Archive for May 24, 2021

The Mac App Store matters for distribution of Apple software and 3rd parties that can’t create their own download store. Other than that what should it be? I think trying to make it the same as the iOS store (the best place for all software from all developers) can’t work…

[…]

We know all the developers, we know the tools they use. We could invest more in being the go-to place for all your development needs. It isn’t a giant market, and there might not be a ton of revenue in it, but it should be growing and worth investing it for the Mac platform.

I could see focusing on a strong developer category (there already is one) and making it better known as the place for all developers to go to for everything they need and even things they didn’t know they need.

Nathan Anderson:

It “wasn’t really working” because UNlike the iOS App Store, it had to compete on its own merits. And apparently was found wanting.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

This is kinda bonkers. Ask any Mac dev and they’ll give you plenty of reasons why they’re not on the Mac App Store. Tim thinks the MAS’ problem is a lack of games. Not sandboxing. Not payment model. Not upgrade model. Not App Store restrictions defining out categories of apps
The Mac App Store is dormant because Apple built a system that excludes almost all of the existing big and indie developers from participating. I feel like if you cared about the Mac app ecosystem you would know this. And you would know this before 2015.

Previously:

Game Mac Mac App Store Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan Phil Schiller Tim Cook

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Remaining Issues in Big Sur

I updated my main Mac to Big Sur a month and a half ago, so I’ve been using macOS 11.2.3 through 11.3.1. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that it fixes any of the Catalina issues that I mentioned, and it introduces a variety of new ones:

Several times my Mac froze and then became unbootable due to APFS snapshots not being pruned, so macOS ran out of disk space and couldn’t function (despite showing hundreds of GB of free space).
I continue to see random freezes and breakage across the system (sandbox file access, external drives, XPC, etc.), such that reboots are necessary to get it working again. I doubt I’ve ever had an uptime of more than 5 days, whereas prior to Catalina it was probably measured in weeks or months.
WebKit frequently crashes, seemingly due to a GPU issue, which it almost never did before. Same with the Quick Look process.
The most annoying bug, affecting me multiple times per day, is that save panels don’t work reliably. I will save a file (typically a message or attachment from Mail) and have it end up in the wrong folder. Part of this is because the state isn’t remembered. Multiple apps often default to the Documents folder rather than to the last used folder. But there are also glitches where the UI lies. The destination folder selected in the sidebar doesn’t match the destination folder shown in the pop-up menu above the file list. Or the pop-up menu says one folder name but the file list below it shows the contents of a different folder. Or the pop-up menu and file list both show the desired folder, but I click Save and it creates the file in a different folder (typically Documents rather than a folder in my iCloud Drive).
Save panels also no longer remember the sidebar width. So, unless I keep dragging it wider, I can’t read the longer folder names.
Save panels use rounded text fields for the filename and tags, whereas historically rounded fields have only been used for active fields like for searching and for posting in Messages.
I’m not sure whether the Mail data loss bug (moving messages stored on the mail server instead deletes them) from Catalina is fixed. I have multiple reports of it happening on macOS 11.2.3 (and reproduced it myself on earlier versions of macOS 11) but I haven’t received any reports of it on 11.3 yet. Perhaps most people who have seen the bug have either switched mail clients or are sticking with older versions of macOS. I’ve not heard from any users who were seeing the bug before that it’s fixed, nor has Apple said that it is. [Update (2021-05-28): I’ve received reports of this still happening on macOS 11.3.1 and 11.4.]
I continue to receive tons of reports of Mail rules not reliably moving messages across accounts (either from a server account to On My Mac or between mailboxes in different server accounts). Mail shows the “moved” message in both the source and destination mailboxes. Sometimes the message does actually get moved on the server (i.e. Mail’s display doesn’t match the reality of where the message is stored); other times the message really doesn’t move. Moving messages within the same account does seem to consistently work, if you’re not one of the people affected by the previous item.
The message list—I use the Column Layout—is massively slower, with occasional delays of several seconds when clicking a message to view and almost universal sluggishness arrow keying down the message list. It helps to a lot to uncheck “Highlight messages with color when not grouped,” which is a shame because I’ve always found that feature useful. I’m not sure what all the other causes of slowness are. Some of it seems to be due to repeatedly querying NSUserDefaults (e.g. about the blocked messages settings) while drawing. But that doesn’t explain why some messages (inconsistently) get stuck for a few seconds before loading at all.
Sometimes it’s not just slow; after clicking on a message it will continue showing “No Message Selected” no matter how long I wait.
Mail’s sort state is unreliable. Most obviously, the column that it’s sorting by is often not the one where it shows the indicator caret. So it looks like the sorting is incorrect even though it isn’t. But then other times it doesn’t remember the sort state for a mailbox, so it’s sorting by and indicating the wrong column.
Mail’s scroll state is also less reliable than before, e.g. when clicking on a mailbox it will show some random scroll position rather than either the last viewed one or scrolling all the way to the top or bottom.
Mail continues to have data vault problems that can prevent plug-ins from being able to load after a migration or restore. (Mail incorrectly reports that they are incompatible.) Usually this can be fixed by manually deleting the data vault (after turning off SIP), although sometimes even that doesn’t help.
Mail recipient auto-completion would only work when typing names, not addresses. This was annoying for contacts that have multiple addresses because there was no way to quickly jump to the one that you wanted. I think this got fixed in macOS 11.3.
After clicking on mailbox in Mail, it continues showing the content from the previously selected mailbox while it loads, instead of either waiting with the old mailbox selected or displaying the new one blank with a spinner.
Unread counts of mailboxes and especially smart mailboxes continue to be unreliable. Smart mailboxes sometimes show the wrong messages entirely.
The Mail search query is now maintained in the search field when switching mailboxes in the sidebar. This can be useful, e.g. when doing the same search across multiple locations, but it’s inconsistent with other apps.
Mail’s “Enable this account” checkbox doesn’t work for POP accounts. There’s no way to hide and disable them.
In Mail’s column layout, clicking the reply arrow icon next to message no longer shows the related messages.
Mail is encountering more mysterious errors that cause “Recovered Messages” mailboxes to be generated.
Moving IMAP mailboxes doesn’t work unless the target mailbox is collapsed. (It even fails if it’s collapsed but springs open as you hover for too long.)
Mail’s data density is much lower due to changing the way magic mailboxes work. It used to be that Inbox/Sent/Drafts/Archive/Trash mailboxes for all accounts could be grouped together at the top of the list. Most of the time you could work with a single combined/unified mailbox of each type, regardless of how many accounts you have. And then these other mailboxes wouldn’t clutter the rest of the sidebar. With Mail’s new system of favorite mailboxes, you can still see the magic mailboxes at the top, but they still appear (duplicated) in each account’s section. So, if you have 5 accounts, you lose 25 lines in your sidebar. Even on a 27-inch display, I can no longer see all my accounts at once without scrolling.
Using external drives continues to be unreliable, with some not mounting until I go into Disk Utility. Erasing drives often fails. It seems to work better to format as unencrypted HFS+ first, before formatting using the actual desired format. Drives spontaneously unmount, which hadn’t really happened to me for the last several releases.
There are weird scrolling issues in different apps. For example, OmniOutliner documents always open scrolled down a few lines. Messages conversations often open scrolled up a few lines (not correlated with which messages have been read or where the conversation was previously scrolled to).
Opening Messages by clicking a notification doesn’t always scroll the clicked-on message into view.
I really like the new window subtitle feature, but I don’t like putting the title and toolbar buttons on the same line. There just isn’t enough space for the buttons, especially if you like seeing them with labels.
I’m not yet used to the new coloring for active vs. inactive window title bars.
I miss being able to drag a window by its title bar while a sheet is up (e.g. while posting in MarsEdit, sampling in Activity Monitor, or sending a message in Mail).
I also miss being able to drag a window from any area of the title bar. Now I have to make sure I’m not clicking on a button.
Window sidebars are hard to read unless I adjust the accessibility settings.
Dimming the text and images in the sidebars of background windows is causing problems for me. First, this makes it harder to interact with background windows, e.g. finding the right folder to drop onto. Second, it’s inconsistent—sometimes a background window doesn’t get dimmed, which again makes it harder to tell which window is frontmost. As far as I know, there’s no API for apps to tell when to dim their sidebars, so (depending on the app) this can take extra work for developers and again there is inconsistency.
I continue to see window layer and drawing glitches, where a window’s chrome disappears, or everything but the shadow disappears, or a whole group of windows have their shadows flash on and off while I’m in another app. Sometimes the Dock itself flashes on and off.
There are drawing glitches like large red rectangles when viewing JPEGs or blue ones when viewing PDFs.
It’s no longer possible to drag a window right up to the menu bar or Dock. There is always a line of colored pixels in between, the desktop picture showing through.
Sometimes when I drag a window from a Retina display to a non-Retina one the font smoothing gets extra blurry.
Sometimes Night Shift only works on one of my displays (the internal).
Sometimes Notification Center doesn’t show any notifications.
Sometimes all the widgets disappear and I have to manually re-add and configure them.
The Stocks and Weather widgets are much worse.
Sometimes the menu bar clock is drawn faded out, even when Do Not Disturb is not enabled. Or, I’m not 100% sure, maybe Do Not Disturb is actually in effect even though it isn’t supposed to be, and it won’t actually turn off.
It’s forgetful of privacy preferences and sometimes spontaneously logs me out when I open the privacy section of System Preferences.
It still forgets my desktop pictures, but only for some spaces.
Sometimes switching to an app switches to the wrong space, i.e. a space that has no windows for that app at all.
Revealing files in Finder (either through another app’s menu command or the Command-click menu in a window’s title bar) often fails and instead opens a window showing just the home folder.
Finder shows files whose name ends with .mbox using a folder icon.
Finder sometimes reports a nonsensical error when I try to move a file to iCloud Drive. It doesn’t seem to be a problem with iCloud, since I can AirDrop the file to another Mac or to my iPhone and use that to save it to iCloud Drive.
Finder often shows a multi-second Gatekeeper progress bar when opening a regular document, even one that had been created on my own Mac and was never downloaded from the Internet.
Finder sometimes shows very stale folder contents, e.g. showing files in their previous folder long after they’ve been moved. Or not showing new files long after they’ve finished being saved. Or showing Safari download progress files long after the download has completed.
Other times the entire contents of a folder disappear for 30 seconds or so, making it look like my files have been deleted even though they were not actually touched.
Sometimes dragging a selection of multiple files doesn’t do anything. They have to be dragged individually.
Dragging and dropping files into the Time Machine exclusions list doesn’t work. (Workaround: click the + button and drag into the open panel.)
The Documents folder now shows some folders that are actually stored in app sandbox containers. I’m used to this folder being my area to organize.
Image Capture forgets the destination folder for saving photos. I have to choose it again each time.
Image Capture won’t auto-delete photos after copying them. (The “Delete after import” checkbox has been removed from the sidebar but is still available if you add the “…” button to the toolbar. It just doesn’t seem to do anything. Note that there is no View menu command to customize the toolbar; you have to know to Control-click on it.)
I like the new translation feature in Safari, but it turns out that I usually want to translate text that’s on the clipboard, not on a Web page. Why is there no Translate app like on iOS? Wasn’t Catalyst supposed to help with cases like this?
If I cut the URL in Safari’s location bar and then switch to another tab, the field remains blank. To see the URL for the new tab I have to reload the page.
AppleScript doesn’t properly work with Rosetta.
There are various problems with the Bluetooth APIs: connections time out instead of succeeding and connection observers aren’t always notified.
It’s now possible to remove the Spotlight menu, but I don’t see a way to get it back. [Update (2021-05-24): It’s in the redesigned Dock & Menu Bar preferences. I do like being able to hide Spotlight, since I use LaunchBar.]

Previously:

Update (2021-05-24): Josh Centers:

Photos just straight up corrupted a photo in iCloud the other day. That corruption synced between devices. Thankfully I was able to restore it, but geez.

Update (2021-05-25): Rui Carmo:

I’ve only experienced some of these issues, but the interesting bit is that I have heard about most of them through complaints from my friends, so it seems pretty comprehensive.

I do have to wonder why this is still the case this far into the 11.x cycle, since Big Sur really ought to be a lot less buggy than Catalina.