I will qualify “networked workstations” as A Thing that John and Jane Q. Public were not using at home in the mid-80s or even mid-90s. If they had a modem (and knew how to use it), that was big.
Certainly universities and NASA and CDC and the like had networks, as did many larger companies. But people using computers at home did not have the expectation or equipment to support always-on, always-connected access to other computers.
With that understanding, I agree with you.
Ok. Nothing new until OpenDoc works
Software was probably better in the 1990s. We had more choices.
In the 1990s there were more companies, thus more competition, thus higher quality products. I remember years where something like this was common: I bought Cyberstudio for web site design. It even came with a manual. Amazing, right? Great program. Then Adobe bought it. Then changed it. Then killed it. Companies were bought right and left and their products eliminated. iTunes came from SoundJam by Casady & Greene, a great company which also made indispensable programs like Conflict Catcher and Spell Catcher. We don’t need Conflict Catcher, but Spell Catcher was never replaced. I think it even had a medical dictionary, which I don’t have in my current setup. There was a verision of the OED on CDROM. Today? Nope.
I find interfaces today especially inferior, esp. in Windows, which is odd because this used to be such an important topic. How is that in a system called Windows, you often can’t resize…the windows? Maybe you have one or two resize options, fill screen or reduce by 20 percent, but often none. I’m begining to see this in the Mac. If you don’t use the default size of your monitor, you are short-changed. Bad news for those of us who wear glasses. Then there’s the inability to change fonts, a problem in Windows that has been coming to the mac. I can’t change fonts in Console. There are no preferences in Console. I can’t check spelling anymore in the Sierra version of Pages. Now what? I’m not even going to go into Quicken on Windows.
I honestly don’t know why anyone would develop for the mac. Apple has always treated developers badly and has done little to nothing to increase the market share of the operating system. Apple insists on releasing a new OS every year, whether it works or not, whether the old OS works or not. Old bugs get ignored, new ones introduced. Pointless features are added. Good software is broken, crippled, or eliminated. Why? Just because. Something is changed. Why? Just because. The subscription model is a terrible idea, one I will never subscribe to. Software gets tethered to the cloud or sends telemetry to the mothership without your knowledge. You have to have an internet connetion to run some software. The OS phones home when you start a program. Why is the Finder sluggish even on an i7 with 32GB of RAM? Just because. The App Store is lousy for so many reasons, I don’t need to list them.
These are easy examples of how power has been taken away from consumers and developers and become more centralized in the hands of a few companies. That’s always bad news for the vast majority of people. It helps only a tiny number of people. Who knows where it will lead?
This right here – the insistent marketing need to release something on regular intervals – probably has contributed more toward my user dissatisfaction than anything else.
And that’s just the OS, released once a year. I have to say that I’m darn tired of bring prompted to update Firefox about every two weeks (it seems). By the time I give the release a little time to shake out and I finally log out, take down all my tabs, download and install the update, do my validation testing, and log in all over again, there’s another update. Can’t. it. wait? Seriously, update the thing when you’ve got something decent to talk about.
I just upgraded from a 2013 13" Quad-Core i7 2.7GHz, 650M NIVIDA 1.5GB, OWC SSD to the very same 2020 model and I’m very happy. While the old laptop was pretty snappy once it’s connected to an external 2K or 1080p monitor it all fell apart. The entire experience on the 2020 is fluid no matter what I throw at it. I’m sure many CPU/GPU tasks could be faster but in that case I should have bought the 16" model. With the 10.15.5 update Catalina seems to be on par with Mojave too; 10.15.4 was a problem right out of the box.
Software aside, the 2020 13" (10th GEN) hardware is simply being held back by the INTEL processor. Note, I have not experienced that left-side Thunderbolt thermal issue. I have maybe a dozen devices to include a monitor and power on that side and it’s been smooth sailing. The graphics processor may not be a beast but it’s still three times as powerful as that NIVIDA GPU I had and the SSD screams at 3000+ MB/s.
An old version of SuperDuper takes about a minute to start up if the internet connection is off. The new version won’t even run. No message telling me it wants internet. I imagine it’s checking for an update, but it would be more reasonable to put up a dialog box telling me that the check for update failed rather that allow for a minute’s latency and the be silent about the failure.
I’m not experiencing that. SuperDuper has always started very quickly and I just tested it with no internet and it started right up. Is this a Catalina issue? (I’m on Mojave, avoiding Catalina, waiting for what comes next.)
Started here without delay on macOS 10.15.5 Catalina, no internet connection. Wonder what’s up with @Will_M’s situation?
No, I’m on Mojave, too. When it took SuperDuper so long to start up, I assumed it was doing some disk scanning. Then I started it once with the internet connection active, and there was no delay.
I just tried it, with both the old and new versions, and startup was prompt in both cases. As @ron said, “Wonder what’s up with @Will_M’s situation?” I assure you that earlier startups took about a minute, but I’m happy they now don’t.
It’s worse in Quicken for Windows. The shenanigans!
One of the main reasons I bought my parents a Dell was to use Quicken. They are in their eighties. You have to create an account in Quicken even if you are not going to do online financial transactions. So you have to sign in whenever you use the program. Then you get ads pushing you to upgrade to the latest version. Or some other junk. Just starting the program is a burden. At one point, when I couldn’t get it to work, which was often, I called Quicken and just started swearing. I told the guy it wasn’t his fault, but the company he worked for (who is it now?) was making the program so much harder than it had to be. I was furious. I told him it worked better in the 1990s and it should be a simple task. The company was built on Quicken. Now it’s wrecked.
This was years ago before I became Windows savvy. I had assumed there would be plenty alternatives to Quicken. Surely what everyone said was true: There’s so much more software for Windows than Mac. They were right. There is. And most of it is crap. I couldn’t find a decent alternative to Quicken. The closest was Moneydance, written in Java by a Scottish company. I even tried the open source Gnu Cash. Not terrible, but not great either. Nearly all finance programs are linked to the cloud. Are you kidding me? Who in their right mind puts their financial information in the cloud? I like Earth. I’m OK with Earth. Let’s stay here. Where’s Aristophanes when you need him?
Yes! Firefox has gotten so nutty and bloated. And it can’t afford to be if it’s going to compete. You won’t find me using a Google product, but so many people use Chrome that web sites are tailored to it. I think Firefox has always been the best browser. The extensions are excellent. But the problems, the endless features, and the creeping intrusiveness try my patience. Upgrades alter your preferences, so you always have to check to see what has been changed without your knowledge. And there are so many preferences now. How long does it take to check them all? An hour? When oh when will Firefox print web pages reliably? Didn’t icab get that right years ago? That’s one guy.
If getting better products requires payment, I don’t have a problem with it, so long as it’s done sensibly. I like buying good software. I like helping good developers. I don’t want free crap. I’m almost at the point where I purposely avoid free software because I suspect there’s some catch.
"We expect a lot out of our software. We expect it to work on multiple platforms. We expect it to know what we want even when we’re not too sure ourselves. We expect it to integrate with dozens of other programs. "
I don’t. I expect it to work and keep working. I expect it to have a clear interface with either a manual or integrated help or both. I expect it not to spy on me. I know what I want.
I don’t care if it talks or links to Facebook or syncs with an iphone or ipad or runs on Windows or Linux. Can I at least change the font? Or resize the windows? Can I own it? Or am I borrowing it?
Moneydance is also available on the Mac, and for anything not involving communication with the operating system, should be using the same code as the Windows version, Note that although it is written using Java, it does not depend on any live Java code in the operating system–it does not use live Java libraries, but incorporates any Java modules used within its own envelope. Importantly, Moneydance does not require live Internet links. For example, I use Moneydance and load my credit card data via .qfx files which I download via a web browser and then load from my computer.
I load most of my stock quotes by again using an Internet service via creating appropriate .csv files to load via a user-written extension.
The Moneydance interface isn’t perfect, and I find the reports not in the best format for me. Also, some of investment tracking code is a bit funky. However, I have learned how to deal with these quirks. For non-investment purposes, I find it as good as Quicken ever was, and contrary to the posters implication, passive Internet connectivity is not required.
That said, the major worry I have about Moneydance is lock-in caused by not having an export format that adequately captures all the inter-relationships in the database. So, if I should want to change to another financial program, substantial work would be involved. When I originally switched from Quicken to Moneydance, that transition was eased by the fact that almost any non-Quicken financial programs was able to convert native Quicken files without losing the various interconnections and relationships that were also supported in the new program. This, I think, was due to the fact that Quicken dominated the program category; if a program wanted to succeed, it needed to do this. Unfortunately, Moneydance has not reached the point where competitors feel it necessary to deal with native Moneydance files, and exports to common formats do not preserve those relationships. Thus, Moneydance users are locked in.
That was what stopped me—the reports weren’t there yet. But if the reports ever do what I want, I will dump Quicken for Moneydance in a heart beat.
Your point is well founded and Mac OS Mail is a great example of buggy software in decline. Over time features are removed and stability compromised. Even with 16 GB of ram & lots of SSD room, Mail can be amazingly slow to search or display a Smart Folder. And it still can’t compose and format a proper html message. Some attachments can no longer be opened except by ISP webmail. The “advanced features” that Apple has added, such as iCloud sync of Mail settings are incomplete & may conflict with each other until the user is forced to disable them. Features you might expect (advanced mail rules & searches, export of all preferences to use on your other Mac, export of mail rules, display remote content from known senders, Edit subject lines) are not added.
Actually in the case of mail rules, Claris Emailer was much more robust.
Apple Mail has had odd unfixed bugs for years & years. It really is as if Apple doesn’t use nor prioritize Mail. Which is strange because as a business person, I use Mail ALL DAY long. Smart & reliable improvements to Apple Mail for MacOS would be very much appreciated.
You’re right about Mail’s search being way too slow, and I’ve also found it to often be inaccurate. But I found that Spotlight has always done the trick for quick and accurate searches in Mail. And I’ve never had a problem with iCloud Mail synching; I think it’s a great feature. I’ve never had a problem with opening attachments, though I am suspicious and therefore will not open any attachment in a format I am not familiar with.
One of the things I most appreciate about Apple is that it is a very intuitive and friendly device for someone who is not at all technically inclined and short on patience, like me. When I did need to send out HTML email, I designed it in Dreamweaver and pasted it into Mail.
I also use Mail all day long, and I very much prefer it to Gmail and Outlook, which made me miserable for years at work.
I hear that, @macmedix. I use Mail a huge amount for work all day. While I in general get along quite well with it. A few things are just silly.
Most recently (Catalina) the fact that Apple thought removing column width adjustment was somehow not a completely misguided idea. And then, why does Mail search have to suck? I’m always amazed how much better search works when I use gmail’s (at work we’re a Google outfit) web interface and realize I can actually use that search field so much better and find things so much quicker than with Mail’s half-baked search (based on Spotlight?). Well actually, Spotlight sucks too but that’s another issue.
Hopefully 10.16 will rectify some of this. I guess we’ll learn more in a week.
Mail’s Smart Folders (and most likely Mail’s Search) are Spotlight. If you exclude your Home folder from Spotlight (in System Prefs) then the Smart Folders stop functioning.
Search is one of the things Apple is making into a system wide functionality instead of application specific functionality.
Ya know, I’d be perfectly OK with system-wide search being used by apps. It’s just that system-wide search should ideally not suck. This is one area where Apple could really take a page from those who know how to do search.