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It was kind of a scary five minutes. GPT and Claude both went silent. I could hear my own thoughts again.


So far, it basically looks like it wants to become Atlassian Confluence. Presumably it will become more tightly integrated with Office 365 than Confluence can be.


That's one possibility. Another possibility is they were merely comparing the submitted nonce to the nonce on file. If a nonce had never been generated for a user, the database may have contained an empty string. An empty string in the db would match an empty string submitted by an attacker.


The Podcast app and the iPad Music app are both a mess, and both happened under Forstall as I understand it.

Trade away the lyric and podcast show info displays for kitsch wood veneer? And a reel-to-reel tape recorder simulator? Move seek controls to weird locations? Replace the easy-to-spot seek knob with a radio needle? Why? So many small steps backward, even if no single one was a deal breaker... negative trajectory is negative trajectory.

If this means they walk some of that silliness back, it's the best Apple news in ages. It started to look like designers who didn't actually use the apps were taking over.


Wow. I haven't listened to any podcasts recently but felt compelled to try it after your post. That thing is just awful. Not only "yo dawg, I heard you like skeuomorphism..." territory, but they didn't even do it right - scrubbing through a track is completely disconnected from the tape wheels (go in reverse, it's much more obvious) If you're going to go down that path, you really have to emulate the device in question 100% accurately or else it just looks really stupid.

There's a good reason that its a bad idea to roll a system UI replacement the vast majority of the time. The next time it comes up in conversation, I now have a perfect example of why in my pocket.

I also totally agree about the "designers who didn't use the apps" bit, and would go a bit further - they really need to do a better job testing real-world network conditions too. Designing stuff designed around cell reception doesn't fare so well outside apple campus where it's not blanketed with reliable, high-speed, low-latency network connections. iTunes Match... it brings back memories of realplayer. It's a cost of secrecy, but seeing that the supply chain had already failed them there, best embrace reality and use it to improve stuff before launch.


I think that's unfair: The "everything is simplistic, monochrome gray" half of Apple's recent design may be more tasteful in many people's view, but it isn't any more usable.

I had many situations in which the auto-hidden scrollbars made it impossible to tell that there was more to discover in a scroll view. The CAPS SIDEBAR HEADERS have no triangle indicator anymore, it is impossible to tell without hovering if a section is closed or open & empty. The monochrome sidebars made Finder and iTunes noticeably less efficient in my usage. Many new-style toolbars like Xcode's are not customizable anymore. etc...

And all these things are in line with Apple's hardware design (where I enjoy the simplicity a lot more).


The last time I looked, save dialogs for example in Preview were broken too, as the horizontal scroll bar hid most of the lowest row even when you scrolled to the absolute bottom. What were they thinking? That's a pretty serious basic level bug that your UI is blocking your data. Don't they test such big changes?

All kinds of things are broken left and right in OSX but I guess that's just how it is. Mail hangs constantly and silently, you're just not receiving anything anymore. You can't close it (and force quit is not an option anymore?), you have to kill it from command line. The new calendar is brown faux leather all of a sudden, completely different than everything else. And you can't easily select which account you're viewing and setting events for.

It is interesting to note that software functionality and polish above a certain mediocre level just can not be reached.

Sure, sometimes it's understandable that stuff is totally rewritten from scratch since some fundamental new technology made it necessary, and you have to go to a state of more brokenness. But even when that is not the case, it seems software can't go beyond "90% complete" or so, at best it just reaches an asymptotic level where stuff is broken at the same rate as it is repaired.

After the major and hard stuff is done, what the heck are all the engineers and testers working on? If you're not in a hurry to create those big features any more, you could concentrate on at least doing the few new small features very well. But it feels as if OSX UI has taken as many steps backwards as it has gone forward from Snow Leopard.

This happens in other software too. For example Xnview and XFLR5 have both been developed for a long time and have had their ups and downs, and at the moment might be below 50% of their historical level of "perfection". But they're cheap/free mostly one man operations, multiplatform and have had massive rewrites and feature expansions. Often the developer might not even have some supported platform to test platform specific issues on, and it's a surprise they work as well as they do.


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