
Apple Software Quality Questions - ingve
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/01/18/apple-software-quality-questions/
======
coldtea
I'm considering in staying with Yosemite and iOS 8, and haven't seen any
singificant breakage over previous versions.

If anything it's better than Mavericks. And Mail woes are 99% gone too.

Just to add another viewpoint, since only people with negative experiences
tend to write.

Of course all software has bugs, but not everybody is bitten by all of them.
Some are legitimate complaints. Other are by peoplw who install every BS
addon, haxie etc they find, have el-cheapo external peripherals, or blame
third party software issues to the OS maker.

(That said, I've had the "22 px sheet" bug, and it's the second point release
already --I run the beta--, it should have been fixed by now, and I dislike
how they abandoned Aperture).

~~~
izacus
On the other hand, I'm still (on 10.10.2) experiencing severe window server
bug where desktop just slows down to a crawl (all animations, window
switching, missing control etc. run with less than 1fps) after some time of
using the machine. Rebooting the system helps for awhile... and then it slows
down again.

The issue seems to be limited to only nVidia equipped rMBPs, but honestly, I
did not expect a brand new laptop (I have mid-2014) for 3kEUR to stutter just
running desktop animations you know?

~~~
bshimmin
I have this too with Yosemite - mid-2012 rMBP, 16GB RAM. It feels snappy when
freshly rebooted, but after a period of time (hours? Probably not minutes...)
all desktop animations start to become really quite obviously sluggish.
Swiping between spaces is painful.

You do not expect this on an expensive machine that is barely two years old.

I also have wifi dropout issues, Mail is increasingly slow and unpredictable,
and iTunes... Christ, don't get me started on iTunes.

My wife's 4 year old MBP, with 4GB RAM, was usable with Mavericks but is now
basically unusable with Yosemite. I'm hoping more RAM and an SSD might sort it
out, but I'm not overly hopeful.

I've been a more or less full-time Mac user since about 2003 and I don't
remember being this frustrated with their software before.

~~~
Alphasite_
If this is the same issue I've been having, the seed prices starts gobbling up
gigabytes of ram, and thats cause similar issues for me.

------
20kleagues
I bought my Mom an iPad over an android tablet telling her that everything
will just work. After the iOS 8 update, I am shying away from answering her
questions about bugs, and questioning my decision about the iPad. People who
are non-tech proficient form the biggest consumer-base for Apple, and it is
terrible that Apple is forgetting how it gained this loyal consumer-base in
the first place - through reliable software which 'just works'. It only makes
more business sense to go back to their original software quality even if it
requires dumping regular releases, because they will start losing (probably
already have) customers real soon if they don't.

~~~
visarga
Don't get me started with iPads and iOS 8 - there is no way to set a screen
time limit for children by their parents. I would like to keep Wikipedia,
Alarms and a few other apps fully open, but to limit Youtube and gaming time.
No way to do it with Apple's software or with third party software (iOS does
not allow parental apps).

The iPad, as it is, is very tempting for kids (and not only kids). To leave
such a toy in the hands of a child is like leaving a big bag of chocolates in
their room and telling them to eat responsibly when they are alone. Apple
wants parents to police their iPads by hand instead. I have many other things
to do than police children's gaming. We are in the age of computing now, if
they haven't realized. I want nice stats with total time per app per day, like
some parental control apps offer on Android.

In practice I was forced to confiscate their iPads and give them Android
phones with big screens and good parental controls instead. Never gonna buy an
iPad/iPhone for my kids again.

I am sure Apple does it for self serving reasons like "Don't limit their
gaming time in any way, and sales with soar!"

~~~
masterleep
It really is astonishing how lacking the Parental Controls are on iOS.

~~~
rimantas
To me it sound more like parents are lacking parental control.

~~~
ChrisPebble
I am not astonished iOS lacks parental controls but admit they would be
useful.

Establishing rules for my toddler is relatively easy when in the context of a
physical object (e.g. don't touch the TV, you can only read books or do
puzzles during quiet time).

The same toddler has a MUCH harder time recognizing the distinction when
dealing with different apps on a single physical device. If I leave two
devices in a room and tell him not to touch one, I'll get compliance. If I
give him access to a device but tell he that he can't watch movies, compliance
drops and he exhibits much less awareness that he broke a rule.

I don't fault apple at all for the lack of parental controls, but do see a use
if they were included.

------
coreyoconnor
No question that Apple's quality has gone done. However, who's has gone up? Or
better yet: Who is actually building quality software systems? Comparing only
in the same problem domains as Apple: All of my Android devices have been rife
with equivalently bad issues. Windows? Different quality issues, but just as
bad. Google web systems? Same case. Better in some aspects, worse in others.
Perhaps I'm old and jaded. Still, seems like we've reached a point in software
development where building quality systems is not possible with existing
methodologies. Where some problems, while we are able to develop 90%
solutions, the last 10% might as well be impossible. The even more jaded part
of me wonders: Does it even matter?

~~~
rtpg
Windows quality has gone up significantly since XP. I no longer associate
Windows with constant crashing like I used to. Android has also gotten miles
better, I haven't had any weird system-related bugs in so long (the worst I've
gotten is some slowness).

The main issue is that Microsoft and Android developers (I guess mainly
Google) are getting their shit together (resulting in some decent software),
whereas Apple software quality is in a freefall, failing in some extremely
basic use cases, and has been for a while.

Desktop OSs are one thing, but in 2 years do you think iOS will be more usable
than Android on comparable hardware? I already don't think so. The momentum is
definitely against Apple

~~~
happyscrappy
Updating your Android version is likely to break telephony and Android will
probably never be secure for non technical users. Apple is pushing the limit
with things like answering my phone on my laptop. Would someone even dare try
this on Android? Maybe Apple is moving too fast, that is a matter of opinion,
but they are certainly moving forward fast.

~~~
Cowicide
>Would someone even dare try this on Android?

Via Google Voice/Hangouts the answering/calling of a phone through a Mac or
other PC has been around before Apple's introduction of it. Also, things like
SMS MightyText for Android were also things I've enjoyed on my Android/Mac
combo well before Apple made it available within the OS:

[http://blog.mightytext.net/welcome-to-the-party-
apple/](http://blog.mightytext.net/welcome-to-the-party-apple/)

Granted, I did use an iChat/AIM combo setup to text phones (and receive texts)
via my Mac in the past, but it was a cumbersome utilization and didn't work
with all carriers.

>Maybe Apple is moving too fast, that is a matter of opinion, but they are
certainly moving forward fast.

Bugs that hinder workflow moves me backwards. And, these Mac OS and iOS bugs
aren't just a matter of opinion. I don't think it's time to slam all that is
Apple, but the company is overdue for some customer backlash and constructive
criticism, in my opinion.

Then again, maybe this is all just bad karma from Apple completely ignoring
the faulty early 2011 MacBook Pro GPU/logic board failures and not issuing a
recall and replacement program as they should.

~~~
happyscrappy
I haven't had any recent problems with iOS or OSX but I don't always agree
with Apple's very opinionated design decision. I can understand why they do it
but it sometimes rubs me the wrong way. The other shoe that hasn't dropped yet
is security which is abysmal on Android but most users haven't noticed yet.
Windows Phone could make huge inroads that way.

------
vbezhenar
I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version every
year. Users expect a lot of changes from iOS n+1 or OS X m+1. You can't just
fix all bugs and release a new version. And constant feature improvement
introduces new bugs and deadline frames won't allow to release properly tested
fixes for old bugs.

I believe that feature-wise OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 are quite nice. Apple really
should adapt something like Intel's tick-tock strategy. Release iOS 8 with new
features at 2014. Release iOS 8S with all bugs fixed in 2015. Release iOS 9
with new features at 2016 but allow customers to downgrade to iOS 8S if they
want to, for at least a year. They'll have to support 2 iOS versions, but
people will have a choice between new features and stability.

~~~
nodata
> I think that Apple is a victim of its decision to release new OS version
> every year

Why? Why is one year the problem, would two years fix it? Why not 14 months?

~~~
fpgeek
I'd say a fixed cadence, especially when combined with a relatively inflexible
scope (pre-announced features, features tied to new hardware, etc.), is, at a
minimum, a significant contributor to the problem. If there's an unexpected
problem late in the development cycle, what's going to give?

~~~
gress
Contrary to this, as they experience more instances of the fixed cadence, they
will have more opportunity to measure their capacity and adjust the scope
accordingly.

What needs to 'give' is over-promising. And the best way to achieve that is to
maintain a fixed cadence so that they can gather a more and more accurate
understanding of what _can_ be delivered with high quality in that timeframe.

------
rwbcxrz
You don't even have to go into depth to find flaws in Yosemite like this one:
[http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152038/prevent-
redr...](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152038/prevent-redraw-of-
menu-bar-icons-yosemite)

The flickering menubar icons drive me insane. It's proof that Apple has is
either unwilling or unable to commit enough resources to OSX to ensure that
its quality is consistent with what users have come to expect.

~~~
jsz0
Quality is important but it's also important to move the platform forward.
This flickering menubar issue sounds like an issue maybe related to the
changes with multi-monitor support and/or the changes made to improve UI
performance on HiDPI displays. Just speculation so who knows but if so they
might be a necessary evil. As far as the level of quality we expect this is
where I start to wonder if I'm living in a parallel universe or something. My
experience over the years is misbehaving menubar apps could make the entire
menubar stop working sometimes even requiring a restart and icon cache issues
in the dock/menubar were not uncommon. I haven't had any of those problems on
10.10 yet so maybe I'm more inclined to believe these changes (and bugs they
may cause) are for the best interest of the platform over the long term. Who
knows though -- if I was experiencing the blinking menubar problem I might
miss the days of only dealing with an occasional menubar crash.

------
rab_oof
SJ used to be relentless about nitpicking to keep quality up. Probably not
happening consistently across all apps and platforms as much. Tim may need to
appoint a Quality Czar whom is detail-oriented, accepts no bull and has "wrath
of God" authority to make folks take them seriously.

Long-standing, time-wasting bugs I've noticed:

\- Mdns broadcast disabling doesn't work.

\- Swift playground in Xcode crashes regularly.

\- Mobile Safari regularly crashes randomly on backspace in text areas.

\- App Store installs corrupted apps but they don't show as corrupted until
reboot, and then future downloads fail.

\- Mail.app synchronously hangs the UI when processing new email notifications
(probable not using a background queue).

~~~
MekaiGS
Spotlight's Search the Web option regularly disappear after you've entered
your query in the box; it's been super frustrating.

~~~
rab_oof
On the privacy front: iOS Spotlight still falls back to searching the web
without permission, leaking privacy info. And all the Privacy and Spotlight
settings are set correctly.

OSX Spotlight is blocked by policy in Hands Off!

------
walterbell
A visual interpretation of changes in Apple's org chart:

[http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-
charts/](http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/)

[http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-
update/](http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update/)

~~~
72deluxe
Very witty - is the implication that Apple now has no leader and the end nodes
are floating off without guidance?

------
coldcode
Jean-Louis was always pretty honest about stuff. The problem is Apple has too
many things going on and only the big stuff gets attention. Take XCode for
example, please take it way before I shoot something.

~~~
cmelbye
Xcode is the number one reason why I don't do more iOS development. It just
takes so much longer to do anything compared to languages that I can edit in a
fast, simple text editor and run/test from terminal.

~~~
72deluxe
What's so bad about it? I use it for native OSX development with C++ and I
have found it very useful, particularly with integration into Instruments for
monitoring memory usage, network usage, thread behaviours, as well as the
static code analysis for finding dead stores, memory leaks, pointless bits of
code etc. (very useful!)

The navigation bar makes navigating the projects easy enough, plus I have
added steps in the script sections for builds to package up 3D
models/resources into the app, set dylib target references, bundle resources
into the executable etc.

Finding where functions are called (callers and callees) from the quick menu
is a lifesaver too. I find that I miss the back/forward buttons when I use
anything else for editing.

As the project is quite large I could not possibly imagine doing this in a
text editor.

~~~
cmelbye
I can't imagine not using Xcode for a large Obj-C project either. The UI and
tooling is not the issue. In that regard, I love Xcode, it's very helpful. The
issue is that it's dog slow on my computer and it eats up all the memory it
can get its hands on. That's why I prefer to do non-iOS development, where I
don't need to use an IDE.

------
robbyt
When I read reports of massive Yosemite bugs, I think that I am ether lucky,
or I'm just a really bad QA tester.

I've personally had very few problems on my 3 different Apple computers.

~~~
rimantas
Same here. Three computers on Yosemite (including iMac from 2008), two
iPhones, two iPads. I would not say zero problems, but those are mingo
glitches at worst. Text messaging from any device alone was worth the upgrade.

------
jsz0
Most of the articles I've read on Apple software quality seem like larger
industry wide issues to me. For example with the iTunes issue mentioned in
this article this is a problem that every metadata / library based media
player has to deal. If you let more than one app touch your audio files then
you're pretty much guaranteed to have problems. Different apps/services may
not write or sort on the same tags. No one's fault exactly just the way things
are. The example of dictionary / thesaurus lookup moving to a system wide text
service is an instance of a feature clearly being improved but if the users
aren't aware it changed is that _really_ an improvement? The entire industry
sucks at user education. There's no good reason every major software developer
shouldn't have hours and hours of free training/how-to videos available for
users to cope with change. For the issue of GMail SMTP rejecting iWork file
format attachments it's the industry wide problem of users being stuck between
the best interests of various companies. Apple wants to change/improve the
iWork format but Google wants to protect users from files it can't scan. Again
no one is really at fault it's just the way things are.

~~~
wodenokoto
I disagree. Companies are at fault here. It's apple's job to test common use
cases, such as sending emails through common 3rd party services. And it is
googles job to send the files its users wish to send.

~~~
72deluxe
I would agree. Has anyone tried to upload a file such as a CV to a website
using Safari? It's impossible - the file selection "browse" button area is
entirely MISSING. As local file access is not possible on the iPad, they just
pretend it doesn't exist and you have to resort to installing bloated massive
stupid apps to work around a daft problem within Safari.

------
visarga
I just rated Yosemite 1 star on App store and wiped everything and installed
Mavericks. It is so much better now. The last OS was just a shameless cloud
infestation ridded with bugs.

I use Remote Screen for work, and EVERY time I disconnect my MacBook Pro
freezes completely for 1-3 minutes (no mouse, just a froze desktop). Sometimes
I need to hard reset it. Screen sharing used to work nicely in 10.9, 10.8,
10.7 and so on. Why was it necessary to mess with something good?

~~~
vitd
Oh man, this happens to me too. So infuriating! I've taken to just hard
rebooting it, as it takes about 20 seconds to boot and log in.

------
planetjones
I think apple are facing the same problems a lot of other companies face -
it's no longer green field development and the existing codebase means they're
being weighed down by regression. Maybe not enough automated tests. However
some bugs are basic error really. Take the frequently visited icons on mobile
safari. They keep getting the wrong favicon - that's just shoddy programming
and testing.

~~~
yaeger
I think it is not so much the legacy code that is the problem.

I think it is the fact that more and more features are being introduced and
many seem to have effects on each other in a way apple has not foreseen.

Like the Wifi issue seems to have something to do with the ad-hoc networks
being used for handoff or for making telephone calls from your Mac etc.

Ever since iCloud and its background services was introduced it seems the bugs
happen more and more frequently. I think we need a maintenance release of Mac
OS this year instead of yet another set of new features that will clash with
the existing ones.

------
lelf
If more developers knew what backward compatibility is, I'd be happily using
Snow Leopard right now. The most frustrating part is there's nothing
fundamentally new worth all the bugs and a constant envy for new hardware.

~~~
cpach
From time to time I have thought about switching to Centos as my desktop,
where every release is supported for ten years. The question is, in the year
2023, will I really still want to use an OS from 2014? I’m not sure about
that. In the end I think I’m really better off sticking with OS X for the
foreseeable future.

------
72deluxe
Has anyone found Safari under Yosemite and iOS8 to be of "disappointing"
quality? I know of DNS being broken in Yosemite but my wife and I find Safari
to be extremely irritating- it just sits there at 20% of address bar progress
after entering an address and pressing Enter.

EDIT: And another thing - Spotlight now takes a significant amount of time to
get results. I notice a large difference between my personal i7 2012 MBP with
Yosemite and the 2008 single-CPU (quad core) Xeon running Mavericks at work.
Maybe it's the disk difference, but I sometimes wonder if Spotlight is doing
anything as there is no search indication / activity indication.

~~~
fredsted
I had that problem when one of my system DNS servers were incorrect.

~~~
72deluxe
Mine are both set to Google's.

------
sudo-i
I can't wait for the day when I can use WiFi and Bluetooth simultaneously
without issues.

eg.
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4113552](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4113552)

------
Flow
I currently have two Macs. A late 2013 rMBP 13" which works flawlessly, and an
iMac 27" with 680mx(later 2012?).

The iMac has felt wonky for lack of a better word. It doesn't hang or crash
more than Mavericks did, but f.lux causes WindowServer to crash randomly which
makes all users to be logged out in a microsecond. I've reported this of
course.

Another thing that troubles me is the amount of rubbish logging done by the
system. Have Console.app open for a while and see what nonsense it barfs out.
How can it work at all with all those problems?

~~~
perlpimp
that model of rmbp has flickering keyboard light issue. if you set your
display and keyboard brightness to about 2 bars, in a very dark room keyboard
will flicker.

~~~
Flow
Ouch, I haven't noticed that, but I'm sure I will now :-P

I've noticed some logging about the touchpad causing some restart. The mouse
pointer used to make a slight jump every time that was logged.

------
programminggeek
I don't think there is as much of a fear of someone important getting angry
like Steve Jobs used to. Without that fear, they are more likely to ship bugs.

~~~
Cowicide
That may be the case, but I've also noticed that too many Apple users have
been less critical than they used to be and easily go on the attack of even
the smallest constructive criticism of the company's products.

Maybe it's time for Mac users to get much more vocal and critical with Apple
and quit apologizing for their mistakes to others?

I remember back in the day when there were Mac user uproars over the tiniest
Mac OS flaws and I took pride that I was a part of a group of consumers that
asked.. no, --demanded-- high quality products from Apple. Steve Jobs really
seemed to take pride in that as well, in my opinion.

I hope threads like these are a sign that Apple consumers are ready to get
back to our old-school roots of being demanding users that expect the best
hardware and software for our money.

Consumer complacency breeds corporate complacency. I'm not critical of Mac
products because I hate them. I'm critical of Mac products because I utilize
them and need them for business. Otherwise, I frankly wouldn't give a shit.

~~~
rab_oof
I file bugs on every issue encountered. I suggest others do as well. The way
Apple works (or used to) is that all bugs get read and possibly fixed, however
there is little/no feedback as to timeline or whether a fix will occur. It's
pompous, pseudotheatrical silence rather than engagement.

~~~
Cowicide
I agree, Apple's silence on various issues is incredibly unprofessional and is
creating increasing resentment among consumers and developers, etc.

------
hackaflocka
Slightly off-topic, but I also find some of Apple's software workflow
philosophies baffling. E.g., sometime back they got rid of the Save As button.

I was once playing around with editing a photo using Preview. I tried a crop
etc. Eventually, I closed the app without committing to any of the edits (by
Saving anything). Imagine my shock (and horror) when I discovered that the
"playing around edits" I had done had all been permanently applied to my
original image. Despite never having saved anything. All the edits were being
applied in real-time, even if I was just trying something to see how it would
look (without committing a save). So, they apparently have decided to even get
rid of the Save button in some cases.

------
webwielder
I continue to be flabbergasted that so many otherwise savvy observers believe
that a random assortment of software annoyances constitutes a crisis at Apple.
Articles like this could have been, and were, written at any time in the past
fifteen years.

~~~
Spooky23
Apple is an incredibly mercurial company that sometimes gets too busy telling
you what to do that they can't execute small things.

Look at poor iMovie, which has had most useful features stripped by this
point. Or Pages, which actually broke file compatibility with little or no
benefit. Or the situation with Wifi, which is a fuckup of monumental
proportion.

~~~
rab_oof
On a mid 2012 13" non-retina (the 16 GiB hackable, 2 SSD one) MBP, fixed wifi
by doing a clean Yosemite install, no transfer settings and then deleting
network preferences plists. :(

Works, stable on 10.10.1. (Discoveryd mdns announce disablement doesn't flag
doesn work at all though.)

------
b3tta
IMHO currently the worst bugs are in discoveryd, which replaces mDNSResponder
for Bonjour.

If you remove a service on OSX 10.10 it's removal will be broadcast. But it
doesn't stop there. No... Most of the time the service will be published again
after that and after a second or so it will be finally removed. How the hell
did this pass even the most basic QA checks?!

~~~
rab_oof
discoveryd is shit. The unofficial no broadcast argument breaks WiFi. You
can't disable discoveryd, or it breaks DNS and DHCP.

If there's somwthing you want to block (multicast DNS), get icefloor and/or
(Hand Off OR Little Snitch). I use the former and latter.former. OSX Yosemite
contains the awesome pf firewall forked from FreeBSD which was forked from
OpenBSD. (Apple send some cash to FreeBSD and OpenBSD plz.)

------
lmg643
I had an issue with Mac Mail and after the upgrade it just stopped synching my
exchange files correctly and that was the end of it. Called apple support,
very friendly guy, talked me through it, we tried a few fixes, there was a
workaround but it wasn't the same again. Moved over to MS Outlook and haven't
gone back. Kind of a shame.

------
hackaflocka
As some others have pointed out elsewhere, OS X Yosemite used to bork your old
XAMPP installation. I spent 1.5 entire days restoring my XAMPP. I believe the
XAMPP people have released a fix that prevents the borking. "Madness" is
right.

Apple: I am NEVER going to upgrade OS X again if my current version is working
fine.

------
psp
Ahh, finally a blog touching this! I've been quietly pissed off for a while at
being unable to get Apple TV to connect or closing a full screen video tab in
Safari without killing the whole process. And other bits and pieces that
occasionally just don't work goddamnit.

------
walterbell
From a comment on the article, a roundup of writers on this topic,
[http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-
in-...](http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in-os-x-
quality-is-declining)

------
hackaflocka
It took Apple 2 years to correct the name of my local university in "Maps"
(after I had filed 3 correction reports via Maps, each spaced a month apart).

I think a little expectations management might be in order here.

------
pbreit
Classic JLG going off on apps when all anyone cares about are MacOS, iOS and
iCloud.

------
Animats
The first rule of Apple software quality is that you don't talk about Apple
software quality. All Apple software is, by definition, perfect.

Look at Rolex watches. They're a pure status symbol. They don't keep time all
that well. Rolex doesn't even submit them for Swiss chronometer certification
any more.

------
blazespin
Apple and Android are in a sack race to the goal line of Billions of dollars
in profit. They're both stumbling a lot, but I think it's pretty clear that
Apple is winning.

------
mrmondo
Quite honestly Yosemite is the most buggy Apple product I've ever used - it
has made working with OSX a chore. Apple has not fixed one of the bug reports
I filed during the beta phase (which I'm not convinced has finished).

~~~
visarga
I tried to downgrade to Mavericks yesterday, it was almost impossible. The
installer refuses to wipe clean and install a lower version unless you do some
magic to the disk first and use web install. It took over 5 hours and I
downloaded Mac OS 4 times from different sources, including Apple.

The ram it on our throats with free upgrade, then block our path to downgrade,
unless we have a time machine backup to restore from. I didn't.

~~~
wiredfool
My wife and I have identical MBAirs, except that I got mine when it was
shipping with Mavericks and she got Yosemite. I get about twice the batter
life, and a lot less trouble with Pages/Numbers.

I'm thinking of wiping hers and installing from TimeMachine, then pulling in
just her user data.

------
_pmf_
Maintaining software is not as fun as greenfield development, and Apple's
strategy of assuming that their users should just throw away three year old
devices seems not to work out any longer.

~~~
Cowicide
>Apple's strategy of assuming that their users should just throw away three
year old devices seems not to work out any longer.

Yeah, as I've been saying...

Some may call all of this growing Apple consumer angst and issues "back luck",
but I bet Steve Jobs would call it "bad karma".

Consumers with early 2011 MacBook Pros that died after 2-3 years didn't feel
like they got a very good ROI on a 3-4,000 dollar laptop, go figure.
Especially those that paid hundreds more for extended Applecare and had the
defective GPU fail quickly after it expired.

------
eridius
Skimming this, I just wanted to reply to this one bit:

> Befuddled users found they couldn’t send Pages 5 files through Gmail. It’s
> now fixed, as the What’s New in Pages screen proudly claims…

> > ° Updated file format makes it easier to send documents via services like
> Gmail and Dropbox

> …but how could such an obvious, non-esoteric bug escape Apple’s attention in
> the first place?

And the answer, if I recall correctly as to what was going on, was that this
wasn't a bug with Apple's software at all. It was a consequence of the file
format actually being a package, meaning it was really a document. Apple
software all worked with documents just fine, and you'll find that if you
tried to use Mail.app to send it, it would all Just Work™. The issue is that
Gmail and other such services never even considered the idea that a user might
want to send a whole folder and did not have any way to support that.

So the "fix" was to change the file format to actually be a compressed archive
of the package (I assume it was a zip file, but I don't know how to go back
and check). This made it work with all of the stupid software out there that
assumed users would only want to transfer individual files.

Sure, perhaps the Pages team could have foreseen this issue. But that doesn't
make it a bug in their software, just a case of only prioritizing
compatibility with other aspects of Apple's software ecosystem.

~~~
jakobegger
Claiming that "this is not a bug" sounds a lot like "you are holding it
wrong".

Software that doesn't perform as the user expects is almost always a bug. Yes,
these folder-packages have been a problem for years. No, that doesn't mean
Apple can just leave the problem as is.

For example, try emailing an app. Doesn't work. You need to zip it first. But
why doesn't Mail.app just zip the file when I select it?

Why doesn't Safari automatically zip any package that I select for uploading?

Apple came up with the idea of packages, so they better fix the issues around
them. Saying that Google should fix Gmail helps no-one.

~~~
eridius
> But why doesn't Mail.app just zip the file when I select it?

It does. That's the whole point of my comment. Mail.app has always supported
emailing folders.

~~~
jakobegger
Folders yes, packages no. I often email prerelease builds of my app to people.
If I forget to zip the app, it arrives broken (but i havent checked yet what
exactly breaks)

~~~
eridius
I just emailed myself an app from one computer to another using Mail.app and
it worked perfectly.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe your email provider modifies the
message in-flight because it contains an executable. And that's something
Mail.app can't possibly work around. Although if manually zipping your app
fixes it then I don't know why that would be.

