A lot of ideas sound great to management, and they work too! I mean, other than killing employee morale and resulting in long term loss ;-)
At one of my past jobs, we worked like consultants (we quoted hours that a task would take to get done, tested etc). We filled daily timesheets to ensure that our hours did not exceed our estimates. In fact, the time on those timesheets had to total 40 hours every week. So we worked the full 40 hours. And we billed those 40 hours to the client. In those few months, I was as productive as I've ever been.
Unfortunately, we weren't paid like consultants.. we got a regular salary. Management was doing nothing wrong. They failed to realize that the 'consultant lifestyle' of billing and working in hours only works if there is an equally motivating paycheck to go with it. I've known multiple people to leave because of how hard it was.
You shouldn't need a person to blame field. Good responsible employees will know what they did wrong and work to fix it. And if they don't, having the field in there will only increase finger pointing and people trying to protect their own jobs. And your bottom line will still not improve. So why do it?
This is great. Keep up the fantastic work! The FF mobile team deserves a lot of kudos for the way they've been able to fight their way back onto Android. I remember it was kludgy beyond belief as much as 6 months ago. But since then, it has improved massively with each release.
Absolutely, price is on the higher side. I feel that they're looking to make it the "really really Pro" line. The existing MBPs (specially the 13") is used by everyone (students for e.g.), so its not really a Pro line.
Absolutely. Time and time again they've shown that they'll do the right thing. Like with firefox sync, where data is encrypted on the client.
And its not like they're lacking in features or speed. Firefox for Android (while buggy) could view the same bookmarks/history/open tabs as my desktop browser and this is a great feature which only recently came to chrome.
Debian is fantastic. I tend to stay on testing (wheezy atm) because it is fairly modern yet stable.
Stability is the biggest problem with Ubuntu I believe- people will generally adapt to the UI changes that canonical is making, but breaking stability is a complete no-no. Even today, on Ubuntu 11.10, Unity shows wierd bugs time and time again. Apps like VirtualBox and KeePassx will show multiple times (or just disappear) in the dock. And sometimes the whole unity interface will close and restart itself.
Compare this to the old gnome2, or xfce, openbox etc; You can go for months without the UI doing anything unexpected.
The main difference is Debian isn't quite as user friendly out of the box. Sudo isn't set up for you for example so you'll be in for a surprise the first time you try to use it. Also, Debian isn't quite as pretty. The fonts aren't as good and the desktop looks quite a bit dated. The upside is Debian at least for me is much faster. I don't know what Canonical did to Ubuntu 11.10 but it drug for me. Also, Debian doesn't crash at all at least for me whereas Ubuntu did suffer some random instability.
That having been said, I like the idea of Ubuntu. I like the fact that they are trying to move the Linux desktop forward and I will happily return if they can get Unity straightened out. As it stands though, I'm a content Debian user for the forseeable future.
Interesting, I've been using 11.10 on a netbook since last fall, and on a new laptop since January, incluing daily use of VirtualBox and KeePass(2, not x), two of my top 10 most frequently used apps. Zero stability issues, I've been very happy with it.
I wonder if there's some hardware issues, or something else you've got installed that's causing those problems.
Hmm. This was a fresh vanilla install that I tried recently on the same hardware that runs debian wheezy. I wanted to have all the benefits of ubuntu's large community (PPAs for a lot of sofware etc, plus I do generally agree with the direction that ubuntu is heading in), but the lack of stability was just killer.
The thing with lumping all 'Android' together is that it gives the wrong picture. Similar to lumping all PCs.
When you buy anything non-Apple, you have to be a smart buyer. This can be good or bad, depending on your world view.
If you compare premium non-Apple brands, they compare favoribly to Apple. For example, my Nexus S was $300 off contract (brand new). This is much cheaper than the comparable iPhone 4 at that time, retains good resale value, and will probably be fast enough/supported for as long as the iPhone 4. On the PC side, ThinkPad T/X series offers similar (or even better!) reliability/cost effectiveness/resale value to MacBooks. For example, the x220 series configured new at lenovo will cost ~1000. Current resale puts it at around 800, which is better than the MBP (for e.g. base at $1249, refurb @ apple for $1049, and resale at around $950).
Even if you break out Samsung, Motorola, HTC, etc. you will still have the same problem within each manufacturer's lineup. Comparing individual phone models is logical but nobody does it for some reason.
It seems that people always want to compare the iPhone (a single hardware line) to Android (software) which is just bizarre.
Resale value is also being measured as a percentage MSRP, which makes sense for the iPhone, as it isn't really available for anything but MSRP, but isn't as realistic for most Android phones that can often be had for less than MSRP.
Problematic it may be, but I wouldn't call it "bizarre". The fact that the iPhone has a single line of hardware evolution, a single line of software evolution, and an extremely straightforward product line at any given time is a very deliberate branding and marketing decision by Apple, aimed at avoiding exactly the situation we see in the rest of the phone market: The marketplace is a confusing zoo in which the available mix of models changes every five minutes and nobody knows what they're buying unless they have the data sheet sitting open in front of them.
I'd get the MBA over either the MBP or x220. Thinness, SSD in all models, a UNIXish OS which actually runs some non-free software (and doesn't have people ask you what the hell is wrong with your computer), a crisp screen (the MBA has the same resolution as the 15" MBP) ... sorry, us MBA people are the most annoying Apple fanboys, right?
The only laptops I've seen which I've been at all envious of are later-model MBAs, and Toshiba's Satellite Z830 (damn that thing's light).
But if you don't mind a heavy laptop, the x220 does look nice. 15 hours video (with the $180 battery hump thing) definitely raises the bar.
I have this year's MBA. Its pretty good, except for the 4 gigs of ram. I find the the T/X series more ergonomic for longer periods of typing though (matte screen + plastic wrist rest is more comfortable).
The T/X run well with linux, so you get all free software ;-) Also, the x220 is 3.3 lbs [1][2] vs 2.96 lb [3] for the air.
I stopped giving a shit what other people think of my computer when a pretty girl told me my NetBSD laptop was "not digital enough" and I needed to buy a Mac because it was "more digital".
If you compare premium non-Apple brands, they compare favoribly to Apple.
Since I'm not aware of a single Android phone that sells for more after two years than the full price two years prior, I'm not sure how any can compare "favorably" (limited run developer models excluded).
>Since I'm not aware of a single Android phone that sells for more after two years than the full price two years prior
Pretty sure absolutely no phone sells for more than the full initial price, iPhone included. Remember, the price you see in ads are carrier subsidized, an actual new iPhone is approximately $650 without a contract.
On that note, I just bought an AT&T iPhone 4 for $250 a month ago. Not bad of a deal for 18 months later.
Per notes elsewhere in this thread, I sold each (original, 3g, 3gs, 4) on eBay for more than full price, after the next model was out. I did unlock them before sale.
This is exactly right. It is the presence of a keylogger, which (at the very least) is echoing keystrokes, that is the problem. Whether they 'send' everything or only parts of it, or whether the data is anonymized, aggregated etc is a whole other discussion.
I think it is certainly a lot worse. All user data (since it is a keylogger?) being logged and sent to a third party without user knowledge or consent, how is that not worse than just logging user information on the device?
To get access to your location data on the iPhone, someone would have to steal your phone or get into your itunes account. This is happening in the background.
>All user data (since it is a keylogger?) being logged and sent to a third party without user knowledge or consent
Where does anyone say that it is being sent to a third party? This rather noob-ish developer noted that they have a keyboard hook, but in no way does that mean that they send all of your keystrokes to a third party.
Honestly I think I expect too much from HN. The level of discourse on here is absolutely no better than any typical blowhard site.
I dont see how meta comments on HN help the discussion?
Directly from the article:
> “Our technology is not real time,” he said at the time. "It's not constantly reporting back. It's gathering information up and is usually transmitted in small doses.”
The issue is, we don't know what this software is gathering and sending. It is not being done with consent.
But you're right, this needs to be looked into before getting the pitchforks out. But certainly, having the presence of a keylogger is bad enough in itself.
I'm sure people consented through some random paragraph in a two hundred page long EULA, usually under the guise of quality monitoring.
The meta is pertinent. I expect the sort of knee-jerk reaction among non-software developers. I don't among a more educated in the realm crowd.
There is little chance this company is recording, much less transmitting, everything you type, every message you receive, etc. I would hazard a guess that they do, however, record basic usage patterns to let the carrier know how people are using their devices ("6975 characters average per day, send 256 messages while receiving 12. Spends an average 37 seconds in the dialer.").
I dont see why valid criticisms of what Apple is doing get such a negative response. A lot of us love Apple software and hardware, and have invested a lot of money in various parts of the ecosystem. We are not windows fanboys who are making a fuss without having ever used Mac OS.
A lot of changes I can understand; moving forward may mean annoying a portion of your users. But a lot of these changes do not change anything for the better. There are no reasons for them at all, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
For those criticizing- He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Not all posts are meant to be essays...
Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says:
Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating.
More user-hostile
- If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot any operating system (other than Apple's) off usb drives or even external DVD drives plugged into usb slots. So with two hard drives, you can not install Windows or Linux. [1]
- Batteries are not considered user-swappable anymore. [2]
More buggy
- Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).
- We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?
Seriously, wtf is up with removing "Save As"? I had to copy the text from a file I was working on and paste it into a new file because the "Save a new version" option wasn't doing anything.
One you missed: really horrible auto-correct feature Apple added. It will replace a word when you're in the middle of typing it. Completely broken and totally transparent. At first, I thought that WriteRoom was just buggy.
Oh, and the "Home" folder isn't exposed under the Favorites section of Finder by default anymore. You have to go to "Go > Home". Took me a little while to figure that one out.
I don’t think you understand. This is about paradigm shifts.
Here is how it used to work: You open this old document because you want to create a new one and use the old one as a template. You either Save as right away or (much more likely) you edit for a bit and do a Save as at some later point.
If you do this with auto save you are fucked. (Well, not really. There is now Versions, so starting with Lion this is finally a recoverable mistake.) Editing your document for a bit before doing a Save as with auto save is the same as mistakenly saving your document – overwriting your old document – instead of doing a Save as. That mistake is catastrophic – I know it, I used to make it often enough myself – and users would make it all the time had Apple left Save as in.
Now when you open an old document you will be asked – as soon as you start editing – whether you want to edit the document or duplicate it, thus avoiding that catastrophic mistake. You can also duplicate documents at any time.
The transition period will be painful, that’s for sure, but the end result is pure bliss. It’s worth it.
A lot of changes with Lion are just like this. Sometimes some pain while transitioning is the price for awesomeness.
And what if my workflow involves making multiple files based off the same document? Say I making png buttons in Photoshop. I change the test to "Order" pick save as, type "order.png", change the text to "Cancel" pick save as, type "cancel.png", change the text to "Help" pick save as, type "help.png".
It sounds like that work flow just got massively tedious.
Here's my work flow when I'm writing a long document:
- Create/open "Master copy".
- Regularly Save/enable Autosave.
- When I have completed a chapter/segment, or before for lunch/supper, I Save and Save As on my backup HDD with a time-stamp/chapter number.
Like this I have one copy that I can edit and is always up to date on my main HDD and I have a whole record of copies on my backup HDDs. If I want to see how I edited chapter 3 whilst I was writing chapter 6 (they're related in the plot) I can.
I can't imagine this being something unknown of in the use of other applications. A franchisee that tracks various performance metrics each hour/day on a rolling database (month/year) sends a copy at regular intervals to the franchise owner/manager so that general franchise performance can be evaluated will have the same problem.
I can see how Duplicate -> Save is "only one click more", but the one-click solution worked well. If the "paradigm shift" is related to auto-saves, why not simply have the auto-saves create a new hidden file by default. Either the changes are saved (cue overwriting of the opened file), or the changes are saved as. If the user exits without saving, the hidden file can be marked for auto-delete in X days/hours, making erroneous exits recoverable. If there's a crash/loss of power, the hidden file is prompted for recovery at the program's next start.
A lot of programs have some kind of auto-save, here is how it works in Microsoft Word. While editing your document, it is auto-saved, but as a new, hidden file. When you manually Save, this new file overwrites the old, and a Save As does the same, but with the new name, not wiping the old document. You can argue that this is messy, and only a hack to get around the paradigm. It all depends on how people want to work, giving the program the responsibility to handle it.
I've not used lion so am not familiar with it, but going from what someone else is saying above, you need to 'duplicate' then 'save'. If it's autosaving, this doesn't make sense conceptually either. Why would the app not be autosaving once the duplicated document has been created? Why do you need to save separately?
You still have to save one first time, else the OS wouldn’t know where to put the file and how to name it. Lion only auto saves after that. That is irrespective of whether your create a new file or duplicate a file. (Apple could have been a lot more radical here, I’m unsure whether they should have been. That certainly would have meant a lot more work and it would have been an even more complicated transition.)
I would have thought that the duplicate function would have had 'duplicate it where?' in it.
The only reason I can think of for not having this is so you could make temporary changes to a document and not have them saved - which just seems to be a different way of arranging the cart and horse compared to the 'save as' workflow. With the Save As workflow, temporary changes are simply not saved. With the Duplicate workflow, you have to dupe the document first to avoid unwanted saving, then make your temporary changes. I don't see much of an improvement overall.
The new behavior protects from the following scenario (which I think is very common): Someone wants to use an old document as a template and in the process overwrites the old document. That’s data loss and the user likely becomes unable to even find the new document since it’s saved under the name of the old document.
It used to be the case that users had to actually make a mistake in order for this to happen (i.e. they had to forget to do a Save as and do a Save instead – that happened to me way too often, though), with auto save they would make that mistake automatically and every time.
I think what Apple could do is add a “Duplicate and save” function, I don’t think Save as is salvageable with auto save.
3) The green maximize button still doesn't maximize.
This isn't and has never been a "maximize" button. It's supposed to zoom the window to fit the content as best it can without scrolling. It's up to the developer to implement it properly with their own logic.
Have you ever used a 30" display? Maximizing windows does not make a whole lot of sense there, especially considering the difference in window contents on Windows vs Mac (ie. self-contained menubar, etc).
That's where the newer Microsoft Windows method of maximizing into 1/2 the screen works well. I'd prefer if it were customizable to work in thirds, though.
I maintain that people think of multi-windowed UI in terms of windows first. Resizing a window to fit the content makes less sense than resizing the content to fit the window. People also seem to get really upset when UI interaction isn't consistent, and the Mac approach means that it varies wildly between apps.
You can drag a window to a corner to get it to fill a quarter screen. Kind of hard to hit the lower corners (it is not the screen corner but the top of the taskbar).
If you're going to criticize it, at least do so in a constructive way. In your list of 7, I see 2 real complaints.
1) Agreed, this can be annoying.
2) The buttons are visually smaller, but have the same target click area.
3) It behaves the same way it did before, so this isn't any worse.
4) The new scrolling takes a day or two to get used to, and then is better. If you really don't like it, there's an option to toggle it off. This isn't an issue.
5) Agreed, it is arguably slower and tends to drain the battery faster. It's also doing more. It sucks, but that's the price of progress.
6) As I see it, FireVault is a huge plus and not at all a drawback. Was there anything 'terrible' about the process other than that it was lengthy? And really, a one-time conversion cost for such a huge improvement to this feature was a problem for you?
7) This happens with practically every desktop OS upgrade ever and, as you mentioned, isn't a problem anymore.
So besides #1 and #5, are there other real complaints?
I'd personally add "really botched multi-touch gestures" to the list, but I'm genuinely curious if it's actually that much worse or people are just piling onto this rant.
When I saw the previews for Lion I thought autosave seemed like overkill. When I'm working on anything I "autosave" by reaching over slightly and hitting CMD-S every time I make any small amount of progress. The last time I experienced significant data/progress loss was probably about 3 years ago before I developed this habit. I don't see what problem they're trying to fix.
The problem is: Most people don't do that, especially new computer users. (Or, these days, people who are used to web apps, which don't use command-S.)
They don't learn until they've been burned, probably quite badly. If the computer doesn't HAVE to burn them in the first place, why should it?
> When I'm working on anything I "autosave" by reaching over slightly and hitting CMD-S every time I make any small amount of progress . . . I don't see what problem they're trying to fix.
Um, that?
The concept of "save" was good for a time, but having everything autosave is absolutely forward progress.
My Macbook Air just kernel panicked about 20 minutes ago (which, admittedly, shouldn't happen). I had to hold down the power button, and then turn it back on. Less than one minute after the crash my laptop's state, opened programs, tabs, files, unsaved progress, was restored.
Like you, I also have a tic of hitting command-S. However, I don't think requiring the user to develop a tic to keep their data safe is very good usability.
Hahah, maybe, but I'm happy doing it. I have control that way. I can't tell the computer to stop auto-saving can I? That way I can take risks when I'm coding etc and always revert what I did if it was a mistake.
“We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?”
No, we certainly don’t. I love Mission control and I think it’s an improvement over Exposé. Don’t pretend I’m agreeing with you.
For me personally Lion has been a solid improvement. Quite a few things that used to suck about OS X still suck but I have seen nothing but improvements or neutral changes with Lion. (Yeah, I have some minor quibbles, but mostly about apps I hardly ever use anyway.) I had no technical issues at all. Again, that’s for me personally.
The thing about mission control is that they could easily have left the old expose intact as an optional alternative, but nooooo they had to remove it completely and fuck up thousands of users' workflow habits. I mean you have to admit the way mission control stacks windows on top of each other for each application is pretty ridiculous. Other than that it's fairly useful.
But there was no good reason to remove the 'all app expose' feature, leaving only the within app expose. They either just overlooked it or want to brainwash users into some sort of app centric paradigm.
It reminds of when they released the magic mouse and you could no longer have expose mapped to a third mouse button. Surely wasn't the only user dependent on such a useful feature.
> But there was no good reason to remove the 'all app expose' feature, leaving only the within app expose. They either just overlooked it or want to brainwash users into some sort of app centric paradigm.
Do you mean the "Show all Windows for the current app"? I'm pretty sure it's still there. Might have a different gesture tho.
No I mean there used to be two forms of expose - show all within app, which I almost never used (it would only be useful if you had a truly ridiculous number of windows open, really), and show all windows across all applications including the finder. They've taken away the latter, which was the useful one.
Most times I hit expose in the past it was to go to a window of another application. For instance switching between the code I was editing in Coda or Textmate to the webpage I was building in Safari, or the graphics I was manipulating in Preview. In fact I did this constantly. Now it's a two step process: select the app in mission control, and then do expose once you're in the app. It wouldn't be so bad if the way Mission Control stacked the app windows wasn't so useless - when you expand them they should at least fill the screen so you can see everything, instead they become just slightly less bundled together, forcing you to footer about with the pointer to get what you want.
Expose was one of the best GUI innovations ever, IMO, and they've bloody ruined it.
1. I don't have money for an SSD right now, and Mission Control can take up to 10 seconds to start, presumably because some stuff on another Space had been swapped to disk. I just used a friend's 800 MHz iMac G4 at a party and damn, Exposé was instant!
2. I don't even want to see stuff on another space. I move apps on spaces to FOCUS, not to see my unwritten report at the top of my desktop when switching apps on one space.
> He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong.
Most of it being... not smart?
> Right now, since I've switched to Gmail, I'm trying to back up and remove from my machine years of accumulated mail storage from mail.app. First obstacle: a user's library files are now hidden.
No, the ~/Library folder is now hidden, you can see it via Terminal, by opening the Finder's Go menu with an option-click or browse it because you know the path (cmd-shift-G, for instance). This change is sensible: how often does a user need to go into the Library folder?
> Finally find them (thanks Matt Silver), back up the files to an external disk, and then delete them. But then when I empty the trash, an ungodly number of files--going back years--claim they are "in use" and can't be deleted. So here I am having to click "continue" every few thousand files (if I'm lucky) as I page through more than 400,00 files to be deleted. I know this is actually an old mis-feature - but why the devil wouldn't they give you an "ignore" checkbox or a "delete whatever you can checkbox"? This has been a problem for years, but never fixed, while they add new gloss all the time.
He hates OSX now because of something which has been there forever? Like the trash refusing to delete open files you moved there?
There are issues with OSX and there are debatable changes, but his post is simply nonsense.
Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).
Wow! 78 page thread! Almost all are saying me too. And no sound in blogosphere! Just imagine if same thing happens in microsoft discussion forum. Tech bloggers really cut some slack for apple.
At one of my past jobs, we worked like consultants (we quoted hours that a task would take to get done, tested etc). We filled daily timesheets to ensure that our hours did not exceed our estimates. In fact, the time on those timesheets had to total 40 hours every week. So we worked the full 40 hours. And we billed those 40 hours to the client. In those few months, I was as productive as I've ever been.
Unfortunately, we weren't paid like consultants.. we got a regular salary. Management was doing nothing wrong. They failed to realize that the 'consultant lifestyle' of billing and working in hours only works if there is an equally motivating paycheck to go with it. I've known multiple people to leave because of how hard it was.
You shouldn't need a person to blame field. Good responsible employees will know what they did wrong and work to fix it. And if they don't, having the field in there will only increase finger pointing and people trying to protect their own jobs. And your bottom line will still not improve. So why do it?