Archive for May 6, 2015

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Problems With Multiple Apps

Ken Case (April 2):

OmniFocus for iPhone was our first iOS (or rather, iPhone OS) app back in 2008. With OmniFocus for iPad in 2010, we added features like Forecast and a dedicated Review mode to take full advantage of the form factor. Both apps have seen major updates since then, and most of their features have spread across the OmniFocus family, but now that Apple has blurred the line between tablet and phone devices with the iPhone 6 Plus it seems like the right time to combine the iPhone and iPad feature sets.

[…]

Also, please note that this isn’t a forced upgrade! If you’re not sure you need to move from OmniFocus for iPhone yet, that’s just fine: starting with version 2.5, we’ll be updating the iPhone app in lockstep with the universal app so that they both get improvements at the same time.

Ken Case:

Really sad that OmniFocus 2 for iPhone has so many one-star reviews from customers who aren’t finding the Complete My Bundle option.

Ken Case:

We’ve tried very hard to preserve our customers’ existing investment in OmniFocus for iPhone (and added major new features like landscape).

Ken Case:

We would remove the iPhone-only app from sale, but then those customers wouldn’t be able to Complete My Bundle anymore. Or get free updates.

Ken Case:

No plans to remove old app from sale, since we don’t want to orphan customers still using it. Just want to discourage new sales.

Ken Case:

When we’ve posted updates to removed apps, customers didn’t get them unless they deleted and reinstalled.

Beyond Open Source

Drew Crawford:

Rather, this is an essay about what, as a practical matter, open source can and cannot do. The study of where the rubber meets the road, effectively. There are features and patches and entire open source projects that cannot exist, structurally, under our current system. The ingredients aren’t right. The incentives aren’t right. Let’s poke at that.

[…]

The Type 3 “institutional investment” is obviously strategic; you invest in an open source project for strategic reasons. It’s hard to imagine now, but in Apple’s case, they were down for the count; they were a major OS vendor without their own web browser, with no ability to influence the future of the web. 15 years later they now control the most important browser technology in the world. By uniting all the second-place players onto one team, they were able to defeat the leading player. But an open web was always a collateral benefit of their strategy.

[…]

Docker, however, is wise to the plan. Since they control the underlying open source project, they think they are better positioned, from a brand and strategy perspective, to grow into CoreOS’s space, than CoreOS is positioned to keep it. The result is that issues with hundreds of comments remain open for years because they’re not strategically compatible with Docker’s vision of being a 1-click end-to-end VM management system. Docker doesn’t want to be just a VM killer. They want to be a VM killer plus swallow up a lot of the market for value-added platforms and services.

[…]

The battle over stuff as mundane as what command-line arguments are accepted for the software are part of some larger war that enterprises are waging using OSS contributions as a proxy.

Michael Larabel (via Slashdot):

Richard Stallman has come out against support for basic LLVM debugger (LLDB) support within Emacs’ Gud.el as he equates it to an attack on GNU packages.

Chris Lattner (in 2005):

The patch I’m working on is GPL licensed and copyright will be assigned to the FSF under the standard Apple copyright assignment. Initially, I intend to link the LLVM libraries in from the existing LLVM distribution, mainly to simplify my work. This code is licensed under a BSD-like license [8], and LLVM itself will not initially be assigned to the FSF. If people are seriously in favor of LLVM being a long-term part of GCC, I personally believe that the LLVM community would agree to assign the copyright of LLVM itself to the FSF and we can work through these details.

David Kastrup:

Why would people be interested in a fork whose primary purpose would be to make the compiler less modular and stop it from interoperating with modules they might want to write?

Because non-modularity is exactly what GCC is supposed to provide in order not to create module boundaries where the reach of the GPL ends.

[…]

[Lattner] did all of the integration work and offered completed patches. These patches were rejected. Partly because bootstrapping from C++ was undesired (GCC now bootstraps from C++), partly because the modularity was undesired in GCC.

Modularity is the main point of LLVM. Chopping it away in order to slap on a GPL that actually stings is pretty much the same as ritual suicide.

Richard Stallman:

I am stunned to see that we had this offer. Now, based on hindsight, I wish we had accepted it.

Richard Stallman:

The license of LLVM is free. We can use that code if we want to.

The problem that LLVM causes for the GNU Project is that, when used, it replaces GCC with a non-copylefted program.

Richard Stallman:

It is good for the parts of GCC to be modular. And it is fine for these modules to be able to link with other programs, too.

What I am worried about is for these modules to be used with nonfree programs by NOT linking them together. That that would lead to proprietary use which ultimately is bad for users’ freedom.

I prioritize users’ freedom above technical merit, and that’s why I wrote GCC. If not for that, I wouldn’t have had to write a C compiler at all -- I could have used one of the proprietary ones.

Richard Stallman:

[GCC] has aided users’ freedom tremendously by leading many companies to release free compilers for their hardware. LLVM has cut off our ability to do that, and that will be a big loss to users’ freedom.

Whatever advantages LLVM may have, they don’t compensate for this big harm.

Richard Stallman:

It’s very simple. Anything that relates to LLVM is a strategic issue, so maintainers should talk with me privately about what to do.

Richard Stallman:

Installing that change would be favorable for Emacs, probably just a little. It would probably be bad for GDB, but I have no idea how much. […] We should do what is best for the GNU system’s goal of giving the users freedom. This means considering what is good for Emacs and what is good for GDB, to make a decision. Then the whole GNU Project should do what is best. That is the responsibility of each GNU package maintainer.

discoveryd Is Still Buggy

Craig Hockenberry (tweet):

I started reporting these issues early in the Yosemite beta release and provided tons of documentation to Apple engineering. It was frustrating to have a Mac that lost its network connection every few days because the network interfaces were disabled while waking from sleep (and there was no way to disable this new “feature”.)

Regardless of the many issues people were reporting with discoveryd, Apple went ahead and released it anyway. As a result, this piece of software is responsible for a large portion of the thousand cuts. Personally, I’ve wasted many hours just trying to keep my devices talking to each other. Macs that used to go months between restarts were being rebooted weekly. The situation is so bad that I actually feel good when I can just kill discoveryd and toggle the network interface to get back to work.

[…]

[This] code is all over the place. It’s in use by iOS, OS X and presumably whatever is running on the Apple Watch. As such, any one of those devices can poison Bonjour for everything else on your network.

[…]

You also can’t rely on software updates to fix everything: I have both an Airport Express and Apple TV that are no longer receiving fixes. Having to buy new hardware because of crappy software adds insult to injury.

Marco Arment (tweet):

Yosemite is now 6 months old, these bugs still aren’t fixed, and it feels like they probably won’t be fixed anytime soon. Yosemite is probably in minimal-maintenance mode as primary resources have likely moved on to headlining features for 10.11. This is what’s so frustrating about today’s Apple: if a bug persists past the early beta stages of its introduction, it rarely ever gets fixed. They’re too busy working on the new to fix the old.

Russ Bishop:

I used to be proud to show off what the Apple ecosystem could do, throwing photos and videos to my AppleTV. Dragging and dropping files between computers with zero configuration. Friends and family were always amazed that it just worked. Now it’s just an embarrassment.

Nick Heer:

I haven’t had any networking issues since 10.10.3, and I know that update fixed WiFi bugs for a lot of people that I know. But this is still happening for an alarming number of people. In an era where Apple is rapidly pushing for a cable-free experience, this is, frankly, unacceptable.

Marcus Müller (via Nat!):

While I’m still using Apple’s OSX 10.9.x as my workstation OS of choice, this is mostly due to the fact that it’s (still) better suited for my needs than the alternatives. I didn’t upgrade to OSX 10.10, however. OSX 10.10 IMO looks horrible and doesn’t offer anything I’d really need or want as a user, but instead breaks compatibility with hardware I own and use everyday.

Previously: Why DNS in OS X 10.10 Is Broken, Apple’s Software Quality, Continued.

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