Slashdot Mirror
Woz Says Big Software Doesn't Work
chrizbot writes "A friend of mine studying journalism at Google's alma mater interviewed Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer fame. He chimes in on open source, DRM, record companies and how software from big companies suck so bad (including Apple's!). The part my friend doesn't include is how he guessed a trick was performed and won a necklace from him!" From the article: "Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they're doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don't know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don't work. The most things that are left out because they aren't finished. The most things that are inconsistent with the way they did their last program. I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple."
But he refuses to give examples, which is strange.
I can tell you that in my experience, the best software by far comes from Apple, from OSX on down to products like Final Cut Pro and Motion. Compare the user interface of Motion with the mess that is Flash and you'll get the point. Or compare Final Cut with Premiere.
Apple's not perfect, and I think Woz is responding to that fact. He's frustrated that even with world-class perfectionist Steve at the helm, software isn't perfect.
And of course this is true. But at least Steve's fighting for perfection - I fundementally agree with the cartoon I linked to - in an industry where most want to settle for "good enough for Government work."
D
Yesterday there was an article about 10 things Google trys to do to attract good programmers.
In my experience the lack, or opposite of those 10 things can often demotivate otherwise conscientious, talented programmers from doing the best job possible.
Big companies often do that, while doing other things that interfere with software quality.
It sounds like constructive criticism to me. He uses Mac only. So obviously it doesn't suck too badly. He doesn't point out any specifics about what sucks, but he lingers on UI design, which has become much less consistent with OS X. First aqua, then brushed metal, then Garageband pops up with some wood grain thing. Now there's a whole new 'Pro' look going into things like Aperture. It's like the Themes from OS 8.5, but now they are app specific. It's a common gripe.
If your finder crashes once a day, then you should fix it as there is obviously something wrong as that is far from the norm.
"Safari just stole focus from this text field because I had the audacity to load a new tab"
That's the way most of us like it, it's how it's supposed to work. If I open a new tab, it's usually because I want to go somewhere else in the same window. Why would you open a new tab otherwise? I'm not sure if it works (not near my Mac at the moment), but UNselecting "Select new tabs as they are created" in the tabs pref pane might work for you.
"And the GUI for Spotlight is almost comically bad, both in the menu bar and in Finder windows."
I like it. What alternative are there for the average use that finds files, folders, documents, messages in Mail, contacts in Address Book, iCal calendars, meta data (Photoshop files, Word docs, E-mails), System Preferences, applications, and even text "within" those files instantly? Your subjective criticism of the GUI not-withstanding, the tech is great. I love it.
"DVD Player steals focus twice every time you insert a DVD"
Again, most people want to watch the DVD they just put in (unless you are ripping them... ahem). And, if that's the case, then just change the preference in the preference pane to not launch DVD player when you put a DVD in! Done! This seems to be simply a usage issue as it takes 3 clicks to change that, from opening the pref panel to change.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
That was the most painful thing I've tried to read for a long time. Typos and minor errors I'll put up with (even though /. apparently has editors). But this reads like it was written by a retard.
I wouldn't be so quick to label Dashboard as a Konfabulator rip-off. At best, you could argue that Konfabulator caused someone at Apple to say, "Hey, remember those widgets we used to develop in NeXTstep? See where these guys have taken the idea? Why did we ever get away from this?"
(Answer: because tons of widgets on the desktop were a huge pain in the butt, and it took a virtual container for them - the Dashboard - to make them non-irritating again.)
But generally I think you hit the nail on the head, and damn are you ever right about Spotlight. From the Ars Technica review of Tiger (note that when he references Finder, he's referring to Spotlight-specific behavior) :
Creating a decent interface to the (really quite powerful) techology behind Spotlight could fuel a budding young shareware developer's career, if it weren't for the fact that you just know Apple is likely to change the whole thing again with 10.5.
The Integrated Woz Machine was named after the Woz, but it was designed by someone else.
Except the fact that iTunes runs on a Mac.....
$RANDOMLUSER,
You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Woz is a brilliant logician, engineer, and mathematician. He developed BASIC for the Apple. Yes, the same language that both Paul Allen AND Bill Gates had to put together for the altair. Woz did it himself as well as doing the hardware design of the Apple I and II. An AMAZING feat for one person to have accomplished.
1,2,3, and 5 are nothing big. I never was excited over iTunes, since I found it to be a poorly designed application from the first release to now. It made music management popular, and everything from there on was not done well, or was not useful.
The first thing I noticed was that the only way iTunes didn't take up too much screen was when it wasn't on the screen.
The second thing I noticed was that it did I/O so badly that it took more than 1100% of the time to load and parse the tags from my collection as Winamp's library did. That's 45mins versus 5mins, for the same data.
1) and 2) can be summed up as "Apple decided to use a nonstandard format, and other people haven't followed them". They *could* have used Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, or a few of the others, but they didn't. Those are negatives.
3) ITMS is a value-add, and could be easily done with most of the players out there by creating a plugin, so I'm not too worried about that. Or you could just use a webpage and get basically the same thing, but you'll need the plugin to have the nice tie-in with the player. I'll never use it as long as it is copy restricted, and many other people feel the same. I will not accept DRM infestations on my content.
4) I would've said that the reason it stands out is music management. That makes things like iTunes nice to use.
5) Who cares about the visualization. Winamp has very nice visualizations out there, too. I don't know how you could use a computer with a visualization running anyway. That's awfully distracting, and takes up much of the screen.
I generally use amarok, which is basically an iTunes clone. The problem I have with music management in both, and most of the similar software, is that it adds steps to "just play this file I downloaded". I don't always want it in the library, and I don't want constant prompts about it.
Also, *I* give a crap about memory use. I have 1GB RAM because I run a lot of apps simultaneously, not so that developers can be lazy and write bad code with bloated and unoptimized memory structures. There's no point in having more RAM if the only use is to satisfy unskilled programmers and their quest to do less actual work. Just because we have more RAM does not mean that we should ignore some of the basics of data structure design.
For a good example, try using a few of the newer OSS GUI programs at the same time, and for a long period of time. Firefox + Thunderbird + OpenOffice gets you a lot of wasted memory. Throw Eclipse in there, and you can add another 100MB+ to that. That's all before you start doing any work. I don't like that I have over 300MB used to check email, browse the web, and write a document, and be in an IDE. That is unreasonable and is piss poor memory management at work. iTunes does the same kind of thing.
What's more, on some models of iPod these lists are dynamically generated on the fly in the iPod itself (well, they are on the nano) in response to changes you might make (eg. by playing or rating tracks).
Yes, Google went to college!
It used to be google.stanford.edu. It was a part of Stanford's web site when it was still a research project.
Anyway, Konfabulator and Dashboard are more than distant cousins and neither are based on Dockapps. My question is, when is the DoJ going to crack down on Apple for bundling apps that compete with and ultimately destroy 3rd party apps such as Watson and the Caffeine Suite.
For what it's worth, when I administrated a network with Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP computers, locating the various subpanels where control panels moved was a major chore.
It became much harder to find things the more modern the MS operating system, which is not really what I like to see.
Since MacOS X never implemeneted a hierarchical control panel interface, it's never been 1/10th as much of a problem to track down lost control panel elements as it was in Windows.
D
I did not cut and paste it. I never used 10.0 in fact. I waited for 10.1 and have used every version since. My iBook G4 800 mhz crashed shutting down until the 10.4.3 patch. I've had random freezes and lockups since 10.4 was added to my machine. I've even tried initialzing the disk and doing a fresh install. I would consider it a hardware problem, provided it didn't happen at work on new G5 machines (minus the shutdown issue). Common ground among all the machines is that they all contain ati graphics adapters and have similar software settings. In one case at work it was the prosoft engineering netware client for OSX. That breaks with every os revision. (10.4.2 to 10.4.3 etc)
10.1 and 10.3 were pretty solid releases of OSX, but 10.4 was a windows style rush job. It took longer than previous versions and it contains more bugs.
I suspect you use a mac a lot different than I do. People I know that have good luck with them only use the graphical environment, often don't install developer tools or use the bsd subsystem.
Its most likely just problems with drivers and interactions with the kernel. Perhaps if apple did more sanity checks between driver code and other parts of the kernel? If i got errors in the console, I could narrow it down. Taking a guess, I think the ati video drivers and the sata controller drivers are not so good in 10.4. I know the logitech mouse driver causes problems with 10.4 and i've seen firewire hardware cause problems as well. I feel like i'm talking about windows 98 right now. Sad.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone