It doesn't matter if the error is a number, or a missing file, or a missing curly brace. The point is that if your program *can* show that error to an end user, no matter how unlikely it is, you should document it so the end user knows how to fix it.
I apologize for not driving home, turning on my PC, and re-installing the buggy software to copy and paste the exact error here.:)
Oh and one last thing... OSS projects may be crappy, but many "free" Windows programs aren't just crappy, they come with complimentary ad/spy/malware as well.
Yeah, but I'm a long-time Mac user and for whatever reason, even freeware MacOS software is pretty good most, if not all, of the time. So maybe I'm spoiled, but I'm not comparing Linux to Windows, I'm mostly comparing it to OS X. (Which seems appropriate because Woz worked at Apple for so long.)
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.
Sorry to reply twice in the same thread, but if you have any tips for getting Finder to crash less, please let me know how to "fix" it. Because I have no clue.
Basically, what I'm seeing is predictable crashes when viewing a folder with a large amount of images with icon previews turned on. Sometimes this happens with only a few hundred images, sometimes it takes thousands. (I actually have started mounting my OS X HD over the network to use Windows XP's slideshow view, since Explorer doesn't crash and slideshow view gives bigger previews anyway.)
In addition to this, about twice a day during my normal course of work, I'll download a file (or make some change to a folder) and notice that Finder didn't update. Clicking to switch to Finder reveals that it's locked up. So far I haven't found any pattern to when or why it locks up, and for all I know it could be locked up for an hour or more before I notice. (When some apps lock up, you can tell easily because they do the beachball cursor and it never ends. Finder looks normal, it just becomes unresponsive.)
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.
Bah. I'm sorry I didn't word it as specifically as you wanted, but try this:
Create a new tab. In that new tab type a URL to load, then immediately switch back to the first tab you had open and start typing. About two words into your typing, the new tab will load the site and jump to the front, stealing focus from the work you were doing. Try it. Believe me, Safari steals focus from me all the time. IE does the same thing when you open a new IE window and put it in the background... as soon as the site loads, it jumps back in the front.
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.
I didn't say the technology was bad, I said the GUI sucks ass. There's a difference, you know. To add insult to injury, making a Smart Folder almost always crashes Finder when more than about 800-1000 items are in it. So the GUI sucks, *and* it crashes.
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.
Because if I'm typing a text document and I put in a DVD, I want to play the DVD right away. I *don't* want DVD Player to come to the front, I want it to play in the background. And even if you were right and most people wanted DVD Player to come to the front, it still shouldn't do it TWICE! (Once when it boots, once when it loads the DVD menu.) In fact, if it only stole focus once, I could probably tolerate it... but as is, it steals focus when you put in the DVD, you switch and start typing again, and about 2 seconds later it steals focus again.
FYI, if I tell the CD/DVD preferences to launch VLC (even via AppleScript), my focus doesn't get stolen at all. So it's definitely a bug in Apple's DVD Player, since VLC doesn't exhibit the same behavior. Heck, if DVD Player worked right, I'd have pretty much no use for VLC. (And no, I don't rip DVDs. I just have an active Blockbuster.com subscription, so I play them often.)
Look, I like OS X. I think it's great. But the fact is that it is more buggy than Classic versions of MacOS were. I could count the bugs I found in OS 9.2.2 on one hand, and most of them were obscure bugs that rarely if ever even came up. OS X has many bugs that affect me every day. (Yes, I know OS X can *do* more, yes I know it's more advanced, that's not relevant to what I'm saying.)
Hah, good point. He's just a big-name proponent of the common Slashdot "everyone's a programmer" fallacy.
I got so worked up with the software that didn't work at all I forgot to talk about unimplemented features. Have you ever gotten a dialog box that says "Unimplemented" in open source software? I have, half a dozen times or more. Have you ever gotten it in commercial software? I haven't, ever. Case closed.
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.
That's pretty much exactly what Seanbaby does in all his articles. Have you not read him before?
90% of them are about crappy old video games, also. 5% are about the Superfriends, and what remains is about terrible Indian versions of US movies and TV shows.
No kidding. It looks like every single computer-animated anime face I've ever seen before in my life... sure it's creepy, but so are all the others.
(From what I've heard, Japanese men frequently take upskirt pictures of their favorite video game women and post them on upskirt porn sites as if they were real women. Source: http://www.heroine-sheik.com/2005/11/30/kasumi-ups kirt/ If they're doing that, I don't think a little creepiness is going to deter them.)
Wait, I'm confused. Santana isn't on the list of CDs containing rootkits, so it's safe to buy and use... but you sent a letter to Santana saying you won't buy one regardless?
they REALLY could clean up by finding a way to enable users to buy the entire album all at once instead of individual songs, for the same price as the typical retail physical CD.
CDs on iTunes (except a few prima-donna artists) are $9.99. That's already cheaper than the typical retail CD. And if they have fewer than 10 tracks, they are cheaper than $9.99.
I think Microsoft's position is that any serious server is going to be beefy enough that the 4 MB or so used by the windowing system is only a drop in the bucket. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that... if your server is dropping connections because it's short 4 MB of RAM, you need to buy a beefier server anyway, right? Freeing up that 4 MB isn't going to make a huge difference in performance... it might be ok a week, then start dropping connections again.
Half-intensity? From my experience, they stay just as bright for a year and a half (or so, depending on use), and then explode loudly enough that you almost crap your pants. What kind of bulb does your 6-year-old projector use? It's obviously different than what they're putting in InFocus machines now.
Hiding the file type (and creator, which is a concept unique to MacOS) in the meta-data has always been the way that MacOS has always worked, since 1.0. That's my point; hiding the file type in the meta-data makes it *very* each to make "jpeg" file that has the icon for a "jpeg" file but is actually an application. And since you need ResEdit, or an equivalent utility, to see the actual metadata that determines this, it's very hard to detect.
Old shareware programs used to use stand-alone text viewers for their Read Me file, but change the icon to the SimpleText document icon. So you'd think you were clicking a text document, and end up with an entire program running. If that program were a virus (or trojan, I guess), imagine the damage that could happen.
I've always maintained that MacOS has resisted a major, major virus attack in the Classic era by sheer luck. OS X is a lot more robust, but you could still easily write a trojan application that looks like a document, and it'd still be able to wipe your home directory without so much as a password prompt.
I bet half the Slashdotters here have AIM, or at least GAIM connected to AIM, open in the background as they type stuff like this. What's with all the negative stereotyping? Is it possible that smart people use AIM? *Gasp*! Maybe I use AIM because back when IM was new, ICQ sucked ass on Macintosh? *Gasp!*
Get over yourself. Are there kids using AIM who type stupid shit? Yes. Are there kids on Yahoo IM, MSN IM, ICQ who type stupid shit? Yes! How about Livejournal or Blogger.com? Stupid kids are everywhere, get over it.
Not only that, but MacOS (even back to version 1) makes it really easy to disguise a executable as any other type of file. And from version 7.0 on, you can even paste any icon over any type of file.
But yes, nobody complains except when Microsoft does stuff like this. Goofy.
What's even goofier is that in OS X, as far as I can figure, "show file extension" is a file-specific flag, not a user-specific flag. Unless I'm missing something, it's impossible to get OS X to show file extensions on all files all the time.
Actually, the idea came from the guys at Claris who invented it for ClarisWorks back in the day to provide a framework to put bitmaps in word processor pages, or vector art in bitmaps, etc. Apple took their basic idea and extended it to cover tons of different types of data. But it never would have worked because it would have made it impossible to share documents.
Say you got a blank OpenDoc and added a Excel pane and a Photoshop pane. Now you bring it to a buddy's computer, but he doesn't own Excel or Photoshop... all he sees is the OpenDoc equilivant of "missing image." The only way it would have worked is if Apple provided all the embeddable tools and built them into the OS, but then they'd alienate all their third-party developers and/or third party developers would ignore OpenDoc and the whole effort would be meaningless. Killing it off was a good thing.
It was also extremely unstable and crashed constantly back when it was installed by default. That couldn't have helped its chances.
You have to remember that the Slashdotters focus on the negative. There *are* good stations still running. 107.7 in Seattle is great 20 hours a day. (The other 4 hours is the horribly unfunny "Morning Alternative" morning show. Guh, I hate that.)
Uh. He has a defective product. Microsoft will give you an RMA for those if you call them. People "negotiate" with ginormous corporations every damned day... I got a defective DVD player from Sony replaced, and it didn't involve me suing them.
So you take it back to the store and exchange it, or you call up Microsoft and arrange a RMA, same as *ANY OTHER DEFECTIVE PRODUCT EVER*. Suing is stupid. It doesn't change the facts (you can still exchange/RMA the product), but now you've made a lawyer rich for nothing as well and wasted a whole ton of people's time.
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It doesn't matter if the error is a number, or a missing file, or a missing curly brace. The point is that if your program *can* show that error to an end user, no matter how unlikely it is, you should document it so the end user knows how to fix it.
:)
I apologize for not driving home, turning on my PC, and re-installing the buggy software to copy and paste the exact error here.
Oh and one last thing... OSS projects may be crappy, but many "free" Windows programs aren't just crappy, they come with complimentary ad/spy/malware as well.
Yeah, but I'm a long-time Mac user and for whatever reason, even freeware MacOS software is pretty good most, if not all, of the time. So maybe I'm spoiled, but I'm not comparing Linux to Windows, I'm mostly comparing it to OS X. (Which seems appropriate because Woz worked at Apple for so long.)
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.
Sorry to reply twice in the same thread, but if you have any tips for getting Finder to crash less, please let me know how to "fix" it. Because I have no clue.
Basically, what I'm seeing is predictable crashes when viewing a folder with a large amount of images with icon previews turned on. Sometimes this happens with only a few hundred images, sometimes it takes thousands. (I actually have started mounting my OS X HD over the network to use Windows XP's slideshow view, since Explorer doesn't crash and slideshow view gives bigger previews anyway.)
In addition to this, about twice a day during my normal course of work, I'll download a file (or make some change to a folder) and notice that Finder didn't update. Clicking to switch to Finder reveals that it's locked up. So far I haven't found any pattern to when or why it locks up, and for all I know it could be locked up for an hour or more before I notice. (When some apps lock up, you can tell easily because they do the beachball cursor and it never ends. Finder looks normal, it just becomes unresponsive.)
Anyway, any tips would be appreciated.
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.
Bah. I'm sorry I didn't word it as specifically as you wanted, but try this:
Create a new tab. In that new tab type a URL to load, then immediately switch back to the first tab you had open and start typing. About two words into your typing, the new tab will load the site and jump to the front, stealing focus from the work you were doing. Try it. Believe me, Safari steals focus from me all the time. IE does the same thing when you open a new IE window and put it in the background... as soon as the site loads, it jumps back in the front.
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.
I didn't say the technology was bad, I said the GUI sucks ass. There's a difference, you know. To add insult to injury, making a Smart Folder almost always crashes Finder when more than about 800-1000 items are in it. So the GUI sucks, *and* it crashes.
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.
Because if I'm typing a text document and I put in a DVD, I want to play the DVD right away. I *don't* want DVD Player to come to the front, I want it to play in the background. And even if you were right and most people wanted DVD Player to come to the front, it still shouldn't do it TWICE! (Once when it boots, once when it loads the DVD menu.) In fact, if it only stole focus once, I could probably tolerate it... but as is, it steals focus when you put in the DVD, you switch and start typing again, and about 2 seconds later it steals focus again.
FYI, if I tell the CD/DVD preferences to launch VLC (even via AppleScript), my focus doesn't get stolen at all. So it's definitely a bug in Apple's DVD Player, since VLC doesn't exhibit the same behavior. Heck, if DVD Player worked right, I'd have pretty much no use for VLC. (And no, I don't rip DVDs. I just have an active Blockbuster.com subscription, so I play them often.)
Look, I like OS X. I think it's great. But the fact is that it is more buggy than Classic versions of MacOS were. I could count the bugs I found in OS 9.2.2 on one hand, and most of them were obscure bugs that rarely if ever even came up. OS X has many bugs that affect me every day. (Yes, I know OS X can *do* more, yes I know it's more advanced, that's not relevant to what I'm saying.)
Hah, good point. He's just a big-name proponent of the common Slashdot "everyone's a programmer" fallacy.
I got so worked up with the software that didn't work at all I forgot to talk about unimplemented features. Have you ever gotten a dialog box that says "Unimplemented" in open source software? I have, half a dozen times or more. Have you ever gotten it in commercial software? I haven't, ever. Case closed.
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.
That's pretty much exactly what Seanbaby does in all his articles. Have you not read him before?
90% of them are about crappy old video games, also. 5% are about the Superfriends, and what remains is about terrible Indian versions of US movies and TV shows.
No kidding. It looks like every single computer-animated anime face I've ever seen before in my life... sure it's creepy, but so are all the others.
s kirt/ If they're doing that, I don't think a little creepiness is going to deter them.)
(From what I've heard, Japanese men frequently take upskirt pictures of their favorite video game women and post them on upskirt porn sites as if they were real women. Source: http://www.heroine-sheik.com/2005/11/30/kasumi-up
That's OS X. I was talking about MacOS Classic. (Versions 1-9.2.4 or whatever.) There's a huge difference.
Wait, I'm confused. Santana isn't on the list of CDs containing rootkits, so it's safe to buy and use... but you sent a letter to Santana saying you won't buy one regardless?
they REALLY could clean up by finding a way to enable users to buy the entire album all at once instead of individual songs, for the same price as the typical retail physical CD.
CDs on iTunes (except a few prima-donna artists) are $9.99. That's already cheaper than the typical retail CD. And if they have fewer than 10 tracks, they are cheaper than $9.99.
In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft is already accomplishing number 2 without needing to go through the effort of number 1.
I think Microsoft's position is that any serious server is going to be beefy enough that the 4 MB or so used by the windowing system is only a drop in the bucket. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that... if your server is dropping connections because it's short 4 MB of RAM, you need to buy a beefier server anyway, right? Freeing up that 4 MB isn't going to make a huge difference in performance... it might be ok a week, then start dropping connections again.
Half-intensity? From my experience, they stay just as bright for a year and a half (or so, depending on use), and then explode loudly enough that you almost crap your pants. What kind of bulb does your 6-year-old projector use? It's obviously different than what they're putting in InFocus machines now.
For a 1-page article that's a lot of exclamation marks! Somebody count them!
...
I counted 21.
(Ok, I didn't, I just copied it from the parent poster. Sucker!)
From the moment I heard about the 100 foot tall Indians, Dane Cook has been my hero. *sniff*
Hiding the file type (and creator, which is a concept unique to MacOS) in the meta-data has always been the way that MacOS has always worked, since 1.0. That's my point; hiding the file type in the meta-data makes it *very* each to make "jpeg" file that has the icon for a "jpeg" file but is actually an application. And since you need ResEdit, or an equivalent utility, to see the actual metadata that determines this, it's very hard to detect.
Old shareware programs used to use stand-alone text viewers for their Read Me file, but change the icon to the SimpleText document icon. So you'd think you were clicking a text document, and end up with an entire program running. If that program were a virus (or trojan, I guess), imagine the damage that could happen.
I've always maintained that MacOS has resisted a major, major virus attack in the Classic era by sheer luck. OS X is a lot more robust, but you could still easily write a trojan application that looks like a document, and it'd still be able to wipe your home directory without so much as a password prompt.
I bet half the Slashdotters here have AIM, or at least GAIM connected to AIM, open in the background as they type stuff like this. What's with all the negative stereotyping? Is it possible that smart people use AIM? *Gasp*! Maybe I use AIM because back when IM was new, ICQ sucked ass on Macintosh? *Gasp!*
Get over yourself. Are there kids using AIM who type stupid shit? Yes. Are there kids on Yahoo IM, MSN IM, ICQ who type stupid shit? Yes! How about Livejournal or Blogger.com? Stupid kids are everywhere, get over it.
Not only that, but MacOS (even back to version 1) makes it really easy to disguise a executable as any other type of file. And from version 7.0 on, you can even paste any icon over any type of file.
But yes, nobody complains except when Microsoft does stuff like this. Goofy.
What's even goofier is that in OS X, as far as I can figure, "show file extension" is a file-specific flag, not a user-specific flag. Unless I'm missing something, it's impossible to get OS X to show file extensions on all files all the time.
It's IBM. This is nothing compared to the amount of BS on their website.
Actually, the idea came from the guys at Claris who invented it for ClarisWorks back in the day to provide a framework to put bitmaps in word processor pages, or vector art in bitmaps, etc. Apple took their basic idea and extended it to cover tons of different types of data. But it never would have worked because it would have made it impossible to share documents.
Say you got a blank OpenDoc and added a Excel pane and a Photoshop pane. Now you bring it to a buddy's computer, but he doesn't own Excel or Photoshop... all he sees is the OpenDoc equilivant of "missing image." The only way it would have worked is if Apple provided all the embeddable tools and built them into the OS, but then they'd alienate all their third-party developers and/or third party developers would ignore OpenDoc and the whole effort would be meaningless. Killing it off was a good thing.
It was also extremely unstable and crashed constantly back when it was installed by default. That couldn't have helped its chances.
Yes. Duh.
If you own the VHS tape of a movie, and shoplift the DVD, are you stealing?
You have to remember that the Slashdotters focus on the negative. There *are* good stations still running. 107.7 in Seattle is great 20 hours a day. (The other 4 hours is the horribly unfunny "Morning Alternative" morning show. Guh, I hate that.)
Uh. He has a defective product. Microsoft will give you an RMA for those if you call them. People "negotiate" with ginormous corporations every damned day... I got a defective DVD player from Sony replaced, and it didn't involve me suing them.
So you take it back to the store and exchange it, or you call up Microsoft and arrange a RMA, same as *ANY OTHER DEFECTIVE PRODUCT EVER*. Suing is stupid. It doesn't change the facts (you can still exchange/RMA the product), but now you've made a lawyer rich for nothing as well and wasted a whole ton of people's time.