Needy Software

I use no Adobe software (yay Acorn, Pixelmator, and Affinity) so I feel pretty immune from this except for Zoom.

Your link to what you did when you turned off auto-updates for a year is linked to the wrong thing. It’s linking to the “Official Overcast Reddit” page

Agree with these points. Largely fine with some notifications about updates, though really prefer some more fine-grained (or sane defaults for serious security updates) prefs for how often I am bothered. Do not want any marketing unless it's some kind of "hey, the next update is going to be a *paid* update."

I am a devoted Lightroom user, and pay for the Adobe Photography subscription which includes Photoshop and Lightroom. I rarely use Photoshop though, so I only launch the Creative Cloud nagware for updates a couple of times a year, otherwise leaving it dormant. I actually install Lightroom from the Mac App Store instead of Creative Cloud, which is the same software and just silently updates whenever it needs to and does not hassle me.

@Joe The link is correct. I talk about how I didn’t update Overcast for a year, which was only possible because I turned off auto-updates globally.

@thomasjpr I don’t intentionally launch Creative Cloud, but it seems to reassert itself in the menu bar after each update. This is the rare case where I would prefer to update through the Mac App Store, but Lightroom Classic isn’t available there.

Another type of neediness is the need to contact the outside world. It's rare that an app does not want to contact Crashlytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Fonts or whatnot. The most stupid apps are the ones where I got a white interface (as in no controls visible) when I used Little Snitch to block everything. At least I need to be warned as user: hey this is a webapp and not a real one.

This seems apt here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBZv0_MImIY

Otherwise I agree with the observations on calling home, notifications and updates. Software should know its place - which is doing its job while causing as little friction to the user as possible.

Recently, Microsoft pushed three updates in as many days for their Windows App (aka RDP client) for one compatibility feature added - god forbid you test your software before releasing it and bother the user as little as possible.

"The reality is that there are no more polished releases"

I think this is exactly it. When I worked at large software companies 30 years ago, every release had at least two months of hardening, during which we just fixed bugs to get things as solid as possible. I haven't worked at a company doing that for at least a decade. We ship with known severe bugs and just put them on the backlog for the next release.

@Beatrix I think about that a lot. Most modern apps make way too many connections.

@Plume Modern SWE management is disgusting. 30 years ago, CD and DVD distribution meant bugs were fixed or they were immortalized. There was a cost to shipping them and dealing with returns. Modern management is so trash most bugs only matter "if enough people complain" and the release notes never inform, lest they admit fault or severity. If a dev's release notes are mostly "Bug fixes and improvements" they're a shit-tier company and I try to avoid them.

This speaks to my soul. And I've had the pleasure of following Prokopov's "grumpy.website" blog for some years now.

I often have fun with vintage computers, and one of the first things that's immediately noticeable to me is how everything there is for me, and meant to be a tool where what I want is what matters, like Prokopov's piece is talking about. This is especially true for classic Macintosh, though Mac OS X circa 10.6 or 10.7, give or take, feels that way too. It really makes it clear how the modern computer experience has degraded from what we used to have, in spite of the new capabilities modern computers have.

On my main computer, it's a constant struggle to try and get have the experience of using it be more like what it was 15 years ago. I am on the verge of ditching macOS for this reason because it's gotten so bad.

And just as an aside, one situation I keep finding myself in is when I mention that I don't update software somewhere online, and someone (usually from Reddit) shows up and chastises me for it, because I might be leaving myself open to security vulnerabilities. They don't know my skill level, my breadth of knowledge, my use case, other methods I use for mitigating security risks, nor can they even acknowledge that there MAY be downsides to updating! It's so very, very tiresome.

"If a dev's release notes..."

What are release notes? People just get used to random things appearing or disappearing; we don't want to needlessly confuse them with release notes.

"I mention that I don't update software somewhere online"

Oh yeah, I know exactly where this is going. People who have no idea about how software works or what a NAT is lecturing you about how you will immediately be pwned if you don't update to the latest version of Photoshop.

I work in the cybersecurity field, and we have "hardening" phases before each release. Not that big bugs can't slip, they do, but still, much less frequent than with these "move fast and break everything" companies. The last place I worked that had a similar release policy was also in the cybersecurity space, a decade before. I guess that field is the only one that still functions that way, at least in big enterprises. Even OS development these days seems to "move fast" and "break things".