Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Self-Absorbed Release Notes

Kirk McElhearn:

This is wrong, and dangerous. Users look to release notes to find out what is new, and what has been fixed. If you cannot quickly see these changes in the release notes, you miss out on something important.

I think a cute phrasing or occasional joke is fine, but this is a whole screenful with no useful information. Better to have just written, “Bug fixes.” Cesium is a good app, though.

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Transit App and Slack are particularly bad for this. The self-indulgent BS is so thick that it's becoming genuine work to parse out the meat.

I do get the general objection here. But on the other hand, if Apple's release notes on every macOS point updates were: "We broke everything. Again. LOL", it'd be pretty damn great...

Then, of course, there is the opposite end of the spectrum—Dropbox is a brutal offender: https://twitter.com/zygoat/status/788522496739807232

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