I’ve been an Apple user since the Apple 2. It has been a wonderful ride until innovation was replaced by featuritis, which I date to the death of Steve Jobs. I used to welcome new features, now I spend time turning them off.
Today I removed Siri from my Mac’s Touch Bar. One of my fingers would accidentally touch the Siri thing and Siri would interrupt when I had no use for Her/Him/It – anyone figured out Siri’s favorite pronoun?
Anti Progress can be nice.
The Captain
What a difference a DOT (.) makes, same link with and without the trailing dot:
I’m 75 now. I’ve been using computers since the Apple IIe. But age takes its toll. I’m astonished at how much harder it is for me to keep up now. My son who is 28 (yes, he came along very late) picks up new tech stuff SO much faster.
No. If I were working sitting at a desk it would not happen. I’m working slouching in bed.
At 86 I’m amazed I can still write code but I do have difficulties picking up new stuff. My issue right now is that I absolutely HATE UNIX Command-line which I’m forced to use to get my MacBook pro Sequoia 15.6 to interpret (run) php which is my go-to developer language. Apple deprecated php (no preloaded php anymore) and one has to install it with Homebrew using the Terminal.app.
Others have reported the same problem so it’s not entirely me that is the problem
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
I just stumbled on an interesting typo by someone else struggling with Mac OS:
Can’t see, to find any information on the site or in the forums that describe this process.
Do you know what letter is next to the comma on American keyboards? Check it out!
One of the huge returns for mentoring and tutoring youngsters is that they quite wonderfully take over my computer maintenance once every three months or so, and do “everything that needs doing” like I did for my parents 50 years or so ago.
Makes me think I might want to stay alive and be pampered that way, and not, uhm, “pampered” in the other.
The pendulum will eventually swing back. When I upgraded my SUV, got all the safety bells and whistles: backup camera, proximity sensors, auto adjusting cruise control, etc., etc., but also many convenient features: parking assist, wifi GPS upgrades, car play, etc. Companies are now taking OUT some of these features because no one uses them. I’ve had the SUV for 7 years and have NEVER used parking assist.
Hear hear. Jobs would only let a feature in if it dramatically upgraded the user experience. Since his passing the bar seems to be “if we can do it, put it in” and that’s what I hated about Microsoft. Unfortunately, Apple still has my money, because Mr. Softie is still worse.
Goofy: Apple since the ][+. Once had a fax relay business in my bonus room with 25 Macs and a T-1 coming into the garage. Fun!
Why did they change the name from System Preferences to System Settings? A rose by any other name…
The settings/preferences fall into several categories each has a number of features in it. In the original they had a good visual layout, the categories were horizontal bands. In the new monstrosity they got rid of the visual display and even the category names. Total GARBAGE.
Here is my general rule of thumb about computer changes. 99% of all software upgrades don’t make things any better. They just make things different. The basic reason for this is to maintain job security for software engineers, and their manager bosses.
If you don’t think that something like new hardware standards are a useful thing…then you’d be using a screen that is showing 640 x 480 pixels with 64 colors! And you’d be backup up your 100 MB hard drive on a stack of 278 5.25” floppies. No sounds other than beeps and certainly no videos.
An entirely different subject. You did not see me complaining about real innovation so why bring it up?
All they are doing is messing up the makeup!
I was in the business before co-pilot was invented. I was an Apple Certified Developer since the mid 1980s. I had a copy of the original Macintosh documentation. If you are old enough you’ll remember telephone directories, that was the informal format of the document which laid out the philosophy the Mac was built on. Before Cook, Apple held developers to these standards, the consistency that made Mac easier to use than Windoze where everyone could do anything they wanted.
An anecdote. We developed a Help Desk Accessory for Mac. When activated by any application the Menu would display helpful text instead of executing the original command. We relied on everyone following Apple’s Guidelines. Surprise, Microsoft Excel didn’t so we had to create a workaround.
I tried to sell the product to Apple. During talks with Apple in Cupertino (1984-5) we mentioned this. At first they didn’t believe us but they went to check out the Excel code. We were right. They picked up the phone and called Redmond. Microsoft replied, “Yes sir, we’ll do it ASAP!”
We also created Help for Excel (one of my favorite early software products) and became Microsoft Certified Developers. Curious fact, Microsoft treated their Certified Developers much better than Apple.
Curious fact number two. Desktop Help bombed as a product but it found its way into a Japanese patent dispute as prior knowledge:
As far as hyper tools are concerned, the help icon corresponds to the “first icon,” while the “Link a choice list” icon, etc., corresponds to the “second icon.” Thus, the Invention is exactly the same as Invention Otsu No. 12 and therefore lacks novelty. B. The Invention is the same as the invention presented in Denny Schlesinger, “Help Documentation System Review” (MacTutor, the issue of November 1987) (Exhibit Otsu No. 13-1; Exhibit Ko No. 20 is a complete translation of Exhibit Otsu No. 13-1; hereinafter referred to as “Otsu Document No. 13”) (hereinafter, said invention shall be referred to as “Invention Otsu No. 13”).
