Archive for April 9, 2025

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

Unable to Send Messages With Apple Mail on macOS 15.4

Awkward_One_9772:

MacOS 15.4 (Sequoia) cannot send email, but it receives email eMail. Using 3 different accounts in apple email it fails for all three. […] When I click “send” on an email created in apple mail or as a draft in apple mail, apple eMail nothing happens, just the airplane send icon grays out, also Time-to-cancel does not appear in the apple mail’s bottom left column either.

pajako:

I can open the mail.app; type and e-mail and hit ‘send’ The send-button turns gray and no email is been send.

[…]

It gets even weirder: I saw a reply somewhere about trying to send an e-mail with an attachment; after I tried to attach a file to an e-mail it works again. Not flawless but I can send emails again…

One of my customers also encountered this bug, where the Send button turns gray and seemingly the only option is to close the draft, discarding changes. He found that the problem was triggered by the Settings ‣ Composing ‣ Check spelling ‣ When I Click Send option, which is supposed to bring up the Spelling and Grammar panel, but didn’t. I have always used As I Type. When I changed it to When I Click Send, the first message worked normally, bringing up the panel and then sending the message when I closed it, but the second message didn’t show the panel and got into the reported disabled state.

Previously:

Why Companies Don’t Fix Bugs

Ibrahim Diallo (via Hacker News):

A few years ago, a lone programmer named t0st did something extraordinary: he fixed an 8-year-old bug in GTA Online that had been driving players crazy. The bug? Painfully long load times, sometimes up to 20 minutes. While the single-player mode loaded in seconds. His solution was elegant: a 13-line code tweak that cut load times by 70%. Rockstar Games, the studio behind GTA, rewarded him with a $10,000 bounty and patched the game. Problem solved, right?

Not quite.

The internet erupted with criticism. How could a billion-dollar company miss something so obvious? Were their developers incompetent? As someone who’s worked in tech, I can tell you the answer isn’t that simple. The real story here isn’t about lazy developers or technical incompetence. It’s about how even the simplest fixes get lost in the labyrinth of corporate priorities.

I think these kinds of bugs do drive customers away, but did it really happen if you can’t measure it? I wish Tim Cook would not think about the “bloody ROI” regarding software quality, too. Apple had the back of the cabinet mentality as a young company, but now that it has F.U. money it chooses not to care. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Conversely, there are some small companies who will dig into any issue that you report, even though it may turn out to be a bug that doesn’t affect anyone else. (At bigco scale, odds are that it does.) Not only is this great because it directly solves my problem, but I also know that I’m dealing with craftspeople and that if they treat others the same way the product is probably solid in ways I couldn’t imagine.

Tim:

There’s some software from a big company that I have to use for a project (not my choice), and it drives me crazy how buggy it is. The same company is running ads for internet service in my city. Given my experience with the software, there is zero chance I’d ever consider them as my ISP. I know it’s not the same team, but they give off a corporate aura of not caring. Even if I knew for certain that the internet service would be perfect, I can’t in good faith reward them with money for their software apathy.

The best companies realize that the best advertising is a quality product, the easiest customers to sell to are their existing customers, and happy customers are their own free advertising team. All the buggy software I see today is causing me to have absolutely no loyalty to any of these companies. It is unbelievably shortsighted for them not to see this.

Previously:

Soured

Matthew Bickham (Hacker News):

Once upon a time, developing for Apple was an exciting, rewarding challenge. Apple built world-class hardware and software, and developers created incredible apps that made those devices indispensable. It was a win-win. But in 2025, that relationship has soured.

[…]

Sure, they’ll pay lip service to developers. But as in any relationship, don’t listen to the loving words of the perpetrator, instead observe their hurtful actions. Apple has continually created an environment and policies, along with nurturing a culture, that is detrimental and harmful to developers.

[…]

Developing for Apple isn’t just about writing great code — it’s about navigating a bureaucratic obstacle course filled with red tape, secret handshakes, and hidden pitfalls.

[…]

Now from experience, I know there is a limit on the number of rules that can be loaded. This isn’t documented anywhere. You are just meant to know the limit. […] Unfortunately – and what isn’t documented anywhere – is that although you can load that many rules, you are unlikely to actually be able to do so. There is also a hard, undocumented, memory limit on the extension process that loads the rules. A memory limit that kills the extension and means the app doesn’t work if it’s exceeded. A memory limit that isn’t documented, isn’t defined and isn’t known until you spend weeks trying to determine why your app is not working. An undocumented memory limit that is also different across iOS and macOS.

He also talks about the annual release cycle and API churn. There are certainly other prioritization and management issues, e.g. with Radar, documentation, and the elevation of “security” over all else, but so many problems come down to the schedule. Apple is trying to do too much too quickly. Major changes are snuck in months after the beta cycle began. Remember when “beta” used to mean that it was feature-complete and had already been extensively tested internally? And, of course, they ship stuff that’s immature (doesn’t work, has bugs or obvious design flaws, isn’t documented, etc.).

In theory, the release interval is arbitrary and not determinative: an annual schedule could be fine if the releases were smaller. But this is not what Apple has been doing. And, recently, they’ve made it worse by announcing stuff that they know won’t ship in the 0.0 release. This is spun as clever planning to deliver new delights throughout the year. But it seems more like a cope for squeezing more into the major release than they should. And the reality is that it means introducing whole new APIs and breakage in the 0.4 release. We no longer get a stable version before the next cycle begins.

The outward manifestation of all this is reduced quality. What’s less seen is that this bad process ultimately wastes time for everyone involved. If Apple ships something with known issues or issues that could have been caught internally, that generates work for external developers. They have to test and file bugs and develop workarounds because there’s no longer an expectation that bugs will be fixed before release to customers. Apple then has to process these bug reports, which it clearly doesn’t have time to do before shipping. As a bug gets out to more people, customers encounter it, which wastes their time and generates more support load and bug reporting for developers and more bug reports and AppleCare calls for Apple. So much of this could have been eliminated by catching problems earlier in the process. But, hey, technically they did hit the schedule.

Ironically, Apple does understand this at the micro level. They continue to make improvements to Xcode’s automated testing support. And Swift is all about catching problems early. Before you get to runtime testing, let’s block you from even compiling code with these potential errors. Let’s restrict what you can do in the interest of being able to prove to the compiler that it’s correct. And if a bug does make it through testing and to a user’s device, fail fast. Yet at the macro level, Apple’s software strategy seems to be the opposite. Ship first, catch later, move fast and break things, just fix it in post (or not).

Scott:

Just had a thought: given rumored iPhone 17 designs which are—quite simply—not all that compelling, that the M4 has made it Mac-wide (excepting the Mac Pro), and the tariff situation, now would be a PERFECT TIME for Apple to announce a 1 year ‘pause’ (of sorts) on OSes, ‘SNOW’!

[…]

Could announce at WWDC that they’re extending development on i|PadOS 18 and macOS 15 another 12 months; squashing bugs, solidifying features, not dropping any additional Intel Macs or iPhones, and eventually, finally, really bringing promised Apple Intelligence/Siri features.

Previously:

Reflecting on 18 Years at Google

Ian Hickson (2023, via Hacker News):

I feel very lucky to have experienced the early post-IPO Google; unlike most companies, and contrary to the popular narrative, Googlers, from the junior engineer all the way to the C-suite, were genuinely good people who cared very much about doing the right thing. The oft-mocked “don’t be evil“ truly was the guiding principle of the company at the time (largely a reaction to contemporaries like Microsoft whose operating procedures put profits far above the best interests of customers and humanity as a whole).

[…]

Early Google was also an excellent place to work. Executives gave frank answers on a weekly basis, or were candid about their inability to do so (e.g. for legal reasons or because some topic was too sensitive to discuss broadly). Eric Schmidt regularly walked the whole company through the discussions of the board. The successes and failures of various products were presented more or less objectively, with successes celebrated and failures examined critically with an eye to learning lessons rather than assigning blame. The company had a vision, and deviations from that vision were explained. Having experienced Dilbert-level management during my internship at Netscape five years earlier, the uniform competence of people at Google was very refreshing.

[…]

Flutter grew in a bubble, largely insulated from the changes Google was experiencing at the same time. Google’s culture eroded. Decisions went from being made for the benefit of users, to the benefit of Google, to the benefit of whoever was making the decision. Transparency evaporated. Where previously I would eagerly attend every company-wide meeting to learn what was happening, I found myself now able to predict the answers executives would give word for word. Today, I don’t know anyone at Google who could explain what Google’s vision is. Morale is at an all-time low. If you talk to therapists in the bay area, they will tell you all their Google clients are unhappy with Google.

Then Google had layoffs. The layoffs were an unforced error driven by a short-sighted drive to ensure the stock price would keep growing quarter-to-quarter, instead of following Google’s erstwhile strategy of prioritising long-term success even if that led to short-term losses (the very essence of “don’t be evil”).

Ben Collins-Sussman (2005, via Hacker News):

I sent this email to my wife and friends as I was wrapping up my first week of “noogler” orientation at Google’s headquarters in 2005. It’s a bit of a glimpse into Silicon Valley at the start of its peak ‘creative culture’ era.

Ben Collins-Sussman (2024, via Hacker News, Dan Luu):

When I was laid off from Google, I knew I’d be deluged with questions. I wrote this FAQ to share with friends and family, to prevent repeated explanation. But my other goal was to help so many of my co-workers process and understand the repeated waves of mass layoffs.

Collins-Sussman was a co-founder of both the Subversion project and Google’s Chicago office.

Ben Collins-Sussman (Hacker News):

Google is still a great place to work -- far better than most companies -- and still doing amazing things. My goal here is to call out a unique, beautiful thing that happened… put it out into the universe, with the hope that it can come back again someday, somewhere.

[…]

And so, when priorities would change, Google did not fire people, but rather moved them carefully between projects. The unstated cultural principle was: “products come and go, but we worked so hard to get our employees… so we should preserve them at all costs. They are our most precious resource.” And so a tremendous amount of energy was put into high-touch resettlement of each employee into new projects. They were generalists. We knew they’d thrive, and that Google would continue to make use of their talent in new ways.

But things change. In my first month at Google, I remember a co-worker whispering to me, “the day Google revenue stops growing without bound, is also the day all of this will change.” The change was very gradual for a long time -- but then things accelerated during the pandemic. Revenue began to slow, and now, coming out of the pandemic, we’re seeing waves of layoffs. Yes, we knew things would change, but we didn’t expect it would accelerate this quickly, in the span of just a couple of years. The academic founders are gone, much of the C-suite is now former Wall Street execs; combine that with revenue flattening toward a stable horizontal asymptote, and the obvious, expected thing happens: the company suddenly moves from a ”culture of infinite abundance” to a standard “culture of limited resources.” It’s a predictable regression toward becoming a ‘normal’ company.

Tim Bray (Hacker News, John Gruber):

On March 15, 2010, I started a new job at Google. The fourteen years since that day feel like a century. The title of my announcement was Now A No-Evil Zone and, OK, I can hear the laughing from ten timezones away. I tried, then, to be restrained, but there are hardly words to describe how happy and excited I was. I had escaped from the accretion disk the former Sun Microsystems was forming around Oracle, that blackest of holes. And Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work.

[…]

This is in my mind these days as I’m on a retired-Googlers mailing list where the current round of layoffs is under discussion and, well, it really seems like the joy has well and truly departed the Googleplex.

[…]

For my money, that was the center of Google’s problem. Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious.

[…]

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

Previously:

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