Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Typos in Disk Utility

Stephen Hackett:

In addition to the text being so brief it feels incomplete, it has two grammatical errors […] While this may seem silly, it’s this attention to detail stuff that worries me about Apple software.

If ever there were software you’d want to trust not to be buggy it would be the file system and associated tools. These kind of user interface issues don’t inspire confidence. And, unfortunately, the problems are not just skin deep. Lately I’ve been encountering a problem where SuperDuper cloning fails because the disk is full. It turns out that the underlying diskutil tool sometimes fails to erase the volume but tells SuperDuper that it succeeded. So not only does it not work but also it doesn’t know that it doesn’t work.

Previously: Disk Utility in El Capitan.

Update (2016-03-03): Marco Arment says it’s like having “a typo on your brake pads.”

1 Comment RSS · Twitter

If I recall correctly, one of the metrics they use for software quality is crash rates. I guess that could be the consequence of such policy.

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