
MacOS Sierra Beta - gregmolnar
https://developer.apple.com/macos/
======
Udo
I've been a Mac-only user for about 15 years now, and I'm teetering on the
edge of abandoning the platform. A lot of technically-minded people I know are
considering the same. The hardware is outdated, underperforming, and
overpriced - and what's worse is Macs are now _completely_ user-unservicable.
So I'm weary when I read about an OS update nowadays (it used to be I was
excited), because OS X has been getting slower and more tedious to work with
for a long time now.

Metal: it's good that Metal exists, even though Apple has no ambitions to
introduce performant or even recent graphics adapters into its PC products.
Some people may even have wished for Metal adoption beyond Apple, but that's
not happening. What's conspicuously missing from Sierra is Vulkan support, so
gaming on the Mac is basically a prohibitively walled garden that can only be
tackled economically by the big graphics engines (which have mostly ignored
the platform) and pre-existing iOS developers.

Swift 3 and Apple Pay: this should not be an OS feature, or at least one that
is featured as spots #2 and #3 on the bullet point list.

Picture in picture: in a better world, this would be a window management
feature, but OS X is reducing its windowing capabilities in anticipation of a
full merge with iOS, it seems. So this is going to be a specialized video
component feature instead. Even on the screenshot they chose to show this off
with, it's clear this is drastically worse than just lining up non-fullscreen
windows side-by-side.

~~~
berberous
PiP looks great. There's nothing stopping you from opening two browser windows
side by side, but that's a huge pain. I don't want all the various other parts
of the webpage showing, or to have to resize the window manually to just show
the video. I just want to pop-out the video only. I love the feature on my
iPad. I think when you try it, you may grow to appreciate it.

~~~
Udo
_> PiP looks great._

For me at least, there is no way to look at that screenshot of a space-wasting
yet partially occluded fullscreen app with an awkwardly-placed naked video
component on top of it and say it "looks great".

 _> windows side by side, but that's a huge pain_

Window positioning on OS X is a huge pain because literally no work has been
done on this by Apple for many years now. Other OSes all have window snapping
and other conveniences, but on OS X I need 3rd-party software for that. What's
more is that PiP is a barely adequate specialized component from iOS. The more
generalized desktop element would instead have allowed to "PiP" any window
content I choose by essentially being an always-on-top decorator-less partial
window. But the way they are presenting it is not going to be empowering for
desktop users in any way. It's a thoughtlessly ported component from the more
unpleasant corners of the Youtube iOS app.

~~~
tmikaeld
There is window snapping in macOS, websearch for Sierra window snapping.

------
Haul4ss
I am using the public macOS and iOS betas. They are buggy.

Do not enroll in the macOS beta if you have your user account login linked to
iCloud, as there have been documented problems with this. My wife still can't
get in to her account on our Mac; I'm hoping they fix this in Public Beta 3.

All things considered, it probably wasn't worth enrolling in the betas. I
don't want to risk messing up my devices by stepping back to production
versions, so I'll just ride these out and get off the beta profile when the
final versions are released in the fall.

Hopefully the public betas get more stable as we approach release time.

~~~
mrmondo
Interesting to see the other side. I've always used the iOS betas and they've
always had the usual expected bugs before say the last pre-release version,
but with iOS 10, for the very first time I've found it to be really very
usable. It does destroy your battery life like all betas - but it'll have so
much debugging turned on and it is... well... beta! But yeah I'm loving iOS 10
(dev) beta as are my coworkers so much that we've put it on our personal
phones and are really happy with everything but the battery life and the odd
springboard crash every few days or so.

~~~
Terretta
I've had opposite experience, prior betas were very usable, no issues, while
iOS 10 has first weirdly notable bug in a "public" beta for me:

Certain Apple first party app background processes don't seem to be updating
status as background tasks progress:

\- App Store Updates tab doesn't show progress in the circles. Shows initial
circle, appears frozen, until app is ready to open and moved to the recently
updated section.

\- Photos "Uploading n items" status doesn't update until changes to time
stamp of when done updating or Now.

Leaving and coming back, force quitting, even rebooting, doesn't seem to cause
these screens to update until background process is complete.

However, they are definitely progressing in the background as the tasks
eventually finish, then screens update to show completed.

------
JulienSchmidt
GPGTools (MailGPG etc) and rustc / cargo stable are broken with macOS Sierra.

Moreover there seem to be a few memory leaks. Finder eats up more and more RAM
until it requires a force-relaunch. Unfortunately the same seems to be true
for the kernel, which therefore requires a sporadic reboot. I also encountered
the calendar notification service using 100% of the CPU a few times.

I'd wait for a later beta release or the final version.

~~~
steveklabnik
What's broken about Rust? Can you file an issue :)

------
orky56
Looks like Safari is getting some much needed updates with extensions and the
upcoming community engagement. Apple Pay in Safari will allow Apple to add
another device type to its payment ecosystem. Overall Safari is getting
stronger and is moving in the right direction to keep pace.

~~~
legulere
Still Apple Pay seems to be americo-centric with only supporting credit cards.
In Europe SEPA wire transfers and direct debit is cheaper, safer and has a
wider use-case (you can send money to any bank account).

~~~
chrisseaton
> Still Apple Pay seems to be americo-centric with only supporting credit
> cards

I don't understand - do you pay for everyday goods and services with wire
transfers and direct debits? Because that's the use case of Apple Pay isn't
it?

I'm not sure how anything could be quicker than a credit card. A normal
contactless transaction from me taking my wallet out of my pocket to being
done takes about two seconds. Apple Pay is no different except I take my phone
out of my pocket instead of my wallet. Maybe Apple Pay by watch could be
quicker?

~~~
matt4077
For groceries: 50% cash, 50% debit cards or direct debit – they instantly
score you and the content of your shopping cart and use the riskier but free
direct debit if they trust you.

But most people have CCs now as well. It's the only sane option besides paypal
and quite useful when traveling. I'm pretty sure though that a rather large
percentage of CC users pay it within the month and avoid interest.

~~~
chrisseaton
Direct debit may be free, but they pay _me_ when I use a credit card, with
cashback, so it's even better than free. (Of course I know I pay for
processing fees in the overall price, but if I'm paying that anyway I should
use the credit card).

------
sdfjkl
Meh. A bunch of silly gimmicks. Meanwhile, drag & drop still randomly breaks
in Finder, using certain USB 3.0 devices on my mid 2012 MBP causes
reproducible kernel panics and Mail.app occasionally crashes while downloading
emails.

Maybe have some of the gimmick crew look at all those crash reports I keep
sending instead?

------
wlesieutre
Since there's no context, the news today is Beta 4.

The betas have been on a roughly 2 week release cycle.

------
microcolonel
This seems pretty underwhelming. Swift isn't even a platform feature. Metal is
mostly useless for portable application developers, who probably wish it were
Vulkan; and furthermore it may indicate that the quality of the OpenGL stack
will degrade over time. Given how little time is actually spent entering
payment details, I do it maybe once a month, I also don't see the point in
Apple Pay on OS X except perhaps for completeness.

The deeper platform features, especially the new filesystem, are exciting
primarily because they're replacing vastly outdated predecessors.

------
eknkc
Anyone using the betas?

I'm thinking about installing the iOS 10 beta to my main phone but couldn't
find any decent info on its stability for a daily driver. macOS is more
dangerous anyway so I'd only get into iOS beta.

~~~
op00to
Don't install the beta. iOS 9 beta literally bricked iCloud backups on my
iCloud account. I had to get Apple Engineering to wipe everything. Even
deleting backups wouldn't fix it, it had to be cleaned up in the backend.
Yuck.

~~~
Terretta
The production iOS 9 cloud restore 'bricked' iCloud photo sync from my devices
(iCloud Photo Library, not Photostream which was fine).

iCloud Photos wouldn't update on the devices because iOS 9 thought the devices
were still restoring from backup. Apparently a known issue with tedious
workarounds involving mounting phone as a drive.

iOS 10 beta fixed the issue (perhaps expectedly, as it wouldn't make sense to
preserve a pending iOS 9 restore after update), and all the iCloud Photo
Library syncs worked again.

------
rrggrr
I prefer as little interaction with Apple's data centers as possible, but that
is the opposite of the direction MacOS is headed. A quick review of increasing
number of web services I pay for each month makes for depressing reading and I
see the handwriting on the wall... soon I'll be paying apple to view my files.

------
okket
Looks like go(lang-1.6.3) is broken again in this beta, worked nice in beta 3.

~~~
MikeKusold
Do you have a link to a discussion around this? A quick search of their GH
issues as well as mailing lists didn't turn up anything.

~~~
okket
Go 1.7-rc5 with a fix for macOS Sierra beta 4 is released [0], see also this
issue [1]

[0] [https://golang.org/dl/#go1.7rc5](https://golang.org/dl/#go1.7rc5)

[1]
[https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16579](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16579)

------
berberous
Are there APIs for Apple Pay and PIP that would let Firefox integrate those
features if they desire, or are those APIs locked down for Apple only?

~~~
Longhanks
Apple Pay: From
[https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/703/?time=9...](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/703/?time=908):
"You take an Apple Pay server URL, and this URL is provided from Safari. You
send this URL to your web server, which then requests the merchant session."
-> Seems like Safari only :/

PiP: From
[https://developer.apple.com/macos/](https://developer.apple.com/macos/): "And
if you use a custom video player, it’s easy to add a Picture in Picture
control using the JavaScript presentation mode API." -> Seems like it's
possible for 3rd party browsers to implement it!

~~~
pducks32
They have said that Apple Pay for the web would converge with window.Payment
but atm they do not feel the spec is acceptable enough.

~~~
berberous
Not familiar with Apple APIs. Is that supposed to mean that they plan to
eventually open up the API so that other browsers could implement it, or no?

~~~
pducks32
No so the window.Payment[1] isn't in the right place yet—according to Apple—to
be ready for their use. You can read more in [2]. So eventually ApplePay.js
would (I presume based on their language) disappear to some extent and all
browsers could use the Payments API and Apple wouldn't need their own custom
solution.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/](https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-
request/) [2] [https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-
wg/2016...](https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-
wg/2016Jun/0013.html)

