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."

Comments

GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[MondoMor]

No wonder it's so damn smart!

Has it got a Master's? Or should we call it Doctor Google?

Re:GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[M. Baranczak]

And who was "chiming in"? The friend or Wozniak? Seriously, it's been a while since I've seen so much mangled syntax crammed into such a small space. Do I win a necklace if I can figure out what the hell this person's trying to say?

Re:GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[aikon29]

That reminded me of an english teacher that I had back in high school. If your grammar was ever off she would proclaim that the "grammar mobile" would be coming to your house and that the grammar police would be notified. I hated her back then, but have since realized how much I hate people that don't use correct grammar or correctly spell their or there properly.

Re:GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[Golias]

You begin with the incorrect axiom that each person produces a fixed quantity of hate.

I, for one, and not a hater of bad grammar, but if I was I'm sure I could get all bent out of shape over people using "it's" when they mean "its" without any reduction of hatred towards people who don't signal lane changes, terrorists, or the Los Angeles Lakers.

Back to the topic at hand, the summary wasn't just guilty of making a few grammar mistakes; it was completely uninteligible. There are chunks of the slash code which are easier to read. None of this matters, though. I've long since given up on carving any useful information from Slashdot story summaries, and have completely given up hope on the linked stories ever turning out to be even half as useful as what a Google News search of the summary's main keywords would have yielded.

Slashdot is a chat room with (relatively) recent news items used to kick off the conversation. That's all it is, and probably all it ever will be. It's still a good way to kill time when waiting for shit to load on the projects I'm working on.

Re:GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[Golias]

I, for one, and not a hater of bad grammar

s/and/am

(sigh)

Something about discussing grammar which seems to bring out the worst writers in us all.

Re:GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[NittanyTuring]

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.

Re:GOOGLE WENT TO COLLEGE?!

[vsprintf]

I can assure you that the most offending facts about english are th non sense relations between written and spoken language and the english morons who cannot realise that half of the World is struggling to learn such a stupid language.

It's good that you rightfully blamed it on the English instead of the Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc., who are merely victims. BTW, nonsense is one word. :)

Gone

[darrint]

I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

But I'm not bitter.

Re:Gone

[daviddennis]

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

Re:Gone

[Golias]

But I'm not bitter.

Woz is no Apple basher. If he's bitching about their software, then he honestly does not like the direction they are taking.

That said, I can't help but wonder if he is looking at the same Apple software as me.

Garage Band 2 is my very life blood. I *love* that app!
X-Code is the bizz-omb.
Pages and Keynote are really neat.
iTunes is the only desktop music player worth getting excited over.
Safari is a pretty good browser.

All I can think is that he must be really, really down on Searchlight and the Dashboard, because those are the only two flubs I can think of to have come out of Cupertino lately... and Searchlight is actually growing on me.

As for the Dashboard... meh. I use it a little, because it's right there, waiting to show me the weather forcast and what-have-you, but I would not exactly weep if it were scrapped in 10.5.

Re:Gone

[tpgp]

From Woz's website

Q: Do you own any Apple stock?

WOZ: I do own Apple stock and I do believe in the company and I'll never desert it. If I had to use Windows, I'd switch to WebTV or retire forever from using computers.

The guy mainly uses Macs - most of his software is going to come from Apple, so of course thats where his bad (and good) experiences are going to come from.

Just because he said something negative about apple doesn't mean he hates them - he was almost certainly just being honest.

But of course, knock down someone who even slightly criticises Apple and immediately get modded to +5 by the fanboys.

Re:Gone

[Phat_Tony]

The Steve (as opposed to The Woz) does fight for perfection, but he also fights hard for rapid development, early deployment, and lots and lots of features. He doesn't appear to fight at all for a consistent user interface experience, as evidenced by the OSX Finder. He lets them change things back and forth and up and down and left and right all the time, and ignore any sort of plan for consistency, including Apple's own user interface guidelines. Let's put the "find" function in Sherlock! Let's put everything in Sherlock! Let's revise the appearance and API's for Sherlock (by stealing Watson) so the 1,000 existing plugins don't work anymore! Let's take find back out of Sherlock! Let's abandon Sherlock! Let's remake Sherlock (by stealing Konfabulator) and call it Dashboard! Let's replace "Find" with Spotlight! Even though it's just a new search technology, let's change everything about the search interface in Find! It's not better, but it's New New NEW! Different Different DIFFERENT! Yeah!

In the early days, Apple used to follow their interface guidelines like they were gospel. Now they ignore them in nearly every app they make. No time to start listing all the violations, but for an example, try the minimize and maximize buttons in iTunes. Or try reading their guidelines on when to use brushed metal, and then try to see when they bother to follow their own nearly unintelligible guidelines.

I don't have time to enumerate all of them, but Apple constantly changes how things work for no apparent reason. Key Caps was around since the very early days of the Mac, c. 1986. With OSX, they change the name to Keyboard Viewer. OK, a minor change that makes more sense. Then with 10.3, this handy utility disappears. Did they get rid of it? No! But to find it, you have to dig around in system preferences and activate a special hidden flag-shaped "international" menu, that's always present at the top of your screen, and you can only access it from there.

This is, of course, only one of countless examples.

Apple is missing some user-interface design oversight committee that has the power to review every last change and stop individuals from messing stuff up like this. I shouldn't have to read a Macworld article and dig through the "international" system preferences pane to activate a hidden menu to continue to access a utility that had otherwise been fairly consistent on Macs for 18 years. Again, I'm not just complaining about their one big mistake, there are countless things on par with this.

Re:Gone

[laffer1]

Thank you. Someone actually brought up user interface design. I think that is what woz was getting at. He was talking about the raskin's of the world that innovatived the desktop. HCI (human computer interaction) is a field of study that most people don't think about anymore. I recently took a class on gui design at my university. Prior to taking the course, i actually had a cs professor (my advisor) recommend I avoid the class. He didn't see a point to the class. I certainly did. I don't plan on devoting my life to HCI like my wife does, but I certainly think its beneficial to web designers and conventional application developers. Usability is quite important. To this day, whenever i write an app or design a website I test it with the mom test. If my mom can use it efficiently and understands what each feature/command does, I did well.

I like the OSX dock provided magnify is disabled. Resizing the icons makes it harder to move your mouse to the correct one. Its annoying.

I don't think I would agree that OSX is the worst operating system in terms of usability. Solaris comes to mind. CDE and the Java Desktop System are crap. There are so many things you can not do in the gui that require CLI interaction its not funny. I love CLI interfaces, but I can't ask my mom or even my boss (a novell guy) to use a unix terminal. They freak out. My favorite OS of all time is NEXTSTEP, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. It seemed so consistant compared to its modern counterpart (OSX).

Skinning apps is stupid. Not only does it lead to inconsistancy, but it also eats up memory like crazy. People who love it are the same people that complain about their computers being slow or talk about buying an extreme edition p4 just to run winamp, IE, and a few games.

I think most people are bad at UI design. Very few people at my university seem to understand basics and even worse most don't even think about usability when they write software. I know I'm a bad offender, but I try to improve. I think thats all we can ask from Apple, Microsoft, and the rest.

As a roadmap for OSX, I recommend the following:
1. Fix kernel/stability problems.
2. Consider standardizing OS components on one UI or at least limit it to two. Pinstripes, shinny metal, and now the worst of all.. plastic. Why do I want to look at plastic? Mail.app drives me nuts.
3. Ignore adding 200 features and work on getting the system consistant, fast and usable. Thats a feature in itself. With the intel switch coming up, I know we are going to have major stability problems in intel and ppc based macs.

Re:Gone

[Golias]

Please note that I did not call iTunes the best music playing app out there.

I called it "the only one worth getting excited over." From the heat of the debate which followed (to the extent that everything else I said was completely ignored), I would say my statement is pretty well supported. Who would ever spend this much time arguing over the UI decisions made by Media Monkey?

Lack of WMA & OGG support, and an "ugly" interface are both valid criticisms, if such things are important to you, but iTunes stands out for several reasons:

1) AAC. It's a standard codec, superior to MP3 in several ways, which many other players are lagging behind in supporting, and the ideal codec for use with an iPod (which is the same as saying "the ideal codec for 90% of the MP3 Players out there.")

2) Apple Lossless. Yes, there are a couple of other players out there which support FLAC, which is another lossless compression codec. If I own an iPod (see point one), guess which one I'll want to use for music I don't want in a lossy format?

3) iTMS. This is huge. An "a la carte" music store seamlessly within the application. Since it came out, I flat-out stopped looking around at what other music apps are out there.

4) Database-driven file management, with user playlists and auto-synch with MP3 players. Far from the only player which does this, but it does it really, really well.

5) The visualizer. Sure, almost every player has one of these things... and on most other players, they really, really suck. Microsoft's is slightly less interesting than a screen-saver app. When I'm playing music in my media room and turn the iPod visualizer on across my 119" widescreen, people gape in wonder at it. Throw on "Dark Side of the Moon", and it's even better than those "Laser Floyd" shows that used to be popular at planetariums. Seriously, if you haven't spend a few minutes watching it in full-screen mode, you probably are not aware of exactly how well it was done. (And it keeps getting better with each iTunes update!)

As for the "large memory footprint" complaint... What is this, 1991? Who gives a crap?

Re:Gone

[daviddennis]

My guess is that part of it is thanks to people like me, who on the whole like change. The subset of customers I represent love to buy a new release of the software, because we're getting new and more interesting goodies. For us, it just wouldn't seem right if there wasn't some radical change thrown in with the mix, as long as it doesn't slow us down much.

In other words, I think what's going on is that Steve responds to the desires of the user, particularly the user who wants to upgrade and give him money.

But even I will admit, getting rid of key caps was just plain dumb. Nobody's perfect, not even Steve.

But at least he does care, and that's why I stick with him.

D

Re:Gone

[sammy baby]

Let's remake Sherlock (by stealing Konfabulator) and call it Dashboard! Let's replace "Find" with Spotlight! Even though it's just a new search technology, let's change everything about the search interface in Find! It's not better, but it's New New NEW! Different Different DIFFERENT! Yeah!

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) :

Here's some video of the Finder doing what it does best: confounding user expectations and absolutely hosing any semblance of consistency and statefulness. The movie shows the smart folder from the earlier video... being opened and closed in both metal and non-metal modes. While watching, just try and guess how the window will look when it's re-opened after each of the demonstrated actions. You may need to step through the movie slowly to get a full grasp of the insanity.

[movie here]

Under what set of circumstances does this get to ship? I would love to see the "design document" for Spotlight's integration into the Finder's interface, if such a thing even exists. (I highly doubt that it does.) I'm tempted to say this is par for the course when it comes to Finder windows in Mac OS X. But really, this is way beyond the Finder's standard level of user abuse.

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.

Re:Gone

[ucblockhead]

Committees are poison to software.

Re:Gone

[iabervon]

Woz doesn't seem to blame Apple for the imperfection (he goes on to say that he still really likes what Apple does); I think his point is that Apple's software is big applications, and they're just too complicated to get perfect. The third-party applications he uses are little things that solve a single problem in a simple way. It's not even that Apple doesn't have little things, but the little things Apple provides have to fit into this whole system, and there's a lot for them not to match, and a lot of similar stuff to sort through. If you install a third-party program, you don't have the same expectations of uniformity, you expect it not to be seamlessly integrated, and you know where you put it.

Re:Gone

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering the same thing...Woz makes some pretty heavy allegations, but refuses to back them up with anything substantial. What software is he talking about? I'm a filmmaker and a graphic designer of 15 years, and frankly Apple publishes some of the best software out there...Final Cut Pro, Shake, Keynote, Safari. Granted, all of those apps needed work when they were released (except Shake, which Apple purchased), but they have all matured nicely. That, to me, seems to be the more typical pattern of development for Apple. And who are these supposedly stellar, non-buggy, homerun-every-time, small developers with whom Woz is apparently enamored? Woz refuses to give examples, instead choosing to hide behind the obtuse comment, "it happens all of the time." Frankly, there's a huge difference between developing an app that lets you change your desktop picture, and one that edits film. And as much as I love Camino and Firefox, Safari still renders faster and better. I'll tell you what...if Woz can set up an editing station for me that runs even half as well as my current Final Cut Pro station, using only his brilliant little developers, and gives me even half of the capabilities I currently have, then I will happily jump on his "small guy" band wagon. Otherwise, Woz needs to shut his fat yap.

Re:Gone

[Phat_Tony]

Umm, thanks for the "mod this up," but I don't think Microsoft does any better. I'm just saying Apple used to be good about this (say, from System 1 until System 7), and now it's bad. But when I went from Windows 3.1 to NT to 2000 to XP, I'd hardly call that a consistent user interface; it struck me that all sorts of things had been moved around randomly. Their system preferences are awful! It's True that Apple rearranged their system prefs over and over again in early OSX releases, so again, I'm not saying Apple's great here, but MS is also really screwed up when it comes to pointlessly rearranging preferences, not to mention they have an absurdly huge and unnecessarily complex set of preferences in the first place. And betraying user interface guidelines? Does MS even have user interface guidelines? I don't know where to look for many common widgets in programs, I seem to have to memorize them again for every program. They're also terrible about hidden features on right-click pop-up menus and such. Anyway, my Mac-bashing doesn't imply MS endorsement. I don't think anyone's concentrating on ease of use in human interface design in a computer operating system.

Re:Gone

[paintswithcolour]

Except the fact that iTunes runs on a Mac.....

Re:Gone

[aaronl]

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.

Re:Gone

[Fred_A]

4) Database-driven file management, with user playlists and auto-synch with MP3 players.

Sorry but iTunes doesn't auto-synch with MP3 players. Unless you bought one from Apple.

Any of the hundreds of other models are completely unsupported (such as the iRiver H320 I've had for a while now).

Or at least that's the way it is on OS X (iBook laptop), I don't know what it's like in Windows. On my Linux desktop I usually use Zinf and "auto-sync" with "cp -Ru".

Re:Gone

[Darius Jedburgh]

Smart playlists are seriously underestimated by people who haven't yet tried iTunes. Smart playlists are practically procedural playlists. Want to play all the music you haven't listened to in the last 3 months? Or get iTunes to suggest a random sample of unrated tracks for you to rate? Or simply play the 80s electronic stuff that you haven't yet played today? Or how about your favorites from each genre or even something more sophisticated like getting iTunes to play one song from each year from 1970 to 1990 in order? Smart playlists support all of these (the last one is slightly tricky to figure out, but only slightly).

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).

Re:Gone

[Lodragandraoidh]

One perfect user interface paradigm is not achieveable(sic) because people are all different.

I see better user interfaces in pc games than I do in other software. This is primarily because game designers realized years ago that everyone has their own prefered way of interacting with the input interfaces. This led to the ability for the end user to modify the input options (such as a keyboard mapper and joystick macros).

A better approach for all software would be to build an infinitely modifiable interface - both for visualization and input. Tie the configurations to some standard, like XML. The company would have a 'standard' config file, and users and others would be able to create and share their own interpretations of what is 'best'. Everyone is (or I should say 'has the option of being') happy. If you are not an XML hack - a GUI could be easily built to make the modifications easier.

Most applications do not approach this level of configurability.

Re:Gone

[javaxman]

The Steve (as opposed to The Woz) does fight for perfection, but he also fights hard for rapid development, early deployment, and lots and lots of features.

That's extremely insightful, you don't work with the man, do you ?

My recollection of briefly working for Steve involves a meeting with a group of 8 engineers where he pretty well had everyone convinced that they could, in a few months' time, fully test an entire OS and extensive application suite, on new hardware, while writing a couple of never-before-imagined applications. In short, we were all going to pull off some miracles, pretty much because of a Steve pep talk. It's great to have inspired engineers, and sometimes people can pull of miracles, but that's a scary way to develop products on a schedule and a budget.

My biggest beef with OS X software ( aside from the Finder, which just needs a *complete* re-write ) is the recent lack of UI consistency. Try this : launch Safari, Mail, and iTunes ( most recent versions, in OS X 10.4 ). Check out the look of the windows... are any of them the same? Not really, they're all slightly different-looking... and iTunes looks like no other OS X app ever !

The difference between brushed metal and standard windows was annoying and unnecessary enough, but what is the rationalization for those three Apple-authored applications having such different looks ? Who needs 4 different styles of window dressing on a single machine? They're making Windows look like the platform with UI consistency, WTF is going on at Apple with these differing looks for different apps ?

Re:Gone

[Slime-dogg]

Hmm... I'm quite sure we can dig things up on MS, too. Actually, their UI shifts are just as frequent as Apple's, but they just never proclaimed to follow one set of UI guidelines.

For instance, Office 2003 has a completely different UI than Office XP, and even that one is different from Office 2K. Visual Studio .NET departed from the norm in UI, if you ever compare it to VS 6. Visio has some rather annoying UI features, too.

Also, the consistency of the UI from OS to OS is unstable. Win2K and WinXP were different enough to cause headaches, and it looks like the trend will continue with Vista. MS also does not enforce UI guidelines, in fact, it makes it very easy to create something that works back-asswords. Witness winamp, as an example.

MS is no angel in this matter, either.

Re:Gone

[daviddennis]

I'm actually thinking of doing something similar to this for a project I'm working on, so realize that I'm being the Devil's advocate here.

When I was working in IT, I had to administrate a network of Windows machines. Outlook has a user interface which has all kinds of panels that can be dragged around.

Every once in a while, somebody - and it was often me - would do this by accident and find out that a crucial panel was missing from the program, with no clue at all how to get it back. I don't even remember the procedure to get things back, but I do remember it was not all that obvious. So by simple use of the software, someone could customize inadvertently and become completely at sea.

I think geeks as a class wildly overestimate the amount of time people are willing to put into an application. They'll customize it with new wallpaper and the like, but I don't think most people like to really pour energy into the guts of something to make it work better. So I would be cautious about customizability; make sure the vanilla version is perfectly usable as it is, and that people don't have to customize in order to make use of the application.

D

Re:Gone

[Burz]

It seems like Apple designers have crossed a threshold in their thinking. They follow a pattern of consistency that more closely resembles the Web now, where different sites each have their own look, but all the little widgets work the same 90% of the time. If this is true, its very smart because they're following the tastes and expectations of their target audience.

Consider also that Apple always wanted icons to have unique color-schemes and shapes to make them instantly identifiable. But now people can more quickly discern an application by variations in window style... and that certainly works in favor of Expose.

That's not to say they haven't transgressed against consistency more than they should. All the old criticisms are still valid; just certain ones are much less important now.

Re:Gone

[lgw]

Cool, it might be good then. After all, the first thing I do with any Windows OS is turn off the "looks great" by selecting the Windows Classic skin. All that crap just slows down the interface, and moves important things to new places.

Of course, everything important to system configuration will be moved to a new and arbitrary place with every Windows release, but at least I can keep the UI sane.

I don't get it, to be honest - to me, the UI is a tool, not a game, and I don't want it to look cute and different every year. If I want a game, I have those, after all.

Re:Gone

[nathanh]

I can tell you that in my experience, the best software by far comes from Apple,

The best software (IMO) comes from small groups or individuals with exceptional talent, never from a gigantic corporation. The problem with a large corporation is that quality tends to dilute as mediocre people are hired, rot sets in, projects atrophy, clueless managers cut funding, stupid ideas are pushed, brilliant ideas are ignored, problems are neglected and faults are left unfixed for years.

I can reel off dozens of examples. People seem to forget that back when Microsoft was small they made some absolutely spectacular software. The Altair BASIC written by Gates and Allen (more credit goes to Allen IMO) was astoundingly good. Even when Microsoft grew to a dozen people they still produced some of the best BASIC interpreters around. But now that Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company with 1000s of employees they seem to produce nothing but embarrassing crap.

Same for Solaris; it was way better back when there were just four guys and one of them was Bill Joy. Same for the Mac; it was way better back when there were just four technical guys and Steve Jobs was an over-bearing perfectionist. It's the same reason why Linux (the kernel) still rocks but Debian (the distro) is starting to bite (it doesn't suck yet but IMO the writing is on the wall). Small groups of extremely talented individiuals lead to exceptional software. The larger the team the more likelihood of there being medicore contributors and the overall quality goes DOWN.

One of the things I find most interesting about open-source software is not the cost and not even the licensing, but the promise it holds of building large software projects of higher quality. Companies have tried all sorts of engineering techniques though honestly they seem to get it wrong more often than they get it right. OSS uses a technique more akin to natural selection; the quality varies wildly and some of the mutations are totally crap but overall the quality is continually improving. Whether it will ever produce software that in all respects is better than the "genetically engineered" software from Microsoft, Apple and Sun, I don't know, but I'm keen to find out.

Re:Gone

[javaxman]

But now people can more quickly discern an application by variations in window style... and that certainly works in favor of Expose.

I've been grasping for a *reason* for the difference between these applications... that's actually the main thing that bugs me. I'm not sure I so much mind applications having different basic looks so much as long as there is a *reason*. I've never heard a reason for these differences that made sense to me.

Safari is just plain ol' Brushed Metal, it's different from regular-look-and-feel Cocoa apps because um, it's supposed to be used only for apps that mimic a 'physical device', like I guess an eBook reader or IM-capable phone or MP3 player ? Enough text has been wasted wondering if that makes sense, I won't repeat it here.

Mail looks different because it has this new thing I think they're calling a Unified Toolbar, where a tool bar and title bar are combined ( why? what's the benefit, I can drag the window by grabbing between toolbar buttons, what's that? ).

Now, I don't personally like either of those things, and I find the justifications for them pretty thin, but... what about iTunes? Why does it look different? It has pointier corners and a different skin/gradient, why exactly? The only reason I could think of before now was that it's sharing code with the PC version and as such isn't *really* a Cocoa app in the same way as the other apps, and has started to get a slightly different look... but that's just a theory, I have no idea. Maybe it's prepping for a look-and-feel we'll see with the Intel switch, or maybe Apple just wants it's most important application ever to Look Different(TM).

So your theory about these being different for distinction in Expose makes a *little* sense, and I thought maybe you were onto something for a minute... except that they're all pretty minor differences, really, that are likely to be lost when the window is so much smaller. I'm looking more at the contents of the window in Expose, not the border and toolbar so much. So while it's an interesting theory, I'm guessing that the difference has less to do with Expose and more to do with UI Guidelines being viewed more as flexible guidelines, not as very important rules to always follow... and the differences are due to an 'evolution' in programming tools and freedom given to individual project divisions within Apple, more than anything else. While UI Guidelines are still important, maybe now the religion is about progress and features, not UI guidelines.

The differences are still annoying, at least to a seasoned Apple user and programmer. You just look at it, and you think, "what is going on HERE?" Pick something and stick with it! Geesh!

Re:Gone

[azosx]

NeXTStep and OpenStep didn't have widgets, they had Dockapps. Apple tried to do the same thing with OS X in the begining and called them Docklets. They never pushed it, and very few developers actually created them, but they were spitting images of Dockapps. Today, OS X still has Docklets built into the system. I can think of the apps name (lack of PB ATM) but it's the app that monitors system activity. You can change the preferences so that when in the dock, the icon appears as a Docklet.

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.

Re:Gone

[daviddennis]

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

Re:Gone

[Watts Martin]

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.

It's worth noting in passing that Caffeine Software was basically one guy, who shut it down after he got a job at... Apple. Personally, I have trouble believing that the disappearance of TIFFany at Apple's behest and the appearance a couple years later of Aperture are completely unrelated, but I've never seen any evidence to confirm my theory.

Sherlock/Watson I think they did a pretty dirty thing with; I half wonder if it wasn't that Steve Jobs or someone else high up just got a bug up their ass about Watson's name, which could be taken as a slap in the face for the previous (useless) releases of Sherlock. Konfabulator versus Dashboard, though, I can't get too worked up about; to me, Dashboard is spiritually the return of desk accessories, and implementation-wise, Konfabulator done better.

This is always an interesting dilemma. When Microsoft Word and WordPerfect integrated spelling and grammar-checking into their applications, they knew there was a thriving market for "add-on" programs with those functions, and they had to be aware that their integration would pretty much snuff that market out of existence. Is that sufficient reason not to do that integration, though?

Re:Gone

[laffer1]

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.

who?

[BushCheney08]

Oh, c'mon. Like this "woz" person has any clue how a computer works. I bet Apple wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole...

Re:who?

[guet]

Looking at the other benighted posts on this thread, your one was sadly prescient.

Re:who?

[eclectic4]

No kidding...

Re:who?

[absinthminded64]

Apple's 10' pole will not be functional until the next release.

Abort(?), Retry(?), Fail(?) erecting 10' pole.

Re:who?

[BushCheney08]

Shouldn't that be a X' iPole?

Troll?

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

This Woz guy is obviously a MS$ fanboy troll! ;-)

Re:Troll?

[msaulters]

In all seriousness though, it does sound like he's just trolling. Either he's pissed he's not still apart of the titan that is Apple and secretly hates himself for it (motive for this tyrade?), or software's simply ran past him so fast that he's just not been able to keep up and he "misses the old days".

OR Maybe he's actually used the software and been unhappy with it and is in the fortunate position of being someone to whom people will listen. I've certainly seen enough of problems with Apple software:
1) Itunes leaving several TSR programs running all the time even though I don't have an ipod.
2) Newer copies of itunes won't install for some unknown reason on my system, and both Apple and installshield point the fingers at each other. Apple support has ZERO help to offer to fix the problem.
3) Try to download the latest version of quicktime, and it won't install, because it has itunes bundled, and itunes fails to install

And this is just on a PC. If you look, you can find enough complaints about OSX. There just aren't as many, because not as many people use it as Windows, and those that do are generally loyal beyond the point of fanatacism.

Re:Troll?

[zod1025]

Gates, as much as you hate him, is a HUGE philanthropist

Pull your nose out, man. The Foundation does many charitable things, true, and Bill has donated large chunks of cash here and there.

But when you look at his wealth to scale, with *orders of magnitude* more fortune than even necessary to still be fabulously rich, what he does amounts to tossing pennies into the crowd. That's not even considering the PR gained from it. In fact, I would wager that Bill has done more to *hurt* this nation than he has mitigated through charitable donations - sitting on huge amounts of capital, throwing it overseas, extinguishing markets, destroying standards, roadblocking innovation, etc.

I don't hate B.G. I have, though, become very much anti-Microsoft over the years, and every day there's more news about them that shows me I made the right decision in dropping all Microsoft products long ago.

Perhaps he's right

[drhamad]

Perhaps he's right, he does get the worst software from Apple... (ok, there's two ways I can go with this) 1. But at least Apple patches them or 2. That's because Apple doesn't like him very much Take your pick ;)

Re:Perhaps he's right

[millahtime]

Perhaps he's right, he does get the worst software from Apple... (ok, there's two ways I can go with this) 1. But at least Apple patches them or 2. That's because Apple doesn't like him very much Take your pick ;)

I'm going with 2. I bet Apple finds out where he is going to get his next apple software from and then sends him crap just to mess with him. He could get "the good stuff" if only he wore his tinfoil hat.

Refeshing change...

[Chaffar]

Apple has been very adamant and has stuck by their guns for a long, long time and they put everything at risk in the company many times to basically say that we're going to be a proprietary operating system and you're going to have to buy our hardware to run it.

Well at least he's honest about it. But don't be shocked if a lot of people refuse to purchase anything from your company because of it.

Re:Who cares? Should I?

[finkployd]

Is he wanting to "jab" Apple into being "better" at what they do due to an underlying love? What are his motives? Does he cite specific reasonings for his rants?

Perhaps there is no ulterior motive and he is just reporting his experience...

Why does everyone have to have motives and such?

Finkployd

Obvious?

[Red Flayer]

"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. "

It's a symptom of two things, from the standpoint of poor quality software produced by people who are capable of much better:

1) Nothing personal at stake for the people actually producing the software. It's a lot different when your livelihood directly and visibly depends on the quality of the product your employer produces. Whether it's because it's my own company, or I get fat stock options, I'll work harder when I'm trying to reach the cheese.

2) Diluted responsibility for the product. 2,000 people working on a product means that in all likelihood, my individual contreibution will go unnoticed, and therefore I have less incentive to perform well. Also, even if my contribution is perfect, it won't have that much effect on a huge project.

Re:Obvious?

[ucblockhead]

As someone who works at a huge megacorp now, and has worked at small startups in the past, I have to disagree completely. At the big megacorp, those of us that used to be a startup are incredibly unmotivated, it is true, but it has nothing to do with the things you saw. Instead, it is because in a startup you can just make good software while at a huge company, you spend all your time bashing your head against the wall. Working at a big corporation is being forced to use poor quality crap tools because some snake-oil salesman is buddy-buddy with a senior VP 10,000 miles away. Working at a big corporation is working a year on a project only to have it killed just before it enters the testing phase because the original management proponant is on the outs. Working at a big corporation is having 58 different managers all trying to put their "mark" on a product.

I personally am extremely motivated to create quality software. And at a startup, that's what I did. Here...I can't. It isn't my motivation that prevents me. It's the wildly changing requirements, stupid management decisions, inability to make decisions and design by committee.

The root problem is that in a small startup, you generally have one boss, and if that boss isn't already technically knowledgable, you can usually explain things to him. In a huge megacorp, the people making the decisions are usually pretty technically ignorant and are so high up that you have no opportunity to raise issues and so they end up making really stupid decisions.

One thing that I can't emphasise enough: a good developer cannot create good software without good management support. That kind of support is easy to get at startups and very hard to get at huge companies. This is because at a startup, everyone's in the same room and knows each other face to face, whereas at a huge megacorp, management is generally too far removed to have a clue.

Another thing that makes software from huge companies suck: When a company gets truly huge, many people in the chain of command get so caught up in internal power struggles that they lose sight of the customers. Here at the large company I work for, I've seen many good products killed, and other projects set up to fail merely because one upper-management type was trying to get the upper-hand over another. In a small company, everyone's in it together. In a large company, you will always find people who want the other guy to fail in order to better their own position.

Re:Obvious?

[CodeHog]

Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays!

Re:Obvious?

[thebdj]

Working at a big corporation is being forced to use poor quality crap tools because some snake-oil salesman is buddy-buddy with a senior VP 10,000 miles away.

Or in Microsoft's case because they created the poor quality crap tools themselves.

Re:Obvious?

[Thundersnatch]

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

But it's a helluva way to go through college!

Re:Obvious?

[hackstraw]

I must have worked at the same place. Or are they all like that?

Re:Obvious?

[fak3r]

Uhh...did I write this, or are you working 10 rows away from me at my current job? I agree with ALL of your points, and at this Mega-corp (~12,000) employees, working with software (and servers) is painful. I'm currently writing a change request where one script will be added to a daily cron on two servers - it's taking me 45 minutes to write it and lay out all 6 approvers! my last gig was at a startup, 30 ppl when I started, 3 years later 50 ppl. Needless to say I could do anything there, I had an idea of how to improve process, the management would say "let's see what you can do, and then we'll deciede". Here when I have a good idea and mail my manager and some co-workers it's just like a black hole; I never hear anything back. And yes, I meet with my manager 3 times a week for a 1/2 hour to go over tasks (I'm a contractor) but I always get to play firefighter, putting out fires daily. I know, someone has to do it, but it's not what they hired me for, and most of the day I'm just idling trying to work on something interesting. my background is working with Linux/bsd/oss - which is forbidden here; why not buy a product instead! terrible software, horrible support, but we have someone to *sue* if something goes wrong! please. anyway I'm going to write more about this on my blog, and will refer to this post/your blog; thanks for posting it. /me checks his email for any new Jobster.com email job alerts...

Clearly

[Tiberius_Fel]

Clearly, he doesn't get any software from any of the other companies named. :P

Woz is from a different era

[ACK!!]

You have to understand Woz is from a different era and genre of computing. He has been out of the business since the days when Assembly was king and you had to hack programs and optimize them very, very hard to get them to work at all.

Most folks I know from that era feel the same way about today's large programs whether they are from Apple or not.

Come on, give the old guy a break there was a hell of a lot more to the article than that one quote.

Anyone else RTFA?

Re:Woz is from a different era

[solios]

Woz is from an era in which software was fast, light, and did exactly what it said on the box and nothing more.

WHEN CAN WE GO BACK. I am sick to fucking DEATH of multi-gig bloatware installs that try to impress 428 features I don't need and will never frigging USE on me. In fact, I still use old software for production use - Photoshop 5.5 - because the newer versions have nothing to offer me but a speed reduction and a slower interface.

Monkeys!

Re:Woz is from a different era

[jbolden]

As a sort of old timer I've been doing computers for 25 years, I can tell you are mixing two issues: language design and application design.

The big difference today and before was that languages used to be much more diverse. Most languages today are compromise languages taking some of the features of the languages that were developed in the late 50's to late 70's and creating a mixture. Basically you get languages with the features of lisp written like fortran :). Languages have complex functional definitions, recursion, dynamic typing... but people tend to write static typed, procedural code. The real innovation has been object orientation and every language has been influenced by it yet its not the core idea of any language in practice.

If you want to see the interesting ideas that didn't win I'd look at stack based (postscript for example) and functional languages (haskall is still used a lot in academia). Of course lisp/scheme is always worth looking at. In the other extreme if you are kind of a Java guy, assembly and C are worth knowing. Understanding how hardware really works is always important and your programmers years ago either knew this very well or not really at all. Today we have better mixtures of low and high level.

As for application design I'm hard pressed to see how anything was better 25 years ago. I disagree with Woz 100% on this. I disagree with you that software was more feature poor back then. Back then the idea was single application interfaces. Emacs was a good example of this kind of environment. More mainstream wordperfect had a full menu driven shell and many people booted directly into Wordperfect (i.e. it was there OS interface). Similarly you had people who did everything inside of Lotus 1-2-3 (so for example to type a memo they would use the notebook feature). Printer drivers were at the application level, as were video drivers.... I just don't see how you can argue the timeline you are arguing for.

BTW you also forgot OS design. There you don't have to go back nearly as far. You can still see ideas about OS design that didn't win in a variety of applications. For example the security model for Oracle is the model you had for most minis and mainframes (and IMHO far superior to the permissions based one that is causing all the security holes in today's applications). Another example is you can see the idea of interpretive OSes in almost any macro driven application (excel for example).

What does he use?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.

He must not buy anything from Microsoft or Adobe then.

That's why I like "Classic" Unix

[Anonymous Coward]

My view has always been: don't let developers (including me) use the latest & greatest technology. Force the build once a week to be run on an "old" PIII @ 800 Mhz w. 128MB RAM. If it's un-usable for quick testing, then go back and fix it.
(by the way, I know I'm being generous in those specs, I personally test all my software on a dog-slow Pentium II @ 233Mhz w. 64M RAM running various "older" OS versions (Win2000, Linux 2.2!, etc.)

Then, when you roll it out to your users and their running the latest 3GHz, 4GB RAM machine, they are happy.

Linux & GNU seem to be the latest (last five+ years) culprits in the bloatware regime. I remember actually compiling the full kernel on an 8MB machine (yes, it took four hours)...now you can't do in under 32MB
(although I guess that's more GCC bloat than anything)

Things are just too big and bloated now.
Give me an old "Classic" Unix with no X, just command line.
Let me pipe my various home-built tools together to create a final simple working FAST result.

TDz.

Re:That's why I like "Classic" Unix

[Alioth]

Linux *is* just a kernel - it doesn't actually come with all the GUI 'bloatware'. If you really want, don't use a big distribution - roll your own. I learned C on a Linux system with a 40MB disk and 16MB of RAM (and had X with olvwm - not much space left over on that 40MB).

There's no reason why you can't still do that with Linux. The kernel's a bit bigger than it was in 1993, but you can either build your own custom one, or only put the modules on you actually use. GNOME isn't part of Linux, neither is KDE. They are merely userland programs that can run on the Linux kernel (and run on many other operating systems).

If you want small but very useful (certainly on the server end) try OpenBSD. I have the latest OpenBSD (3.8) running on my VAX and it is very satisfactory.

Re:That's why I like "Classic" Unix

[brainstyle]

You might be interested in this for a different take on bloatware. Software requirements haven't gone up as quickly as hardware specs, at least as Joel proves through the power of anecdote. Those resources are there for a reason. It's not bad to use them.

The software industry as a whole should ...

[almound]

break with the "tradition" of their insolance and:

1) offer customers a sincere apology for their negligence
        (no court seems able to get a comprehensive conviction
        against any of them anyway, so they should't have to worry
        about liability), at the same time as

2) distribute a genuinely effective set of patches to those
        customers as they wait for the company to develop a new
        product that actually does what it says it should

3) distribute that genuinely secure product to customers FOR
        FREE, with full on-site support to smooth the transition

4) offer a discount on upcoming products to extend good will,

5) and eat the crow they so richly deserve.

I figure all in all it will only cost them about a trillion bucks. (Yeah ... just the agregate personal fortunes of the top swindlers who perpetrated this biggest scam in the history of the world.)

But why should the software industry be held to a different standard? Other industries end up eating losses all the time.

Because if all those middle/upper-level managers in other sectors that wanted to cash in on the "replace workers with machines" craze of the 90's would propose such an ultimatum to their companies' stockholders, then they would have to admit that their blind greed backfired all over their damned faces!

and a new geek fashion starts

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

Wearing an orange Apple polo, dark dress slacks and a stainless steel, analog-and-digital Bell & Ross wristwatch, Wozniak greeted me at the door. After talking to Wozniak for five minutes, it was obvious there is weight to his reputation: he is affable, candid and sharp. The remarks that follow are excerpts from our discussion.

Orange polo and dark dress slacks. Check.

Multi-thousand dollar watch. Well, maybe some other time.

Sometimes it is the job, not the programmer

[beforewisdom]

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.

Has Woz ever *tried* open source software?

[Blakey Rat]

Does he honestly believe that commercial software has more missing features than open source software (in general?) I installed Ubuntu recently, and out of about 4-5 packages I tried to use, I got exactly zero working correctly. Some looked like they worked, but actually didn't. Some just froze when they started up. Some returned obscure error messages I have no clue how to debug (partly because they're written in programmer-ese, but mostly because they're completely undocumented in the manual or the web. Hey, if your program can possibly return error -34525, MAKE SURE YOU DOCUMENT IT!) (*)

I'm sorry, I can't buy any of this crap. Apple and Microsoft might not be kings of software development, but I can tell you that all the software I've downloaded to try on my Mac, EVER (even including the stuff in Fink repositories) worked the first time I ran the software. It may not have done exactly what I wanted, and it may not have had the best GUI in the world, but it worked. That's far more than I can say for the majority of open source software I've tried.

I will say this, though. Apple's QA has gone WAAAY down hill. I'm not even positive they test software at all before shoving it out the door now. Safari just stole focus from this text field because I had the audacity to load a new tab. DVD Player steals focus twice every time you insert a DVD. Finder crashes or freezes at least once a day. And the GUI for Spotlight is almost comically bad, both in the menu bar and in Finder windows. My theory? Those programs are developed mostly by workers at NeXT who didn't have much experience with Classic MacOS. But to have the OS go from zero focus steals (in OS 9.2.2) to stealing focus every goddamned five minutes (OS X), that's just sad. Even Microsoft has gotten to the point where 90% of focus stealing bugs are solved.

(*) Go ahead, call me a moron for not being able to get it to work. I know you want to.

Re:Has Woz ever *tried* open source software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear sir,

You are a moron for not being able to get it to work.

Yours in Jesus,
AC

P.S. You were right, I did want to.

Re:Has Woz ever *tried* open source software?

[wackysootroom]

Before you paint *all* open source software with such a broad brush, realize that the fink repositories are open source and that OS X userland programs are based on open source. In fact this message you're reading has been served up on an open source webserver and has probably passed through several routers running open source software.

Re:Has Woz ever *tried* open source software?

[MECC]

"(*) Go ahead, call me a moron for not being able to get it to work. I know you want to."

Not hardly. I've found OSS software has plenty of things/features that don't work, or don't work they way you'd think. Often, its because some package is still in early stages of development. People often install a linux distro with the impression that the *entire* distro is a finshed product, which isn't the case. Installing a linux distro is a different situation with respect to where various parts of the distro are at, and can be frustrating due the amount of information that needs to be assimilated to get a perspective that helps dispell the confusion.

That said, I installed Ubuntu 5.10 on a thinkpad A22m, and I've only had one thing fail to work, minicom which doesn't talk to the serial port, and epiphany crashes from time to time (although it works). A quick laundry list of things that pretty much worked fresh out the install without a hitch:

• GNOME & various preference applets as well as things like gedit, gipsc, etc.
• KDE ( i did install kubuntu too )
• Konquerer
• Firefox
• Evolution
• KMail
• Synaptic
• Ubuntu's automatic update notifier
• Aptitude
• various net utilities like ping, traceroute, ssh, sshd, etc.
• Bastille
• Guarddog
• Various xterms like Gnome-ternminal, etc.

The following I just built from source, in the most thoughtless ./configure; make; sudo make install and they worked just fine also:

• Ntop
• mrtg
• rrdtool
• mrxvt

I installed OSX 10.4 on an 800MHZ iLamp, and it crashes, and the mouse occasionally stops talking with the USB port - none of which ever happened on 10.3 - so its the software. Apple QA does seem to have taken a hit lately.

OSS 1
OSX 0


I have to say, I think WOZ is right.

Re:Has Woz ever *tried* open source software?

[eclectic4]

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.

Giants are clumsy...

[Iriel]

...but mobs are hard to organize.

Both are generalizations that don't always fit the models that development teams are cast into.

Some software behemoths can make some pretty damn good software or at least have a pretty responsive team for fixing bugs that can (and will always) arise. But some open source software I've worked with has completely alienated me because the organization of it was so abyssmal that nothing ever really got done to crawl out of alpha 0.0.0.halfapercent.9 despite all the phenomenal talent pooled between the developers.

Stereotypes are dangerous so pick your poison, should you decide to follow that route.

The Wonderful Wizard of Woz

[digitaldc]

Points I came away with:
-Apple is no longer what they were when they started out, and now their proprietary software sucks, the 3rd party Apple MAC software is great, and the Apple Macintosh software is great
-Proprietary software traps you
-Open source is good for companies that would like it, but Apple software is still better
-DRM is a necessary evil in the digital downloading world, since people share files and hurt the artists
-CDs and Itunes should be cheaper, artists should be able to set their own price
-Software is huge, complex, over-hyped and under-supported and it is only going to get worse
-Colleges should train people to design software with a humanist point of view

After reading this article, you could argue that the computer industry is quite depressing if you start to think about all the different things he has mentioned. If you want to build a better computer/OS/hardware/software, you should not put large corporations in charge of development, leave it up to those with a more humanist point of view. The only problem is, if by humanist you are saying it is for the greater good or some moral good, it is inherently against the profit model and the actions of greedy corporations who are always trying to increase profits or meet projected profit expectations and deadlines.
The Open Source community is the closest thing you can get to a 'humanist' point of view while computing. Since the profit motivation is taken out of the equation, everyone can benefit.

Re:The Wonderful Wizard of Woz

[TopherC]

Well, he is very easy to agree with on these points.

Open source is humanist in some sense, but not when it comes to the human-computer interface. People want consistency, but OS developers need the freedom to try different things. Also (speaking for myself anyway) programmers tend to devote more thought to the structure, or internal beauty, of a program than its interface. I think that almost any interface to a program that the author has either written or deeply understands will seem intuitive to them. Intuition is not universal, it's individual and formed from prior experience.

I can definitely see his point with DRM -- it's instinctively a repulsive thing, but there are so far nothing but incentives for music piracy. I can imagine a great online system of music distribution, recomendation, and even profits to feed into startup artists. But I can't see an economic system working without any factors that will reduce piracy. I hear lots of people objecting to DRM, but haven't yet heard any suggestions for what else to do.

Re:The Wonderful Wizard of Woz

[Bongo]

The only problem is, if by humanist you are saying it is for the greater good or some moral good, it is inherently against the profit model and the actions of greedy corporations who are always trying to increase profits or meet projected profit expectations and deadlines.

By 'humanist' he's probably referring to the person-centrered approach, where you put the person in the middle, as it were, and affirm that the person is perfectly ok as they are, and rather than imposing some method or system onto them, you look at what their own desires, needs and preferences are, and work to fit those when designing a machine interface.

However, there was an article recently by some interface guru saying that this approach hasn't really worked with computers, and that at the end of the day, people are naturally able to learn and adapt. We learn to drive cars, we learn to operate washing machines and toaster and all sorts of machines. So rather than worry about making the computer adapt to the human, let the computer be the best tool it can be, and let the human learn and adapt to use it. Don't take the sharp bits off the saw because sharp bits are not friendly to humans--let the saw have sharp bits because it's in the nature of the tool to work that way.

I think the latter approach might be more interesting. We've tried to use the GUI to "intuitively" show the user what to do, but frankly this only worked when you had like a dozen tool icons to pick from. Software now has so many features, so many file formats, so many protocols and stuff, that GUIs are just really complex. So what if there's a button for everything? Most people can't find the buttons because there so many layers to the GUI. People thought it would be easy because you could just "press a button", whereas a lot of the power is in scripting and modeling stuff.

We're stuck with bazillions of Word documents because we wanted to make the computer "natural" like typing a letter. Now with web pages we're desperately trying to get back to some semblance of meaningful and structured content, which unsurprisingly is going to be too complicated to setup for the average Word user.

Perhaps if we'd started by teaching people how to think about and organise information using a computer, we'd be further along today. Computers might cost more, but they might be used in smarter ways?

Hardware manufacturers

[pubjames]

I think some of the very worst software comes from hardware manufacturers. HP printers for instance come with the most appallingly crappy software, a lot of it just badly replicating things that the OS (Windows or Mac) does anyway.

Then I brought a Nikon camera recently, and the stupid software they shipped with it managed to screw up both a Mac and a Windows machine.

Re:Who cares? Should I?

[Total_Wimp]

Why should I care about Woz and his "opinions"?

a) Because he's a long-time industry insider who knows what is possible with software.

b) Because he's an end-user and knows what he'd like to see in software.

c) But why Woz and not someone else? Well, we do listen to those other guys too. You, me and a bunch of other people rant on a pretty regulare basis here on /. about what we think is good or what sucks in software. I think we should listen to Woz for pretty close to the same reason I hope the software industry listens to us.

TW

Re:Who cares? Should I?

[MacDork]

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.

Death Star Syndrome

[(1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

Big-shop software, as a matter of fact, is always what made A New Hope somewhat plausible for me: the too-many-cooks oversight of a two-meter exhaust vent analogizes well with desktop infelicities.

I'd like to nominate this phenomenon the "Death Star Syndrome," or DSS.

Joe Sixpack is at fault

[east coast]

Why have some major software players gone to crap? Because they have to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to sell in the kind of numbers it takes today to get software published and noticed. That and the fact that Joe wants one software package to do everything

Granted these moves are often made in the guise of software integration but the fact is that the more gizmos you pile on the more issues you're going to have. At one point most geeks were happy about software that did one thing well, now Joe comes in and he wants one package that does everything including wipes.

Look at the hardware market too; HP was a Godsend when they weren't trying to put out 85 different products that did everything. Now we get lousy equipment such as "all in one" devices. Sure, they have more function but the problems are out of hand.

I guess the question is are we ready for mammoth apps and devices that do everything or do we need to cool our heels and get what we have today working right first then tackle the issues of more functions in a tighter package?

Re:Joe Sixpack is at fault

[shummer_mc]

Joe doesn't know *exactly* what he wants. He knows that he wants something that does (roughly) X. He goes to mega-corporate software vendor (i.e. Best Buy, Amazon, etc) and says/types X. Well, software salesman or reviews, or whatever tell him that for 9.95 he can have a limited version of [perhaps] concise software, for 19.95 he can have the mother-of-all apps (MOAP) from another mega-corporation. Joe decides that he should just get mega-corporation's software because he wants "to be able to... in the future... after I figure it out." What he doesn't realize is that mega-corporation put all those features in to appeal to the broadest audience and put the software together in a huge time-crunch. Where the concise software is [hopefully] 1. easier and 2. less problematic it is also 3. useful to fewer people. Where the MOAP software was 1. harder and 2. more problematic it also was 3. already bought and paid for by more Joes (i.e more profitable). Joe takes MOAP home, installs it, tries to figure out how to do X (successful, or not-- doesn't matter), and then promptly forgets about that software.

What open source tends to forget is that that Joe pays for marketing, brand recognition, R&D, and, yes, the software. What [some] mega-corporations tend to forget is that "free" (as in beer AND as in choice) is the most powerful marketing/brand recognition word ever used. M$ tends not to forget (free internet browser, free media player, free Express versions of development software) that "free" only needs to be mentioned... not realized.

On a bit of a higher level, consumers (in the US anyway) can't and don't like to make decisions. They'd rather that it's a bit more expensive now and avoid another decision. Decision == work. Many little [maybe free] apps require many more decisions than one [potentially expensive] MOAP. Teach your children to *enjoy* decision making and we can change this...

Re:More nonsense from slashdot

[gowen]

Well, here's some balance for you : The Guardian on why OpenOffice sucks so badly.

I _told_ you so!

[Thud457]

I told my managers about that exhaust port being a vulerability. My group did extensive simulations showing that a small, one-man fighter had a 0.0016% chance of getting close enough to launch a radiation missle down the port, triggering a chain reaction in the main reactors. When I threated to go to the GAO, they took the whole team off the project and put us on designing improved Bantha saddles. When I tried to tell my story to "Sixty Parsecs" Lord Vader himself saw to it that I was transferred to the cloud mines of Bespin.

Re:Back in the day

[Zathrus]

Neither has Dvorak, Jobs, Gates, or Balmer, but that doesn't stop them.

Dvorak (John C. Dvorak) has never done any work in computers -- he's been a journalist his entire life. Frankly, I've never really understood why people paid attention to him. He's been around a long time, but his batting average on predictions is pretty miserable.

Jobs, Gates, and Balmer are all involved in the industry still -- sure, they're in management at this point, but being the top managers of two of the biggest and most influential computer companies in the world means you have relevance.

Woz, while he's done a lot of worthy things since leaving Apple, has not been involved in the industry to any significant extent since. I'd be forced to argue that Dvorak is more relevant than he is, and that's a sad statement. He did some great stuff nearly 30 years ago, but that doesn't mean that he's "with it" now.

Indeed

[itistoday]

While I didn't read all of it, here's an interesting quote from Woz:

I don't even call it a problem; it's just something you learn to work around. It's like, there was such a cleaner, good approach to it and they did this stupid thing. But remember, the people who wrote the OS X weren't the people who developed the Lisa and Macintosh. Those guys are gone.

You can tell this guy has "lost touch" when he starts recommending you use OS 9 over OS X; I'm glad those days are over personally, I kind of like being able to fully multitask.

Re:Indeed

[PantsWearer]

I don't even call it a problem; it's just something you learn to work around. It's like, there was such a cleaner, good approach to it and they did this stupid thing. But remember, the people who wrote the OS X weren't the people who developed the Lisa and Macintosh. Those guys are gone.

If you review the article, this is actually a reference to user centric design, not a reference to anything technical about the underlying operating system. Woz was actually talking about the way the early Mac and Lisa were designed around what the user wanted/expected, not around making the user adjust to the workings of the system.

You might want to remember that user experience is (mostly) independent of technical underpinnings. You can have a crap UI on top of a modern OS (say AIX running only ksh) or a great UI on top of a really crappy OS (pre-X MacOS is a pretty good example).

Re:Indeed

[anaesthetica]

I don't think he's talking about the technical underpinnings. I think he's talking about software design and human usability. After a certain point, it doesn't matter what's under the hood. I think that he feels OS X abandoned OS 9's user interface guidelines in exchange for superior technical underpinnings but inferior usability dressed up in eye candy.

Re:Back in the day

[waterlogged]

OK so I'll take the bait and feed the troll. Woz has probably forgotten more in the past week than we collectively will learn in the next year about computers and computing. Never underestimate any person that has a root knowledge about how something works. While others may say, "but he hasn't been working with the tools.... or doesn't understand the current state of things...". This doesn't mean the man doesn't understand FAR more about how to get a certain task accomplished. I try not and underestimate, or discount people that don't have the same skill set as me, and you would do well not to either.

It's no surprise

[Malluck]

You'll never get the best software from a company who's business model is to cater to the largest userbase possible. The options they include in a software package will never be the best, merely good enough for the masses and at a price the masses can afford.

It's kinda like expecting the very best food from somewhere like McDonalds. That'll never happen. Instead you have to go to the little corner bestro to get really good food.

Single Quote Headlines

[derubergeek]

I suppose this wouldn't have been much of a story if it had read:

Woz Still Loyal Apple Zealot

From the article: "...I love every part of the Apple world. The whole world of Apple works together."

What are you talking about?

[Darius Jedburgh]

He chimes in...

Who? The friend or Steve Wozniak?

how software from big companies suck so bad

Please! It's 'sucks badly'. 'Bad' might be acceptable in speech but not in journalism. And 'software' is singular and the verb must match.

The part my friend doesn't include is how he guessed a trick was performed and won a necklace from him!

Your friend guessed a trick was performed? Surely you mean 'how it was performed'? And what does that have to do with anything? And where does the necklace come in. This writing reads like something said by Vicky Pollard.

...and really care what they're doing...

Was this really what was said? 'Care what they're doing'?

The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don't work.

Hey! Who needs grammar when you can just string words together in any order you want?

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.

Re:Back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

Dvorak (John C. Dvorak) has never done any work in computers -- he's been a journalist his entire life. Frankly, I've never really understood why people paid attention to him.

Because he designed that excellent keyboard, and composed music in his free time.

I refuse to let you make fun of such a multitalented individual.

Re:Worst, Worst Software from Apple?

[Bobartig]

Wow, that site has some amazing comments.

Userfriendliness

Apple has always had userfriendliness as a high priority with their previous operating systems. With OS X this changed. By basing it on a UNIX-system Apple lost all of their simplicity. Not that OS 9 was great in anyway but atleast you didn't have to mess around with a text based terminal to get things working.

In fact many applications available don't come with a graphical user interface, so if you want them to work, you better start making friends with the terminal.

I work in tech support with hundreds of mac users going through our helpdesk a week, many of whom are professionals in every imaginable industry. I'd say around 1-3% of them use the terminal regularly, and less than actually have to.

"many applications available don't come with a graphical user interface" which is to say, with Mac OS X, there are lots of terminal based applications already installed and many more available to you. Quite impressive he's trying to spin the robustness of unix as a drawback. I've met some very nice linux developers at my job. I'd say without the combination of friendly GUI and powerful commandline, they probably wouldn't be using a mac to begin with.

Re:HERATIC ?

[schon]

HERATIC

Because you think he's affiliated with a greek goddess?

Re:Back in the day

[NullProg]

When the 6502 was a hot processor, Woz was a pretty fair hack electrical engineer. Running the video off the CPU was a cute trick. But he hasn't had anything relevant to say about computers in a very long, long time.


Are you trolling?
1986:
The //gs was the first computer to include a Large Scale Integration (LSI) chip, designed by Steve Wozniak, and called the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine).
http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=a IIgs&performa=off&sort=date&order=ASC

2004:
Wheels of Zeus
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1734857,00.as p

He knows more about modern technology than you do.
Enjoy,

Re:I thought this guy was supposed to be cool

[schon]

call it a hunch, I just dont think The Woz see's many Real Poor People at the country club.

Which country club would you be referring to?

Would that be the one where he teaches computing to underprivileged children, and provides them with free laptops?

WOZ is very smart

[geekoid]

I would wager he sees usabilty issue, load issues, and has a good idea of what software should be doing that you do not.
The kind of stuff where once pointed it out, seems incredible obvious and will bug you everytime you use the software.

Re:Back in the day

[oudzeeman]

The Integrated Woz Machine was named after the Woz, but it was designed by someone else.

Re:Back in the day

[Anonymous Coward]

$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.

Re:Evil Progress

[Phat_Tony]

You have entirely missed the point. New features are fine. Useful new features are great. Randomly rearranging existing features is just annoying. Putting common features in different places in different applications is annoying. Having the same widgets unexpectedly do different things in different scenarios (or even in the same scenario) for no reason is annoying. Woz, many people in this thread, and the linked articles like ARStechnica have commented how great the original Macintosh UI was. It was almost entirely new at the time! We have nothing against new. We have a problem with pointless inconsistency and changes that lower our productivity and force us perform lots of pointless memorization to accomplish our tasks.

Inconsistency

[Savage-Rabbit]

My biggest beef with OS X software ( aside from the Finder, which just needs a *complete* re-write ) is the recent lack of UI consistency. Try this : launch Safari, Mail, and iTunes ( most recent versions, in OS X 10.4 ). Check out the look of the windows... are any of them the same? Not really, they're all slightly different-looking... and iTunes looks like no other OS X app ever !

The difference between brushed metal and standard windows was annoying and unnecessary enough, but what is the rationalization for those three Apple-authored applications having such different looks ? Who needs 4 different styles of window dressing on a single machine? They're making Windows look like the platform with UI consistency, WTF is going on at Apple with these differing looks for different apps ?

Believe it or not I use all those apps regularly and the inconsistency does not bother me all that much but then again I like the complete absence of an every-body-must-be-the-same, 'lemming mentality' this inconsistency brings with it. For all it's faults the OS.X graphical UI is still infinitely superior to Windows which it self is full of suboptimally implemented applications (Try looking at some of the sytem Administrative tools that ship with Windows 2003 Server just for example. I partickularly hate the 'IIS Manager' and the 'Computer Management' tools). The example on arstechnica where they cycled between the different looks for Finder was nice, they did have a point and it left me thoroughly confused when I tried it. However, how many users out there are flipping between Finder looks every 2 seconds? Or, more realistically, every two or three days? Pick a look and stick with it, having a choice is not necessarily a failing. I will however agree with the fact that Finder needs a rewrite simply because it has ergonimics shortcomings in all of its incarnations.

Re:How about iTunes for start?

[jafac]

After reading this whole thread, I've come to a startling conclusion:

You can't please everyone.

Re:correction

[aaronl]

It's also worth pointing out that nobody was using it to distribute music at the time, and also that MPEG-4 is the Quicktime container format. While that 'A' might not stand for Apple, it comes very close. The world was using MPEG-1 layer 3, Windows Media, Ogg Vorbis, and RealAudio, in decreasing order of popularity. Out of the five formats I mentioned, only two are actually realiably distributed without DRM.

If we want open formats, we can't be saying that we want open formats unless (insert company of the day) is doing it, and then DRM is okay.