because it isn't successful that doesn't allow you to give them a free pass. Additionally, they preinstall third party bloatware on their OS and send tremendous amounts of telemetry back to their servers.
Google absolutely sells access to "digested" user information. While your first sentence is technically correct since they don't directly give anyone the data, it is misleading at best. Google is in the business of selling selective eyeballs to advertisers, and has been a pioneer in using user data to try and target those add impressions.
Google doesn't sell access to user information either, digested or not. I think it's misleading to say they do, "digestedly", or indirectly, or whatever.
Google sells advertisers a promise to show their ads for razors to males 18-30 years old who have ever searched for 'razors' or 'shaving' or 'beard' or 'shaving cream'.
Maybe they also look through your Google photos to find faces with beards... or check your email for references to beards or amazon orders with razors... and to show extra ads to people who live in the Portland area
Some people are more okay with the facts (top paragraph) and the possibly exaggerated version (previous paragraph) and others.
Google charges clients for the ability to have their ads seen by the demographic of users they want to target. Under no circumstances does Google sell user data in any form and it's disingenuous to try and make people believe that they do.
Microsoft does not preinstall third party bloatware, that's OEMs running on thin margins. There have been Microsoft efforts to share with OEMs the effect of bloatware on boot times and incentivizing boot time reduction.
Yes they do. My Windows 10 upgrade, which was from Microsoft, came with Candy Crush [1] and some third party PDF annotation app. They also added ads in their OS [2] to try and upsell you.
Just because you don't want to pay directly doesn't mean it's not valuable. Value is hard to judge and people will definitely start to care if it all stopped.
I've never thought about it this way. I was wanting to transition to using all Google products and services from Apple but might just further invest in Apple and start using their cloud service as opposed to Google's.
> Microsoft want me to buy subscriptions to their cloud services and ideally devices running their OS.
Microsoft pretty clearly wants 100% telemetry about everything you do on your computer - to the point where they will explicitly override user settings to the contrary - so you are underestimating the scope of their motivation
"Personally I prefer to pay someone for a product/service directly." This wont work in our part of the world where access to tech is more important than ethics to a lot of people.
It’s kind of crazy just how many resources of humankind must be expended to make up for obnoxious behaviors, whether it is burning cycles on ad-blockers or cleaning up other peoples’ garbage.
For all the power we have expended, humankind could be so much further along than we are.
I wish the people who spent energy making terrible ad experiences would just quit their jobs and apply their talents to something of actual value.
I worked in ads company. I understood that I was producing waste. But I treated it as a puzzle. Tasks were really challenging and salary was more than average.
how wasteful would your work have to be before the personal satisfaction wasn't enough to outweigh the drain on society as a whole?
i'm genuinely asking, because i'm genuinely curious. i'm lucky enough to get paid decently to work at a job that i believe in, and that's been true of the vast majority of my employment history. but i can think of an e-commerce gig i took that i did not particularly believe in (though i certainly didn't find it immoral), and what was essentially a classed up spam generation gig that i turned down a long time ago (more for the fact that i had a bit of trouble trusting the founder when i pressed him on what equity and future compensation might look like, though i was also rather hesitant to become a spammer, er, direct marketer).
> how wasteful would your work have to be before the personal satisfaction wasn't enough to outweigh the drain on society as a whole?
That's noble thought, but if the pay is high enough, you'd be plain dumb not to do it. Especially when there is someone else willing to ponce on the opportunity if you turn it down.
sorry, this is not how morality works in my worldview. "someone else willing to do it" is nowhere near sufficient to imply "morally acceptable for me to do it".
"someone's gonna get paid, might as well be me" isn't, IMO, a reasonable way to make decisions. sometimes the morally correct thing to do is to pass up a payday, because you don't think the thing being done is the right thing for the world.
If it is question about being paid well or not at all. Then I rather get paid well. The world isn't going to get better just because I refuse the work. In fact it might just get worse, since at least I can try to influence the product or at least half ass it in some way.
I had ads but playing devils advocate they have given a huge number of people access to technologies they never would have had access to otherwise. They have made entire businesses viable that wouldn’t be as good otherwise.
I think the problem more importantly is the current tracking ad bubble. The design of the current debt based economy naturally leads to these kinds of bubbles.
The other day someone was asking why Facebook wants people to adopt to React, which is generally just a question about why all of these software vendors want to eat the world and become the source of everything that commands user attention.
This is why. Apple can use its influence to harm its competitors by frustrating the mechanisms used to promote their monetary interests, making a (legitimate) claim that doing so is beneficial to the user.
Microsoft articulated the goal well in its 1998 memos, the infamous "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". They want platform control because once you control user attention (and developer attention by extension), you can wedge your way in and do things that benefit your company over others.
Facebook controls the front-end library used by a large portion of all sites, not just facebook.com. If Apple's machine learning mechanism notices some common patterns between Facebook's code for React and Facebook's code for user tracking, either organically or because Facebook does a couple of nudges to make sure that happens, now Safari is broken, evidenced by its inability to correctly render a large portion of the web. If Facebook only had control over code running on facebook.com, then Facebook would be the apparent source of any user-facing breakage.
Note that users are not the customer being catered to. They are, rather, the resource being exploited to provide the energy necessary to undergird the MegaCorp's power expansion, in service to the other MegaCorps doing large-scale advertisement, endorsement, and censorship/speech control deals with them.
In Android, it is not mandatory to use Google apps - you can use your favorite browser, mail or maps instead of the Google ones. Firefox, Nine or Here, for example.
The difference between Android and Google Play Services/Google Apps Suite is, that the latter use Google servers and the former does not.
If removing these apps makes Android unusable for you, it means you are hooked on or locked-in to them. Asking for open-sourcing the client parts will not help you anyway, because the server parts are still running on Google servers and you won't be able to replace them.
> Asking for open-sourcing the client parts will not help you anyway, because the server parts are still running on Google servers and you won't be able to replace them.
It wouldn't be ideal, but a big improvement. Providing a clear API to Store, Maps, Mail, etc. would (1) allow developers to publish their own client for these services (that e.g. don't display ads, or don't track the user, or obfuscate/anonymise the information they send to the servers), and (2) allow competing backends to be developed and allow the users to choose between them without having to change the mobile OS.
So you want to use their back end with your front end, and remove their monetization? Why would they even entertain the thought of agreeing to something like that?
The much better approach is bring your own backed. E.g. I'm using Sygic (because it is offline and the roaming fees were killing the online maps) and it works in the all places where the original Maps work. If I click in the Booking.com app to navigate to the hotel, for example, Sygic (and other alternate maps) work seamlessly in place of Google Maps. All that without having to use their back end. The APIs for doing that are already there since v1.
In other words, (1) developers could publish for years alternative implementations, with any back end that allows that in it's TOS (though Google's doesn't) and (2) this was always possible.
I'm not saying they have to allow that, I'm just saying that's what it would take them to "neutralize" the threat of their business model for users (and become as trustworth as Apple).
Unfortunately, this is the case of wanting to have a cake and eat it too. That's why I wrote that bringing alternate implementations is a better approach. That way you don't want something for nothing (use Google resources without any compensation; you don't pay them anything after all, but you do pay to Apple).
> Asking for open-sourcing the client parts will not help you anyway, because the server parts are still running on Google servers and you won't be able to replace them.
Yes I could, if the average android phone would allow me to do so. You can't go to the store, buy a phone, and remove google play services. At the very least you have to root the phone, which isn't possible on most devices.
You can also not put in username and password for a Google account. Without authenticated account, Google Play Services won't work.
What you can do, is to install apps or plugins for CalDAV/CardDAV-like services. The account system works with any generic account, not just with Google accounts; you can implement any service you want talking with any protocol you want. You don't need Google Play Services source for that.
Removing apks for android installation is cannon for sparrows. Remember, /system is not only for running the system, but also for factory reset/recovery too.
Getting your iPhone to stop calling Apple and Google would make it unusable as well. The difference is that it's actually impossible to do on an iPhone.
My phone with LineageOS + microG is very usable. It does use Google's service for Push Notifications (because I do want them) — with an open source client for that service.
I don't know how many times Google Maps calls home, but it does it often enough for Google to know where any Android user that hasn't explicitly disabled location tracking has spent each minute of his/her life.
The proof is easy obtainable on Google Maps location history.
It doesn't call home with each data point; that would mean that radio is never standby and the user would notice that his battery is quickly dead.
No, location history is a _feature_, where saved datapoint set is submitted in batches, when the radio is active. And of course, you can turn it off (I did).
Sure you can. You're free to download from the Amazon App Store or any other app store or even get your apps directly from the developer.
You're confusing your cheap Android phone with an expensive iPhone. On the latter, you need an Apple account just to download apps, and their App Store tracks you exactly the same amount as Google's Play Store.
So sign up for a Google Account. As long as you're not using Google+, there's no requirement that a Google Account have accurate, personally-identifying information. And if it's only used to sign into the Play Store, then all Google will know about "you" is what apps you've downloaded. (And you can sign back out of the Play Store in Settings right after if you want, though you won't be able to retrieve updates then.)
Apple has publicly committed themselves to certain approaches wrt to privacy. If they fail to act as they have said they will, class action lawsuits will follow shortly.
Nothing prevents you from using a competitor's core apps on Android. Those apps could be even better at stopping tracking than Apple's. On iOS, you're stuck with whatever maps or browser Apple decrees.
I think this is a really key point: on Android I have the option to install whatever software I like, from whomever I like. There are tradeoffs, of course, but I am free to choose between them.
Uhmmmm...what? You can install google maps, chrome or firefox (although these don't count because they're just safari skins. But if someone wanted to they could implement real chrome or real firefox for ios.) You can install any number of third-party keyboards, alarm clocks, what-have-you.
iOS doesn't allow you to implement a JIT because Apple doesn't trust its OS to have working process isolation, so you actually can't have a real Firefox or Chrome on iOS.
Yes, one thing that has probably helped Apple is that their business model aligns with what their users want. Not having to be a weasel about it, not forcing users to just have to live with something. Last thing I saw was Microsoft pushing Edge ads from within Windows 10 itself. Ads – in an operating system?!
Where? I've been using these products for years and have never seen this. I get (too many) notifications about available updates, but have never seen an ad anywhere on either macOS or iOS from Apple.
> Automatically use Safari Reader for every web article that supports it, so you can view websites without ads, navigation, and other distractions.
This will come in handy since I hit the reader mode on articles as soon as the page loads and the reader option is enabled. On a side note, I like Firefox too because it has a reader mode built in. While Chrome has plugins to make this happen, having this feature as a first class citizen makes a difference. Of course Chrome has other strengths and I spend a lot of time in it, but I end up using Safari or Firefox for reading on the web.
Yes! When I saw this, I leapt for joy! I have been wanting a feature like this. No more having to see modal pop-overs asking me to subscribe their crappy newsletter. It's about time!
> Safari now uses machine learning to identify advertisers and others who track your online behavior, and removes the cross‑site trackingdata they leave behind.
Do my Safari Google searches still go via Apple by default though? I guess that's totally ok if you're in Team Apple? It's just sadly naive to believe a corporation has your privacy interests in mind in the absolute.
IIRC the idea is that (1) it allows third-party cookies of the websites you actually use (like Facebook so FB integration works), and (2) it allows cookies on new websites for the first day or so, and then it starts blocking them.
Apple left ad blocking to third party developers. You can find plenty of ad blocking apps on the App Store. I imagined they did this for political reasons because they don’t want to the arbitrator of deciding whether something is an ad or not.
So how many decades are we going to hear about how bad it is that Google knows what kind of toothpaste I like and how important privacy is before we actually see a real world benefit?
Can someone point to any situation in the past where the conclusion was "good thing the ads were less targeting to my interests!"
Groups that get more and more power pretty much never give up that power willingly. Google's NEED to understand your desires, track your behavior, and read your emails to sell more and better ads is them accumulating power.
So, even if you think Google will always have your best interests at heart, the governments they work with certainly don't. China could exploit their knowledge to target dissidents. Would Google do that? Perhaps, just censoring internet was anathema to Google in their early days, now Google respects Chinese censorship.
To be honest, I'm not comfortable with my own government knowing what I want to read online or what I say to my friends, let alone authoritarian ones. The future is pretty much already here on that one though as government already does.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... has an example (Target, not Google) where that could very well be the conclusion, yes (or rather "too bad the ads were targeted so well"). That's off the top of my head, since that one hit the national news pretty widely.
Google's personalised search results have already contributed strongly to the political polarisation that we are seeing in the US. And that's to say nothing of Google's internal politics that is seeing the ostracisation of liberal leaning points of view. See James Damore as a case in point.
You are right that the product comes from the business model. You are however completely wrong about what Google should do. Advertising is not an evil thing that needs to be eliminated. It is a much better revenue source for building services compared to selling hardware. Apple organization is fundamentally built around selling hardware and software as a package for an upfront cost. The organization is design to perfect something than release it. This is 100% at odds with what you need to do with services. You need to iterate all the time and not be trying to perfect something for the new iOS release.
Your advice would lead to maps, gmail, etc be becoming worse but their hardware still not keeping up with apple.
Passive advertising is not an evil thing that needs to be eliminated. But when companies start building dossiers on all of us that even intelligence services would be jealous of, that is evil.
> This is 100% at odds with what you need to do with services. You need to iterate all the time and not be trying to perfect something for the new iOS release.
This sounds like it _should_ be true, but unfortunately, Apple has a much much better track record of supporting its old devices that Google. So, yeah, the "service" might work, but what help is that if my 3-year old Android phone was hacked yesterday because Google (or OEMs) don't bother patching it any more?
In this blog post, we briefly discussed High Sierra's "Secure Kernel Extension Loading" (SKEL) and demonstrated a new 0day vulnerability that can be exploited to fully bypass this new `security' feature.
Unfortunately when such `security' features are introduced - even if done so with the noblest of intentions - they often just complicate the lives of 3rd-party developers and users without affecting the bad guys (who don't have to play `by the rules'). High Sierra's SKEL's flawed implementation is a perfect example of this. [There are many other examples.]
Of course if Apple's ultimate goal is simply to _continue_ to wrestle control of the system away from it users, under the guise of `security', I'm not sure any of this even matters."
It's unfortunate that there is an alleged 0day in this functionality. I don't know why the author is trying to accuse Apple of having the real goal of "wrestl[ing] control of the system away from it users". SKEL looks like a very good idea to me, and the presence of a bug does not make it any less of a good idea. It's also unclear in what way SKEL is supposed to be taking control away from Apple's users anyway. If anything, it's giving control to the users, because the users now get approval power over any KEXTs.
Try making a change to the /usr filesystem, for example. It's very hard in recent versions of macOS. It sounds like this type of thing is going to be harder in the future, and that's what the GP is talking about, I believe.
When this first came out I had some troubles with it. I guess since then homebrew and others have caught up to the changes. It hasn't been a problem for many months.
It's part of an overall trend. For example the gatekeeper security settings ux has slowly been removing options to run unsigned binaries bit by bit.
In 10.12 there is no obvious way on how to run unsigned binaries now. When you double click on an app multiple times, it refuses to run. If you go to security settings you cannot run the unsigned binary from there. You have to right click on the app and press open to get the old dialog that would allow you to run an unsigned binary like it's some sort of easter egg. In older versions you didn't have these restrictions.
Did you ever configure Gatekeeper in Security settings to allow for unsigned apps? It's plausible that updating to Sierra would preserve that setting, though I haven't tried (as I never configured my system that way).
The biggest problems I have had with my Mac came from a kernel extension that I didn't know got installed, and didn't get uninstalled when I uninstalled the accompanying program.
It's always interesting how they implement security features. With Vista MS introduced UAC which is a major headache if you develop any automated tools. But most users I have observed will always press "Yes" automatically because they have no idea what the message really means. The result is that life got worse for developers often forcing them to do less secure hacks and overall no gain in security.
> The result is that life got worse for developers often forcing them to do less secure hacks and overall no gain in security.
But, for comparison, life got considerably better for me. I fee much safer (but not safe, there's plenty to worry about with just access to my user files) knowing when something is requesting Admin privileges, and because of the UAC prompts it's actually possible for regular users to run as non-admin and still get stuff done.
The amount of windows boxes that aren't running email clients and web browsers with full privileges by default is a huge advance for the whole world. That people aren't as careful as they should be with allowing that access sucks, but I think it's probably an order of magnitude at least better than what came before with regard to how easy it was to gain full access on Windows boxes through simple exploits. To say that there's been no overall gain in security in windows completely ignores the absolutely horrid state of security on Windows a decade or more ago. There are reasons why Windows is much better with respect to security today, and UAC is definitely one of them.
MS + Google (via only recently more finely-grained Android permissions)
It amazes me at the arrogance in assuming users are idiots, so it's not worth engineering features for them.
"Warning: This installer is attempting to replace core Windows files. Do you want to allow it to do this?" isn't hard but gives substantially more useful information than "Do you want to allow this installer to do stuff?" (Current UAC)
I'm going to ask for a citation on that. Where is proof that average users will ignore reasonably worded security messages?
Because as far as I can remember (Windows back to 95, MacOS back to the 6100), we (ie computer science professionals) have never done what I would even call an "acceptable" job at attempting this.
And the argument, for 20+ years now, has always been "Har har, users are too dumb to read. We'll just abstract all those decisions away from them."
Stupid dialogs and lazy UX begat stupid users, not the other way around.
I mean, I feel like a big difference between me and my grandma is that I have an instinct for quickly getting to the "meat and potatoes" of whatever I'm doing on the computer.
I do a google search and click within 5 seconds the right link, even if the first couple are ads/irrelevant. When installing a program, I get through everything quickly, without wasting mental energy on the useless TOS and etc.
Whereas my grandma will see a TOS and think "oh my goodness, a contract! Do I need to sign this? What, should I read this?" Because she doesn't see many TOSs and doesn't get that they're not a legal document or whatever, and any actually interesting information is buried deep within swathes of legalize. She also doesn't have access to reddit/HN or whatever to quickly warn her if the TOS changes/contains heinous shit.
Anyway, I feel like this is why google and firefox buried their "untrusted website - go to it anyway" button in some clickies that even I have a hard time finding, to force people to actually consider the decision.
It doesn't seem like a real vulnerabilty to me - it is not remotely executable, it has to be run by a signed in user on the actual device.
When you go to facebook.com, your device must surely decrypt the keychain to plaintext to prefill the password field so it can send your password to facebook.com - Thats how it works.
So this seems like normal functionality to me, someone has just put it in a command line. Someone has just reverse engineered the keychain decrypt that happens all the time.
Yes, you are completely missing how the keychain works.
When you go to facebook.com, safari requests access to the facebook.com password via the keychain api. At which point you are supposed to be prompted by the OS, and if you allow it, the keychain api returns the decrypted password only for facebook.com.
The vulnerability being demonstrated is able to decrypt every password in your keychain, without prompting the user in any way.
I’d like a bit more detail. Instructions to repro ideally. Too much is left out of the video (show me the items it will access and the access permissions for those items) and I’m inclined to think it’s staged or Mr. Wardle didn’t understand something fundamental (e.g. if you built/debugged the app on the same system where you made the video, you may have already authorized the app to fetch items from the keychain.)
So would I.. normally quick to dismiss. I'm not familiar with Mr Wardle, but he seems to have some serious followers. I was hoping someone here has some background information.
It showed the "unknown developer" warning box when running the app, would that have been shown if the app was already authorised to access the keychain?
You are right, I initially misread your comment, I thought it said that Keychain only checks the app name.
The security framework uses some kind of digest / signature to verify that the app hasn't changed if the binary is not code signed. Apple's docs are scarce on details, see eg [1] which just says that the security framework makes sure the app wasn't altered.
But I am pretty sure the app name is ignored. Most macOS services use the bundle identifier.
However, if the app is code signed, the security framework automatically grants newer versions of the app permission if they have been signed with the same certificate.
What keeps me from updating that I am confused about the way forward regarding FileVault & APFS. I currently have FileVault enabled as I need my drive to be fully encrypted (liability for my clients). I want my backups to be encrypted as well.
But now APFS solves disk encryption on FS layer instead of going through CoreStorage. And I'm confused about the way forward for me.
Is there some documentation that explains
1) What happens to FileVault/Backups during initial conversion?
2) Am I better off to disable FileVault and then encrypt using APFS?
3) How does the APFS full disk encryption work? Does it have any problems, especially backup related?
4) Can I enable/disable FileVault after the conversion?
From my personal experience with the developer betas on my laptop;
I experienced no issue during the conversion of Corestorage Filevault to APFS Filevault. The conversion to APFS was offered as an option to me during the Developer Beta series.
I am not sure whether this will be done automatically for the release version. However I do understand that the conversion will only be offered to systems with Flash Storage only, whereas Fusion Drive and Hard Disk equipped systems will not. (as per: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018 )
I found that the process required no interaction on my part and that my system came back up without issue. Likewise, there was no change with how Time Machine operated for me, in fact I don't believe that Time Machine backups are touched by the conversion process.
On another fusion drive equipped system I have, I was able to manually enable Filevault after filesystem conversion to APFS. You should be able to disable it after conversion too, though I've not yet tested this out.
That was a concern to me before I migrated two laptops: one had FileVault enabled and the other not†. The conversion dealt with FileVault without a hitch. Even better, enabling FileVault on the non-encrypted one after the conversion let it encrypt without even the reboot previously required with HFS+, one less excuse not to enable it.
Backups to an external disk are still done to HFS+. External disks formatted as APFS either do not show up as available disks to backup to or prompt to format the disk back to HFS+ (I encountered both cases as I was trying to put TM into submission on that one). Remote backups (over AFP) are unaffected and still use (optionally encrypted) sparse bundles. So Time Machine itself appears to have not changed much in that regard. Local snapshots do leverage APFS snapshots though and are browsable at /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots.
† A mistake on my part following a restore from Time Machine where I did not enable encryption.
And I'm even more confused about how things should go about for more complicated Core Storage setups. I have several disks with Core Storage. All of them have multiple logical volume families in a single logical volume group. And some are encrypted and others are not. I also have Core Storage volume groups that span multiple hard disks and/or hard disk partitions. I read the Ars review but that doesn't cover APFS in much technical detail at all. I'm really missing those Core Storage deep dives in Siracusa reviews.
System Information 10.13 reports a medium type "SSD" for my stock MacPro6,1 flash and medium types "SSD" or "Rotational", as appropriate, for SATA SSDs and hard drives connected via non-RAID Thunderbolt AHCI controllers.
For my two Thunderbolt SAS RAID arrays, however, System Information shows no "Medium Type" field at all. And Disk Utility reports "Solid state: No" for both, even though one is, in fact, all SSD.
Therefore, on this one particular Areca controller at least, I'd be willing to bet that SSD boot volumes would look just like rotational hard drives to APFS and the installer, and therefore would not have been auto-converted at installation time.
With that said, on the GM candidate, converting the volumes on these RAID arrays to APFS after the fact was as simple as right-clicking each in Disk Utility and selecting "Convert to APFS...". And it the week or so since I did so, I've had no problems or regrets.
All volumes on this system are FileVault-encrypted, and APFS conversion did nothing to change this.
The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. Currently they’re all but useless for something like a shared album from a vacation, because it groups photos by when family members upload them. I tend to upload photos at the end of each day, but other family members who were shooting on a normal camera waited until the end of the trip to upload their photos. The end result is that photos that should be appearing next to each other instead show up at opposite ends of the album. Infuriating.
The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album.
This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. I remember the 10.2-10.6 releases and just how significant they were and it feels like rearranging deck chairs in comparison nowadays.
I remember the first time I saw Spotlight. It was magic. Then came Expose. Wireless that worked. Sleep that worked. Trivial configuration of things like sshd, apache and samba.
Amazing days.
Lately I only upgrade when forced. I ran 10.8 until earlier this year when I finally upgraded my machine. Then I spent a week trying to figure out how the hell to get gdb working again because binaries now require code signing and there's this horrible new thing called System Integrity Protection that tries to protect me from myself. They also took away my Escape key and replaced it with this TouchBar nonsens just because I wanted an i7 CPU. To put this into perspective: I practically live inside vim.
Remap single tap CAPS to ESC and when used in combination with another key or long-pressed - CTRL. This has changed the way I use my keyboard in vim and tmux.
I'm doing this on Ubuntu, but there are ways to get it done on OSX too.
I have `jk` mapped to ESC in spacemacs, zsh and anything else I can set up to use vi keybindings. `jk` is essentially a no-op in vi, so rebinding it doesn't cause any issues while carrying the advantage that my fingers never have to leave the home row.
Copy and paste from another window? If your use of the word "Dijkstra" is frequent enough for this method to bother you, there must be other mappings that would work.
once installed, open the app, and go to the "complex modifications" tab. then click "add rule". then click "import more rules from the internet". on the web site that opens, expand "Modifier Keys". import "Change caps_lock key".
that'll give you a rule to do what you want in karabiner. (the rule is "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".)
It breaks all sorts of things, even the version of py2app that Apple themselves ship - but are too lazy to test or read bug reports about for year after year.
“All sorts of things” is a broad statement to toss around without at least some links. I primarily work in python and had never even heard of the py2app issue since it’s not an incredibly common tool and most python developers I know use newer versions of python.
That’s why I questioned the original broad claim: I know there are edge cases but most of the developers I know work on Macs and SIP just isn’t mentioned often enough for it to be anywhere near as bad in general as a few random commenters claim, not to mention that anyone I know who’s at all security savvy appreciates that it’s a trade off rather than a unilateral bad move.
I develop against the deployment environment run in virtual machines for two reasons.
1) Too many packages/servers/etc. I've tried to install under OS X over the years just didn't quite work right. That's probably not the case so much any more, but I have experienced it recently.
2) Developing against a macOS localhost can mask problems associated with my code running in the deployment environment. So to avoid those surprises, I develop against the deployment environment.
If I need root for package install or other server deployments, I log into the VM and do it there. I rarely need to install stuff on my macOS workstation.
Re: #1 that’s been generally smooth for me since Homebrew stabilized but I think your second point is key: it’s faster to develop locally but you definitely want to have some regular test that you’re in sync with the actual deployment environment. Docker has made that pretty easy now that the Mac Docker app is solid.
Brew is what I was alluding to, they have straightened out much of the package management issues. I ran into problems recently where certain CPAN modules wouldn't compile under OS X.
I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.
I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.
If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install.
Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.
If I'd like to stick with HFS+ for now, do I have the option to during the upgrade? I dual boot with Windows and I'm worried about something getting messed up and am not sure if there's a way to read APFS from Windows yet (I back up of course, but want to avoid potential issues)
Update: I upgraded, and everything happened automatically. No option to opt out of APFS conversion so yeah, if that effects your workflow you should know that. Went without a hitch for me though!
Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.
I've been finding the same with iOS updates lately. iOS 11 has some nice improvements, imho, but they're not any major advancements, just the usual incremental improvements. Could have just called it iOS 10.4 and be done with it. That wouldn't be PR-friendly enough though.
If you have an iPad the iOS 11 update is huge. Being able to run two apps side-by-side with drag and drop supported across the system is a fundamental change to how you interact with stuff.
The new dock and changes to the multitasking interface and behavior take some getting used to, but my iPad feels like a much more powerful device than it did a week ago.
I do have an iPad on which I've been using the 11 beta for the past few months and I love the new multitasking support, but is it really big enough to warrant a major version bump?
You already could run two apps side by side in iOS 10 (I was a pretty heavy user of that feature, which is incidentally also the primary reason I opted into the beta), it just wasn't quite as flexible. Drag and drop is new, for sure. I suppose I haven't used it much so haven't really noticed it.
The dock seems like a small improvement over the old dock, added because of the better multitasking.
They're great improvements for sure, but they still seem like incremental improvements to me.
Everything Apple has done since iOS was first introduced (or arguably the initial iPad support in iOS 3.2 ) has been incremental improvements. But drag and drop is one of the bigger ones, IMO on-par with the initial multitasking support which incidentally was the update that finally convinced me to buy an iPad.
For an example of where this smooths things out, I've been using Readdle's Documents as an approximation of a local filesystem for a while now. Saving an image to that before was tricky; iOS doesn't have a way to isolate an image out of a page, just copy or save to camera roll. So you could save to camera roll and then import it over, but you lose the filename in the process and replace it with something generic like "Image 10". Or you can do weird workarounds like using Workflow's "Get images from page", which pulls up a slideshow of all the images on the page, which you then get to scroll through and find the one you wanted.
Now you just drag it and put it straight into the destination. You can also drag the URL bar over, which saves the URL as a new text file.
And if I have data in Documents that I want to use elsewhere, there's no shenanigans required with piping it through share sheets, I just drag it out and use it.
If you want something less permanent than a file manager, the popover multitasking is also a good platform for temporary "shelf" style data buckets. I'm currently trying Scrawl Pouch, but I've seen a couple others that looked equally nice. It's basically intended as a drag-and-drop destination to temporarily store any type of data until you want to drag it back out somewhere else.
This can be the obvious stuff like images and links from Safari, PDFs and other files out of Documents. You can also drop things like map pins, which can be shared via messages or email or dropped as links into Pages documents. I haven't experimented a lot with 3rd party apps, but presumably we'll see this show up in other ecosystems, maybe dropping things like audio effects between a family of media creation tools, or someone could make a 3rd party service for sharing paintbrush presets that you could drop into Procreate.
They've also brought in the "spring-loaded folders" behavior from Finder for this. If you're dragging a URL and you want to add it as a Safari bookmark, you can hover it over the sidebar button to pop it open and then navigate to the folder where you want to drop and save it. Or after the sidebar opens, you can hover over the Reading List tab to put it there instead of bookmarks. It's integrated like that throughout the entire OS.
A whole lot of things that just weren't possible on iOS are now a 2-second interaction.
Addendum on spring-loaded folders, you can even swipe up from the bottom to open the dock and then spring open another app. If you open Mail you can tap the new message button while still dragging the data, and then drop it into the new message popover. So splitscreen and slide over multitasking aren't even required to use drag and drop.
Ok that's fair. I suppose the update seemed less to me because I haven't needed the drag and drop for my workflow (basically I don't find myself needing to copy files/images very much and the documents I author on iPad are typically text only), so I guess this feature kinda slipped by me a bit.
I actually haven't used half that stuff yet, just discovered the depth of spring loading and the weird objects it supports (contacts / maps) while I was writing that comment. But even for smoother handling of text, images, and PDF files I really like this feature.
As a downside, the interface for picking up multiple objects feels a bit weird and is probably one of the bigger learning curves that iOS has gotten.
Another example I just found - you can drag an email (or several) from Mail over to Documents where they're saved as .eml files. Documents doesn't know how to render these so you see the full markup, but I can imagine that would be a useful feature for something.
Maybe a utility app to view full email headers? I don't think Mail.app has a way to get into those.
I'll settle for when shared iCloud albums support a decent size and resolution.
iCloud Photos is frustratingly bad, but I don't want to buy into other cloud ecosystem, like Google's. Does anybody know if it's possible to replicate the integration with Photos on both iOS and macOS, so I could write my own sync thing?
That’s dreadful! I had assumed that iCloud (rather than Dropbox) sharing would share the original as that is already in the cloud anyway. It would just be a pointer or DB entry
I was horrified when I learned that Google wasn’t going to save full resolution by default. Had no idea Apple would do something similar.
That's what I thought myself, but then I realized pictures put into shared albums are actually copied - you can delete the original and it's still available in the shared album, at 0 cost to your iCloud storage.
It's kind of a nice feature, but at the same time it makes doing things like collecting photos from my wife for a photo book annoying.
Ugh, wasn’t aware of that. That plus my annoyances with the sorting will definitely make me reconsider using the shared albums as the primary way of sharing family photos.
Serious question: What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos, and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour" (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?
Agree with you on the time ordering. If people want a particular order, they could upload in that order. If they want time ordered, they could tap a button to refresh sort by time taken.
However, and this is a big gotcha -- you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones, or out of order by minutes for individual devices.
What Apple could do is recognize contributors and devices in a shared album and let you assign an offset to each contributor plus device pairing, then sequence these all sensibly.
What I do is have a inbox type album for everyone during and following the trip, then import, sort and select and manually fix time offsets (if I remember, I have everyone take the same photo of the same phone clock at the same moment to make this easier), then re-order and curate to taste, then re-publish.
> What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos.
100 albums is nothing. Looking at my photo share history (on Google+, not iCloud as iCloud is useless) I have about 500 albums shared with friends and family over the last five years. And of course, there have been innumerably more albums shared with me, while iCloud limits that too to only 100 albums.
The best thing about these Google+ albums is that I don't even have to give them a name, unlike iCloud shared albums.
> and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour"
It's easy, I don't share photos every day, I share them e.g. at the end of a holiday, and then there are more than a thousand. In any case I might need to share even more, since I might share the same pictures to different people in different albums, and that counts multiple times.
Of course this is all moot, since the quality is degraded too much to use this service anyway.
> (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?
It doesn't rate limit, is blocks you out and it tells you to try again in an hour. I have to remember to do that and I have to remember where it errored out. It takes forever to do something that should take seconds. They already have all my pictures stored in iCloud. They are already there! "Sharing" doesn't consume resources, it's just an entry in a database referencing data they already have. Which, btw, means that they should not have to reduce the photo quality. They already keep my high quality data, and I pay for this storage. Reencoding into lower quality actually increases the storage they have to use for my data.
I suspect iCloud Photos and iCloud Photo sharing are two completely disconnected services at Apple that don't communicate properly.
> you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones
Erm, no, because you sort by actual physical time keeping track of time zone and everything?
I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day). Good model, fast, and no artificial limitations. I wish Apple would keep up.
I attempted over the years to use the various incarnations of Google's photos but they consistently mangled pictures, canceled / renamed / migrated services, bungled who gets to see what under what Google Accounts, etc., until I was browbeaten into conceding defeat.
I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong. So unless you fix the metadata, the only sort you can have is manual.
Note: If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again? What's the use case? Throwaways? You're making on average a new album every 3 days, which still seems a little awkward. And innumerably more shared with you, means, what, 10 albums shared with you a day? It's amazing you have time for detailed and thoughtful HN comments. You should switch to pictures, they're worth a thousand words.
I am very happy to pay someone to take care of my problems and I am a big fan in general of paying for software and services. Not sure exactly how Flickr would help me though, but I will take a look at Flickr.
Does it integrate with the iOS/macOS photo library? Basically if I make an album in Photos on an iPhone, does it get synced up as an album by the flickr app, or does it just upload the pictures? Similarly, does it integrate with Photos on the mac, or do I need to use some other method to get my pictures that lives outside Apple Photos?
> I think you missed the point on sorting by time. If multiple people are at an event, you lose the information about "physical time" because the time recorded in their snapshots is very probably wrong.
Why is the time "very probably wrong"? I don't understand this, everybody uses NTP or whatever the GSM/telecom equivalent is. I haven't seem a wrong time on a mobile device in probably over a decade.
> If you're not even naming albums, how does one find them again?
I rarely search for specific albums, usually I prefer to view all the pictures and search by date. Albums are just a grouping mechanism for sharing. Sometimes "an album" contains just one picture.
When I go in vacation, etc, I might create a named album that I can reference later, but other than that, yeah, albums are throwaways that are just for grouping a set of pictures at a moment in time.
> haven't seem a wrong time on a mobile device in probably over a decade.
Not talking about mobile devices. Talking about cameras.
A dozen of us from work flew to have lunch at Noma in Denmark. We combined pictures after. There were nearly as many wrong times as there were people in the group. No software could have machine sorted these.
> Flickr
Flickr integrates with camera roll to upload originals in background but you manage albums and sharing in their app or web, and share via URLs or app. Only you have to be a member.
Ah, of course that cameras always have time set wrong!
Personally I use cloud services like iCloud only for my iPhone pictures. For my "real" photography I just keep files on a NFS server (and Lightroom is a pain with NFS...), I don't import then in cloud services.
> I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day).
What problems do you have with Google Photos on iOS, macOS? I use it regularly with web (windows, macOS) and my android, iOS devices and have no major complaints. For me, it's by far the best photos solution there is.
And I'm invariably the only geek whose photos are timestamped in UTC because I set devices that way (except for phones which I can't), or who knows that the metadata doesn't even record the TZ until a recent EXIF standard update, 2.31 released last fall, added support.
Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.
> Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.
Most of my friends and family take their photos with Android, iOS devices and Google Photos seems to have fixed this issue and all of my photos have a timezone field. Here is an example of a recent one: https://i.imgur.com/8AFgKs3.jpg
Not sure how it's done, but I also don't have this problem on iOS. Apple Photos seems to sort by UTC, not sure if it uses embedded TZ in photos or the GPS in EXIF, but whatever it's using, it seems to work fine for me.
> Wikipedia still says "There is no way to record time-zone information along with the time, thus rendering the stored time ambiguous." It'll be a while for cameras to catch up.
Apple Photos sorts photos by UTC, today, I assume by using the GPS information inside EXIF. There is no confusion between photos taken in different time zones.
I do a lot of photography from jets, and the photos are sorted just fine, while the time zone changes all the time.
Yeah, and it doesn't make any sense as they already have the pictures in the original quality stored on their servers already.
I think (but I am not sure) you can use iCloud Photo sharing even if you don't use iCloud Photo library, but that's a special case. Then you could limit the quality of those photos, I guess. But why degrade the quality of photos that you already have? Sharing doesn't use any extra space than non-sharing. They are in the cloud anyway.
I live in Canada and am born in the early 80s. 1 in 20 of my friends has a phone that isn't an iPhone, we often use iCloud photo sharing for albums but I don't know anyone who is using iCloud Photo Library, so not a special case in my circle
Workaround: download the photos to your local storage and create a new album with them, you can then sort them correctly by date taken. Can delete the original and reshare if others want access to the photos in chronologically taken order.
The biggest change I’ve noticed since testing each of the betas and now running the final release is the significant decrease in interface / UI latency, it feels significantly faster to use and is a welcome upgrade.
That'll be because Windowserver now uses Metal 2 to render UI, so if Apple's claims that it's 10x faster than Metal 1, then that's probably where the UI performance improvements have come from.
I personally own an entry-level Early 2013 Retina MacBook Pro with a i5/HD4000, and the iterative improvements they made with each major release really shine through. A machine that was previously described in every single review as underpowered on that department especially WRT Mission Control can now handle any number of windows I throw at it at a steady 60fps, including those blurs and transparencies which I previously had to disable back in the day, and even when compiling, say, GHC. As an extra bonus, the maximum video RAM on that machine was offset from 1024MB to 1536MB at some point (either Mavericks or Yosemite). Similarly, the Mid 2014 one (i7/HD5000) I use at work can handle the main display as well as external screens (including an ultrawide) without breaking a sweat. So much for planned obsolescence.
To add to this: the Nexus 5 was released a month after the 5S. That phone got its last official update last year, I believe. It was also discontinued a full year before the 5S.
Granted, the 5S started at 4GB for 500 USD and the Nexus 5 started at 16GB for 350 USD.
Still, it's hard to support the "planned obsolescence" argument.
How does your argument about Android vs iPhone affect my Mac vs iPhone argument? Macs have taken a performance hit with Yosemite, but have improved ever since, while old iPhones become more sluggish with every release.
I would generally expect new features designed for newer hardware to run worse on older phones. However, I'll agree that some releases are less about features and more about stability and performance.
Admittedly, I can't really speak to how older phones feel after some of the updates. The oldest iPhone I have is the original iPhone 6 and I haven't tried it on iOS 11 yet (currently using the iPhone SE, which _seems_ to run better on iOS 11).
I don't see how you can really say that sluggish is _worse_ than N/A. Worst case scenario, you just don't update, which is no worse than not getting the update in the first place.
Edit: clarity.
Edit2:
I realized I'm not really addressing your point.
I think there are some pretty big differences that make it hard to compare phone OS releases to computer OS releases.
Mobile devices have a much smaller margin for performance. They don't handle multitasking terribly well. These two things mean that the OS doesn't end up affecting the performance of a phone as much as apps and websites do.
One poorly developed app can destroy the performance of the entire phone (even without the app running in the foreground). None of this is true for a non-mobile device.
I definitely wish we would see more performance-focused iOS releases, but I don't think it has gotten to the "planned" obsolescence point as much as just "regular" obsolescence. Hard to say.
It could be less planned obsolescence and more that iPhone/iPad hardware has gotten many times faster over the past few years while Mac hardware has improved by 50% at best.
Expose (or whatever the hell it's called now) is significantly faster on my 2015 5K iMac, the animation used to lag with as little as 6 windows on my workspace, I've seen it handle around 24 now without dropping frames. The upgrade to Metal 2 for WindowServer is a pretty nice performance boost.
When installing a major OS update it's often worthwhile to do a clean install. As a shameless plug of some free software I made, Install Disk Creator will make you a bootable USB installer out of any USB disk you have laying around made from the macOS installer that you download from Apple.
"Install Disk Creator will make you a bootable USB installer out of any USB disk you have laying around made from the macOS installer that you download from Apple."
Wow - thank you! I have a half-page of self-written documentation about turning an apple installer into a bootable USB that I hope to never have to use again ...
While I think Disk Creator is awesome for certain I’ve never found that a fresh install is needed for macOS upgrades. They have maybe the best upgrade process in the biz right now.
Honestly, I haven’t even bothered doing that with Windows in a pretty long time—maybe since the 7 to 8 transition, after which they’ve had a pretty robust upgrade path. About the only place I do do that regular is on Linux, but that’s because it’s stupidly easy to do so due to the packet managers, not because I actually have to.
While I’ve not felt any particular pain from updating, other than perhaps some binaries from homebrew that needed to be recompiled, i've got an enormous ~/Library folder along with a few hundred GBs of other cruft accumulated through several upgrades of OS X over the last four or five years. Most of it is applications not related to the OS, so not blaming Apple here, but the opportunity to rebuild from a clean slate is welcome for sure.
It's only an opportunity to re-evaluate what autoruns at startup and what you want running in the background. This means people feel faster once they delete all of those things. You'd do just as well by removing them yourself.
If you have more than one Mac you might want to create a USB install stick so that you only need to download the installer once, on a Mac that you'll upgrade later.
What about performance on older machines? My mid-2010 MBP is still supported, but I'm afraid of switching if performance takes a hit. It has dual 512GB SSDs and 8GB RAM, so it runs Sierra with more or less success, but it's usable.
With all this filesystem level changes, does High Sierra have more hardware requirements than Sierra?
I have installed 10.13 on a mid-2009 macbook pro using the installer patcher hack. It works quite fine, I did not notice any difference with Sierra. I have a single 256MB SSD and 8GB RAM. On a side note, I did not get the APFS update, I assume this is because it is a third party SSD.
UI wise it should make more efficient use of your MBP's GPU, thanks to Metal 2, but on the other hand that efficiency may be negated again by more visual effects. Things like blur (which cost performance) can be disabled in accessibility settings though.
___>
'
Metal 2
Supported by the following Mac models:
MacBook (Early 2015 or newer)
MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or newer)
MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or newer)
Mac mini (Late 2012 or newer)
iMac (Late 2012 or newer)
Mac Pro (Late 2013)
'
Installed on a 2012 non-retina 13” mbp, everyhing feels faster (probably no benchmark gains, but much less UI latency, faster app switching etc.). Thankful, I don’t need anyhing more from the update :).
Though I appreciate the effort they're putting into GPGTools, issues preventing one from using it on Sierra went on for more than half a year after Sierra went public.
Are there any improvements to the Dock? Apple really needs to open up an API for Spaces so we can have a proper tiling window manager that works across Spaces without buggy hacks.
I still haven't updated to Sierra because I depend on Karabiner. Just tried the newest version of Karabiner-Elements and it still doesn't do everything I need.
It did take a bit of extra time to replicate my Karabiner setup, however controllermate is much more capable and the overall result has been worth the effort.
Does it allow you to implement the conditional mapping of karabiner for capslock,i.e. By itsrlf its escape, with another key its ctrl? That's the one thing I've gotten so used to having that I don't know if I could go back. Im remembering now why I never did make the leap to Sierra.
I regretted upgrading to Sierra because I lost my favorite functionality of Karabiner. But I got most of the features back when I started using Hammerspoon. It's not GUI friendly, but it's doable and there's a lot of scripts available. It's similar to Window's Autohotkey which I use at work, but Hammerspoon has a sane, real language (Lua).
My other suggestion is to actually replace keyboard. ErgoDox EZ and Ultimate Hacking Keyboard have almost all the features I need from Karabiner, but is saved to the firmware, so I can take the keyboard anywhere and it just works. Also, they're mechanical keyboard, so it's nice to type on.
I use Karabiner to remap all the keys/buttons on my Razer Naga (so I can avoid using Razer's awful software). I've looked into Hammerspoon but it's not clear if/how I can remap keys only from a specific device.
Is it possible to rebind the caps lock key? That's the only reason why I have Karabiner-Elements installed, using the caps lock key for delete_forward is the best thing ever.
*>Reader. Always on. Automatically use Safari Reader for every web article that supports it, so you can view websites without ads, navigation, and other distractions.
This is interesting, how does a website signal that it's ok for you to block all its ads?
It doesn't. Safari auto-detects when to offer Reader mode, and what's new in Safari 11 is you can then configure the website to automatically start in Reader (you can do this through Safari preferences, or by right-clicking on the URL bar).
It would work fine, but compile times are obvious slower than a desktop with a better CPU. High Sierra adds official support for external GPUs on thunderbolt and you'll definitely need one.
Apple sells an enclosure (Sonnet's) with an RX 580. I thought this also came with a $100 Vive discount, but that promo must have ended.
Also note that Metal has less CPU overhead than OpenGL. Beyond the compile times, you'll be more likely to run into CPU bottlenecks while running games/applications that are OpenGL based.
I am excited about the new Photos, I am hoping I can stop having to use Lightroom and other tools aimed at real pro's to manage and edit my hobbyist photo collection.
"1. Xeno Kovah(<-) @XenoKovah 17m17 minutes ago
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Replying to @XenoKovah @NikolajSchlej @coreykal
A design requirement we were given early on by Privacy was that we can't just scoop up everyone's firmware and send it back for analysis
1. Xeno Kovah(<-) @XenoKovah 15m15 minutes ago
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In my perfect world we would have rolled this out way back in 10.12 as just a silent data collector"
Once again, remote, "silent data collect[ion]" from all users, in this case from a hidden partition on user-owned hardware, is on by default. Nor is user asked for consent.
This is not meant to be "alarmist".
EFI is an open specification. Anyone can write EFI applications and anyone can use EFI type partitions for whatever purposes they like, assuming that the computer belongs to them, i.e. they paid for it. EFI usage is not exclusively reserved for companies like Apple.
Perhaps if the remote check was on a more familiar partition type where more familiar files are stored, the privacy issue might be better illustrated.
It's simply ensuring the firmware (which is really part of the hardware--though nothing's "hard" until you get down to the microcode interpreter on the CPU) hasn't been altered.
The only "data" collected is: Has this Mac been compromised?
It's being called data collection to be alarmist. It's the same thing as the iTerm bug last week. There's a genuine issue that is blown out of proportion by the network-Temperence movement. I agree that this should be an opt-in or at least opt-out thing, collecting anonymous checksums to start to watch for EFI vulnerabilities is a little different form sending Apple your DNA profile to be sold on the human clone black market.
Have been on it since beta 3 or something. This has been one of the more smooth transitions, no dev tools broken, and only few apps had some quirks that I filed bug reports for, which are now fixed.
The APFS change really isn't something you are likely to hit, heck you'd have to go out of your way to make it a problem.
Speed ups? Where are you seeing speed ups? I'm on a Macbook (last gen) and have been using High Sierra for the last month or so. Aside from my changed desktop background, I haven't actually spotted (any / many?) changes.
General animation things because of Metal 2. APFS is awesome when copy pasting (instant), Safari's faster, and general performance increase (subjective of course).
Yup, which is pretty neat. Before you'd have to wait for the little Finder window to show up, calculate time remaining and then do the job. Now it's instant when copy-pasting files around :)
It doesn't, it only touches the drive you perform it on (meaning your Mac HD). I literally did a fresh install yesterday with an existing bootcamp partition, and no problems.
One thing though, if you relied on some thing like Paragon or whatever to read your HFS drive, that will obviously not work anymore (not personally a problem, but could be a deal breaker for some).
Thanks for the heads up. I was considering using vagrant on this box. I'm currently RDP'ing into a windows box in the office and using that for vagrant most of the time at the moment.
Yup, it's a well established truism at this point that if you need a stable system (or don't have excellent data backups) you should never install the .0 version of any Apple OS. And while many Cocoa apps should be forwards-compatible out of the box, if you rely on Homebrew it may be several months before the packages you need are all updated.
Obviously just 1 data point, but I've been on High Sierra since the GM candidate came out. Smooth transition - everything just worked. Nothing about my development setup had to change.
I’ve got a spare machine and will run it on first. I don’t do any dev on the box; it’s all remote. I use git client and macvim to update some markdown docs occasionally but that’s about it. Rest of it is on the end of SSH and via web.
You won't be able to connect to a shared drive using AFP anymore, if you get the new file system APFS when you upgrade. Apparently you only get APFS if you have a pure SSD drive (not Fusion).
APFS and file sharing
- Volumes formatted as APFS can't offer share points over the network using AFP.
- APFS supports SMB and NFS, with the option to enforce only SMB-encrypted share points.
So I read the note you quoted as "an APFS filesystem can't be exported over the network via AFP", but what you wrote seems to say "a machine running the APFS filesystem cannot mount an AFP exported filesystem".
I don't think your conclusion is supported by the snippet you quoted.
Do you really have the button? I saw this headline and tried to update the Macs I have that are waiting for this update, but none of them see it in the App Store.
They're supported, they're just not upgraded to apfs. At the moment, only SSDs get upgraded automatically. Not entirely clear why, or whether that's a long-term plan.
So an early version of the beta set up Fusion drives with APFS, and then the next version switched them back to HDFS. I don't know the exact issue, but I would roll back like that if I saw there were data corruption/data loss issues.
So, while going through this page, I decided to check out the Safari product page, and saw this http://i.imgur.com/GXQAQVK.png. Does anyone here have any clue what they mean by having a second safari benchmark next to the Windows 10 browser benchmarks? Are they just trying to say "If our browser did work on Windows 10, this is how it would perform"?
It is saying that safari on mac is 4.3x faster than firefox on mac, and also that safari on mac is 4.2x faster than firefox on windows (at executing javascript).
Went to upgrade an iMac and an MBP to High Sierra today. The iMac took well over an hour. The MBP is the first Mac since my LC back in 1990 to be bricked during an OS upgrade. While I should be praising Apple for that kind of track record, I'm not exactly thrilled. I mean, it's not just a restart-and-try-again, it's a flat out "WTF do I do now?" bricking.
I've tried to use macOS with case sensitive filesystem for some time (before APFS). Works mostly fine but there're applications that break (Steam and Intellij IDEA are the two I remember).
there was a tremendous ATP episode about this exactly, maybe 6-9 months back. John's explanation of case sensitivity and file systems is a real gem, if anyone can remember the title
Have you tried any of the Finder alternatives, such as Path Finder[0]? I'm not sure if it's a result of me adapting my workflow to the environment, but I find I don't actually use the Finder very much. Between ⇧⌘G (Go to Folder) and Launch Bar[1] (the first thing I install on a new system), actual Finder browsing is pretty rare for me. Of course, different people have different workflows and needs, and I can understand people who might want an alternative.
What do you personally find lacking or inefficient? What changes would you like to see?
At one point I looked at alternatives, but I wasn't ready to buy one. And since most editors and IDEs have "Show in Finder" options, that I use sometimes, I'd still have to augment my workflow to get around it.
Thanks for enumerating. Having used Macs since System 5, I'm definitely more accustomed to ⌘O for Open across applications, including the Finder, but I can understand how muscle memory can be hard to rewire. And while I'm sympathetic to the frustrations of learning the idiosyncrasies of a new system, I'm sure you recognize memorizing (new) shortcuts for applications independent of platform is something is par for the course.
If these are true sticking points for you, I'd suggest taking a look at the Finder alternatives again. I wouldn't be surprised if the Show in Finder feature isn't overridden in these environments. I can't imagine that the points you've listed are likely to be changed in Finder: they're behaviors that have existed across many, many versions.
> Say goodbye to videos that auto‑play.
Full of gimmicks, thats why some very basic bugs such as CJK inappropriate line breaking never gets fixed, because those fixes aint going to be attractive for eyes.
They blocked auto play video sounds just because some abusing the video tag? That is just going to push those scammy people finding the other way to annoy their users, such as, playing the audio separately in a audio tag or decoding and playing audio using javascript. Of course they can block those too to make it a even more backward browser, but indie web game makers are going to be suffered from that.
Photos will never be a viable replacement for the full Aperture professional use cases -- they have different goals.
Aperture might or might not run on HS (not sure), but holding to it until Photos catches up is not very good strategy, at some point it will just stop working (and it's not getting any new fixes, updates, etc).
I don't want to rent software, and I don't want to install the dreaded Adobe installer. What other good alternatives are there? Darktable doesn't pass the test.
I was an big Aperture user too, and put off the move a long time. I installed and edited the same photos in everything.
You either take the feature-set hit and switch to Apple Photos ( which does a great job with basic tweaks ), or you switch to Lightroom. Everything else is way below par. Your photos just won't anywhere near as good.
Personally, I don't want a "photo management" app, I want an app that is very good at batch processing, works over NFS drives, and doesn't use "projects" and "libraries".
It's interesting to watch how Apple marketing - at least on some products - has become increasingly technical over time. It was certainly rarer to see them explaining the intricacies of a file system - the cost of retrieving the size of files within a directory, etc - in, say, 2001 or 2011.
They've gone from "here are five colors you can chose from" to, in some cases, something almost approaching an lwn article.
maybe it is a consequence of increased technological knowledge in the general populace? i don't feel that it has increased, but maybe Apple's marketing team arrived to that conclusion.
Apple are always good with their marketing but I can't see any upgrades here that seem like they'll make much impact for me. Mobile upgrades are slowing down as well but it feels like for desktop there hasn't been any game changing improvements for a long time now.
I do this every 1-2 major OS releases. Copying from backup gives you a cool total defrag for system and user files, and cleans up all the BS that has accumulated (config files, stuff no longer need, use, etc).
I have a script that installs all my settings, brew packages, etc, even App Store apps, from external backup disk -- I'm up and running in 2-3 hours after the base install.
I don't have it polished enough for that, but the gist (no pun intended) is:
I keep all my documents in a single folder called ~/AAA (so it lists on top) with subfolders like /WORK, /PHOTOS /CODE (e.g. /CODE/GO), /MUSIC etc, so I can just rsync that and be totally backuped.
Inside ~/AAA I also have a folder called SYSTEM_FILES, where I keep stuff like bashrc, vim directory etc. My ~/.bashrc etc are just symlinks to ~/AAA/SYSTEM_FILES/bashrc.
So I start with a script that rsyncs the AAA folder from the backup disk to ~ on the Mac, and then creates the appropriate symlinks for .bashrc, .vimrc etc.
Now all my documents are on my Mac and I have a working shell.
Then the script does:
# install brew
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
# a number of brew related installs
brew install rsync
brew install mercurial
brew install watchman
brew install binutils
..
# some brew-driven font installs
brew tap caskroom/fonts
brew cask install font-roboto-mono
..
# install various linter-related stuff for my ST3
brew install -g node
sudo npm install -g eslint
sudo npm install -g eslint-plugin-import
sudo npm install -g eslint-plugin-react
sudo npm install -g babel-eslint
pip install flake8
pip install requests
..
# install various big packages from casks
brew cask install vagrant
# install mas -- a mac app store cli client
brew install mas
# use a wrapper script that extracts mas ids from the apps I want
~/mas_install.py Pixelmator
~/mas_install.py Skitch
~/mas_install.py Evernote
...
# use a shell script to copy .bashrc and co
# create symbolic links etc
~/prepare_environment.sh
# configure the Mac with various "defaults" options
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool false
...
# finally the script sets up Mail.app, copies my Sublime Text packages to the ~/Library/Application Support etc.
You can take a look at mine: https://github.com/memco/dotfiles. A number of other people have theirs online as well. Review default preferences and the brewfile before you run install.sh. Not updated for 10.13 yet, but most of it should remain unchanged. Having your config setup this way will save you a lot of hassle if you do find yourself having to rebuild your system. Took me about a week after having to rebuild the first time it happened and now I know it won't take more than a few hours at worst.
My understanding was that recent versions of Mac OS have an upgrade process that works a bit like this anyway — i.e., behind the scenes it's doing a fresh install, then copying your files back across. But I could be wrong.
> behind the scenes it's doing a fresh install, then copying your files back across
Are you thinking of the reformatting to APFS? That's kind of done like this. Aside from this, the OS upgrade is the same as it always is: install the new system-level packages over the existing files & reboot.
The migration from HFS to APFS does not move your files at all. It leaves the files exactly where they are on the disk. Instead of moving the files, it writes new the new APFS metadata onto unused areas of your disk. When it's done with that, it changes the superblock header to point to the new APFS metadata. Then it marks the old HFS metadata as blank space. Your files are not moved or copied.
By doing it this way, they make the dangerous part of the process as small as possible. They actually did a dry-run to collect success/failure metrics before APFS was released to iOS devices:
One minor thing I'm excited about is instant folder sizes. Right now, I open the info panel and go do something else for a minute while it calculates the size.
All of my Mac Stolen from home burglary meant I could never try it out. Have they fixed the scaling system on Retina Mac, where all enlarged scale, ( Where you choose Larger Text or Smaller Space ) fonts and windows looked washed out?
I cant be the only one who want a Retina Mac but need bigger fonts and Icons because i am getting old.
Sort of off topic but what has happened to the web design team at Apple? Their landing pages used to be extremely pleasant to read but by now I often struggle to read their headlines. The blurred background with text on top is not easy on my eyes at all. Perhaps my eyes are starting to go bad...
Their page for the new iPhone had the same issues. In my opinion their web designs has gone down hill this year.
They even change date formats within the same section of the website, so no consistency at all. They use a slash in their date "9/25" for a Beats offer at the bottom of https://www.apple.com/mac/
Yes, American dates are confusing and illogical at the best of times, I wish America would standardise on the international ascending order date style of 25/09/2017.
Yeah, I thought about that as I was writing my comment and realized that's why I always write "back to front dates" with dashes instead of slashes. I think it's probably because I always use that format in filenames and slashes feel like a very bad idea there ;-)
Yes, it would be so great if there could be a standard for dates formatted this way. It would have to be called something awesome like ISO 8601! ;-)
That is definitely also my preferred format, everything just sorts naturally then. Not so in love with the 2017-09-25T12:00 format as it does not work for filenames on my OS.
There definitely still is ambiguity if you're unfamiliar with the format. Show someone "2017-07-06" and they still might be unsure whether that's June or July.
I have never seen YYYY-DD-MM format, on the other hand, both DD/MM/YY and MM/DD/YY are equally common, that's why I always prefer YYYY-MM-DD format as it is the least ambiguous and most useful (sorting files etc., as other comments have mentioned). Feel free to prove me wrong though.
I work with non-techies. Most are totally unfamiliar with YYYY-MM-DD so weren't sure what a date that was ambiguous in that format was. I totally agree that usage of YYYY-DD-MM is rare (in my experience, anyway), but none of these formats fare particularly well when it comes to discoverability.
I’d update the Wikipedia article but don’t have time to go digging for official sources. Something you (or someone else with domain knowledge) could do?
I've been to Latvia many times in last few years, but haven't noticed YYYY-DD-MM format, maybe it's historical? It looks like DD.MM.YYYY was the most common format there (at least on posters).
> international ascending order date style of 25/09/2017
I don't believe that's an international style?
"Since 1996-05-01, the international format yyyy-mm-dd has become the official standard date format, but the handwritten form d. 'month name' yyyy is also accepted (see DIN 5008)."
Or just use an unambiguous format especially when writing normal copy. It would only take a few extra characters to write it as "25th Sep" or "Sep 25".
argh! i can't believe people are still arguing about whether we should do MM/DD/YYY or DD/MM/YYYY or anything similar to that. here's how you should write a date that you are going to show to a user:
Jan 11 2016
if you accept that premise, it doesn't matter (much) what order you put the elements in, because none of them can be confused with any other. a word is a month, a one- or two-digit number is the day of the month, a four-digit number is the year.
i feel the same way about websites that expect me to input phone numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc without punctuation or spaces. why are you making this my problem? if your backend requires that, then strip out everything i typed that wasn't a digit and do your own formatting. geez.
that way would work fine, too. i can look at that and tell what date we are talking about at a glance.
the real problem is displaying both the month and the day of the month as one- or two-digit numbers, which leads to ambiguity. display the month as a three-character string, and the year as a four-digit number, and we are all on the same page again.
it's pretty obvious that, if those standards were being followed all the time, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
i am talking about an ad hoc, fairly simple thing one can do, if one is writing user-facing code. it's a rule i follow, and i offered it up as something other people might want to try as well.
I am not sure if its the American date format or the way they choose to write them (with the . instead of - or /) made it confusing to me. On Indian website it is written "Available 26.9"
That only affects people with 'experimental web platform features' turned on in chrome://flags.
Apple is using 'backdrop-filter' in its CSS. Safari's the only browser to support it ATM, but it degrades gracefully. If you have that flag set, though, chrome lets you see their half-finished implementation.
To be fair, a large number of sites seem to never visit their sites on Safari. Have a look at the Javascript console when using Safari. All sorts of small issues that are simple fixes but they get ignored, especially when it comes to javascript embeds such as help desk widgets.
Somewhat off topic, but I'm becoming to realise that reading product pages like this is sort of like reading only the advertising pages of a magazine, but in this case I have the choice of what advertising I want to view; it's not enough to simply get information about the new system (I don't even have a Mac) but I need to be sold it as well. And the advertising is very impressive - strong colours, beautiful photography, crisp and clear screenshots and the "flat" icons. I can understand why there are so many people taken in by this advertising.
Anyways, it's definitely stable, honestly I feel like it's the most stable .0 release I've been on (have been going beta -> GM on almost all releases).
I do experience lagging even on basic stuff like writing SMS or other-text inputs... (waiting 2-3 seconds for the soft keyboard to response). I'l have to do some Option->Reset when I find time... [iPhone 6+] Not good when you can't trust the device... once my iphone freezed for X seconds, then I realized that random social post were posted to FB, while I tried to touch the display... :) And that scares me :) I have to give a try to the "Reset" options :)
I own an iphone 6+ too, this could also be a hardware issue. It started for me with the touchscreen going unresponsive for a few seconds and then suddenly 'catching up', it got progressively worse so I got it repaired. Hopefully it's purely a software issue in your case but just in case : https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6plus-multitouch/
Experienced the same issue, please have a look at Privacy->Analytics. If you (like me) find a lot of errors related to mediaserverd, then 'reset network settings' will likely fix it (like it fixed the lag on my 6S after upgrading to iOS 11).
I don't experience input lag, but I definitely experience general UI lag. Everything is so jittery compared to iOS 10. Swipes, transitions, everything lags.
I had similar problems on my iPhone 7 when I upgraded to iOS 11. This included apps totally freezing, sometimes for what felt like a minute, with very laggy input, as well as other issues, like not displaying the playing podcast controls for Overcast on the lock screen or in control center. Yesterday I did a fresh install of iOS 11 and then restored from a backup and my problems seem to have gone away. At least for me, it seems like there may have been something wrong with the over-the-air upgrade process. Perhaps this will help you.
Hmm, that means redownloading 50 GB of photos, but I guess I could try it. Do you know if you could force download all the iCloud Photos library instead of having it load on demand? Even with Settings -> Photos -> Download and Keep Originals it seems old photos (from before the device was installed) are only downloaded on-demand. I want them all offline.
I'm having this problem on both my iPad (which is newer than my phone) and with my laptops. Old pictures are not there unless I view then, although new pictures seem to be pushed to all my devices. And even if I view then, they are downloaded only at medium quality, unless I view them for more than 1.5 seconds or I zoom into them. This means I can't even scroll quickly through them, as this won't get me the original quality I want.
Try 'reset networking settings', this fixed it for me. Appears to be related to mediaserverd crashes (check Privacy->Analytics if that is the case on your 6S as well).
> Safari now uses machine learning to identify advertisers and others who track your online behavior, and removes the cross‑site tracking data they leave behind
I'm starting to like the business model of buying the product more and more.
There was a recent thread somewhere (here, reddit, FB?) asking "What feature would it take for iPhone users to switch to Android?" - the answer for me is, Google changing its business model (or else completely open-sourcing all of Android and all of its core apps (mail, maps, browser).