makecheck

I think it’s interesting because a notch would have a much bigger effect on other OS interfaces compared to the Mac.

On the Mac, there is generally space up there anyway (usually menus on one side, icons on the other). In “full screen” they’ve decided to just black it out unless those same menus/icons are set to remain visible. In normal use, not really taking up important space.

On other desktops though, it would appear to carve a piece out of the background.

Many of us have certainly used a number of indirect channels like forum posts, blogs, podcasts, etc. but I for one have also used several direct channels:

- I have filled out their “developer surveys” multiple times and explained in very direct, precise terms what is so very wrong with App Review and which parts I do not want. And I’m not talking 2021, lots of this was an issue (and flagged as such) years earlier.

- I have used the Feedback system to “suggest” changes.

- I have directly communicated with App Review over my own rejections.

I mean, even if you ignore the insane size and resources of Apple, they can’t say they weren’t told. I’d be very surprised if it weren’t in the top 3 gripes from all surveys.

Their latest changes aren’t great but they can be disabled. In general there are work-arounds for all their quirks. We should not overreact.

Firefox remains the only way I can get full uBlock Origin and uMatrix on the desktop, and I simply refuse to browse the mind-bogglingly frustrating “modern web” without those.

Also, browser diversity is crucial. We should support the main competition as long as possible.

It’s unfortunate that by default a lot of systems just gather strings into a pile for translation, as if all strings are created equal. But if you have two uses of the same text with different meanings, you have to be careful (e.g. put them in separate translation tables or something). Even for single words, e.g. somewhere there’s a button named “Open” but elsewhere there is a status text indicating that the current state of something is “Open”; lots of things like that. Just because it’s the same in one language, it may not be in another.

It would also be nice to have more context besides, say, just a comment. For example, things in toolbars ought to be short (ideally one word), things in menu items might be medium (a few words tops), things in notifications might be medium-to-long, and stuff in a window might have no restrictions at all. When you start from just a string, you do not necessarily know how much space you have and even if your UI can auto-resize, that doesn’t mean you’d want it to in every case.

Remember that airport security was not the only thing that changed. When they note that there have been fewer incidents, etc., we have to factor in things like reinforced cockpit doors, crew retraining, etc. and not just whatever procedures pass for “security” at the airport.

I am also a bit skeptical that the much more complex new scanning machines are actually more effective at catching things than metal detectors.

Meanwhile, we have to acknowledge the serious threats introduced by inefficient processes. The one that scares me is the unbelievable crowd sizes that now form at virtually every major airport. There is simply nothing secure about a giant crowd and it is ridiculous when the insecure crowd exists because of “security”!

Plus, since they never tell you why you weren’t selected anyway, for all you know there are problems in their recopied version (which is probably all they read). Would you even know if they just failed to store half your work history in their database?

Don’t be fooled by allowing a link here or a link there. Stores are currently benefiting most from people not seeing the fee structure, and they’ve probably figured out that most people won’t really follow links either.

What would work is being forced to actually show things to users, directly in their face, at the time of purchase. As long as a user has to follow a link first, there’s still a pretty good chance they just won’t bother.

Just imagine how app store sales would change if the stores were required to tell users what is actually going on (as you would see at any cash register or online web site shopping checkout page, by the way):

    Your New App    — $6.99
    Apple Store Fee — $2.20
    Taxes           — $0.80
    -----------------------
    Total           — $9.99

Wouldn’t seeing the above change how you view any number of app purchases, especially for recurring purchases?

What if, when playing games (which Apple makes, by far, the most money from), you saw the same breakdown, every time you did a consumable in-app purchase:

    MyGame Gem Bag  — $6.99
    Apple Store Fee — $2.20
    Taxes           — $0.80
    -----------------------
    Total           — $9.99

Wouldn’t this completely change the average person’s view into the store’s cut?

Until THIS is what purchasers actually see, any other “concessions” allowing “links” mean nothing.

Well honestly they should just have links to all apps but that would require the search engine to not also suck (different discussion).

It’s just surprising to me that Apple didn’t take such a basic step to do this, when it seems it would so clearly increase the value of the platform. It is why it is difficult to believe anything they say about how much they “love” the Mac...every single action they take to “help” the Mac platform is just baffling.

And it’s such an incredibly good example of why anti-steering rules should be illegal. Apple basically refuses to let apps even tell the user that such alternate licenses are available!

I hate anti-steering so much that I hope any future legislation against it also enforces retroactive refunds for a significant period of time. Whatever money they have made is basically entirely due to pulling wool over users’ eyes, and they need to be losing millions from this as a punishment.

The Mac App Store gives a hint at what would happen if there was any choice. The amount of software actually available for the Mac is far, far greater than what’s listed in the store. Furthermore, while some quality and notable apps are still in the Mac App Store, many well-known apps are not there. The number of lousy apps is also extremely high every time I go to search or just look at the front page, to the point where Apple does itself no favors by even drawing attention to most of the apps on that store (and it gives the impression that “most” Mac software must be like this).

If they simply listed all major Mac apps, e.g. linking to their web sites or download links or whatever, they would hugely increase the value of the Mac platform and bring enough direct benefit to developers to be worth some kind of fee (and of course Apple gets $99/year anyway). Instead, they tried to port the same clueless, greedy, review-burdened scheme to that store, layering completely unnecessary requirements on top (like poorly-thought-out sandboxing). And since developers had a choice, they mostly said No.

My way around fees is to greatly increase what I order to dilute the fee, e.g. I might order 3-4 days of stuff.

Even before apps, e.g. back in the day when ATM fees kept increasing, I kept doubling the amount of cash I took out so that the fee change didn’t matter.

In general I think businesses count on most people not noticing or finding it too inconvenient to change behavior. Probably the same principle behind forcing people to spend hours on hold to make companies do things they don’t like, such as cancelling things.

I know of at least one clearly-garbage behavior, which is the “Taxes & Fees” category (initially hidden). Basically instead of saying something like “$7 DoorDash fee” they say “$5 DoorDash fee” and tucked under “Taxes & Fees” is another $2.

This kind of crap is why companies just aren’t trustworthy without reasonable regulation. They default to “trick the customer” every chance they get.

Basically they had been abusing developers in 40 different ways, reduced it to just 38 forms of abuse, and they expect a celebration.

If you’re still stealing all my stuff but you agreed to stop jaywalking, expect me to keep fighting to keep you from stealing all my stuff.

Developers should not accept this action, even if they’d get a little cash in the short term.

I think there is a general issue with platforms “conveniently benefiting” from massive growth from all their users, until one day they suddenly decide who/what they want to “allow”. This exclusion can take different forms, e.g. exclusion by suddenly imposing high subscription fees (not just “moral” exclusion).

It’d be really interesting to see if these platforms would ever have gotten so big/popular without their now-excluded audiences.

It’s better than nothing but still not great because the login area they present is too broad. For example, if you live in a large city and the phisher is somebody you know, seeing “New login from Your City” is not going to make you think twice.

Actually it is very reasonable to choose the right language for the job, especially for tasks that are not performance-critical.

When you are writing and debugging something new, you don’t want it to take forever to get it into a correct state. When you are maintaining things, you want readable code. And in an open-source project, you might attract more maintainers if you have code that is more accessible (e.g. simple things appear as simple as they are because they’re scripts, and people familiar with those languages can help even if they are not C programmers). It is also more likely to work cross-platform.

I can imagine a lot of things that would be a very simple few lines of script but a mess to write, debug and read in C code. This is especially true if you could have (say) relied on a robust, debugged Python standard library function that has existed for years but instead had to do all of that yourself in C “because the project should only be using C”?

It’s such a “perfect” circle of non-communication that benefits only the fruit company, isn’t it?

- Can I update my app inside your store? Fruit company: No.

- Can I find out why? Fruit company: No.

- Can I find out who or what makes this decision? Fruit company: No.

- Can I update my app outside your store? Fruit company: No.

- Can I contact my customers? Fruit company: No.

- Can I even identify my customers in order to help them? Fruit company: No.

- Can I directly give my own customers a refund? Fruit company: No.

- Can I be removed from your list of featured apps? Fruit company: No.

- Can customers prevent this one app from being auto-updated into brokenness? Fruit company: No.

- Can you tell customers that this new brokenness is your fault and not the developer’s? Fruit company: No.

And on, and on, and on, and on.

This is a completely absurd system that has never, ever, ever benefited customers or developers nearly as much as fruit companies.

Congress can’t act soon enough.

I don’t like the idea of stuff running on my device, consuming my battery and data, when the only point is to see if I am doing something wrong?

An analogy I can come up with is: the government hires people to visit your house every day, and while they’re there they need your resources (say, food, water, and electricity). In other words, they use up some of the stuff you would otherwise be able to use only for yourself — constantly — and the only reason they’re there is to see if you’re doing anything wrong. Why would you put up with this?

Funny, I can draw a pretty substantial parallel between “getting stuff done” and “hours of time to work on a problem uninterrupted by pointless chat and E-mail”.

Given that algorithms are designed to avalanche (e.g. changing one bit of the plain text causes tons of bits to change in the ciphertext), I don’t see what they expect to find from the encrypted data itself. Two similar encrypted sets of data would be similar essentially by accident.

They would have to get information from other observations, e.g. the fact that you send (encrypted but nonetheless observable) messages to certain people at certain times and frequencies, telling them something about the apparent importance of that relationship.

I see no evidence of poor performance on macOS. Have you used a recent Firefox? Could you be blaming the browser for the behavior of a particular extension or web site?

Yes but unfortunately it still creates links using the “new” Reddit interface. Installing an add-on like Old Reddit Redirect helps to restore sanity when searching by site.

Yep; I can’t believe what used to be bar-none the most useful set of search results will now seemingly scatter results into the list that have zero matches for my search term, as well as some with boldfaced words that I did not even type.

And also, for some reason the “zero-click results” stuff really bothers me. I don’t want some crappy AI summary of a Wikipedia page, I want the Wikipedia link first, for example. I can only assume this is a form of traffic theft because I seriously doubt Google has agreements with all the sites they slurp useful information from.

This isn’t really a filtering issue though; this decision was arbitrary. It is an App Store New Rule of the Week issue.

Stores and platforms can and should keep all their sophisticated fraud-detection tools, hardened runtime environment, etc. and continue to guard against untold numbers of awful apps.

The human review is supposed to take over where the mechanics fail. Yet we know (from Epic trial, etc.) that Apple has a comically small number of people assigned to this, relative to the millions of apps in existence. We can extrapolate how little time must be spent on each human review.

We also know that people outside of Apple were able to dig up scams pretty easily, without even having access to all the tools/data that Apple must have. Apple clearly could have invested more in this, and did not.

So we know (1) the Apple review team is limited, (2) serious problems can still be found with relatively little effort, and (3) they nonetheless choose to spend their limited resources chasing minor violations of App Store Rule of the Week.

We also know from the Epic trial that, despite what they say, Apple certainly will give some developers special treatment. This means leniency or rule-bending was an option for them here, and who better to work with than a developer like this, who has spent years writing software for Apple platforms, clearly increasing the value of Apple devices in the process? Apple looked at that years-long relationship and said: “get out of our store”.

If they put half as much effort into eliminating real scams as they do in eliminating proven useful software, what a different platform it would be.

The main value Facebook ever had to me was a way to reach people that were otherwise hard to reach. Over the years, literally every other possible benefit eroded away as the platform changed.

Therefore, I make sure people I care about know how to reach me outside Facebook so that it really does not matter if I log in to Facebook. In other words, I no longer need it even to reach people.

For notifications, here[1] is a pretty good overview of the problem.

A collection of comments on reformatted alert messages: [2].

Comment on icons, translucency and other quirks: [3].

[1] https://tyler.io/240-invisible-pixels/

[2] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/07/03/big-surs-narrow-alerts/

[3] https://medium.com/macoclock/why-apple-has-broken-some-basic...

Not to mention posts on Reddit, Twitter, blogs, etc. about lots of these UI quirks.

To be blunt, while the macOS 11 UI is not all bad, it contains very serious design mistakes, ruining things that everyone has no choice but to use (like notifications and alerts). Somehow Apple doesn’t get how terrible this trend is, and that it is damaging their entire brand. I can only assume the hierarchy at Apple is broken to the point where the people in charge are either unreachable, or unresponding to feedback, while having entirely too much control.

And as far as dumbed-down tools, it really feels like literally no one inside Apple even uses their tools (or they have access to better stuff and don’t care). For instance, “Console” - once the simplest imaginable concept with an implementation that everyone would expect - is now a pointless mess. An app that should have obvious behavior and usability is now just confusing every time I open it, leaving me feeling defeated because I cannot even find what I need. They messed it up and moved on, like many other things.

Not just ads but distractions in general. Who are these people who constantly want their TVs blasting random things while looking at a menu? And who decided that these things need to be playing more loudly than the TV show itself!?

When I am trying to select a show or an episode I DO NOT want it auto-playing even a clip of a show (much less an ad). Just be quiet!

This is not destroying the whole concept of ads, it is only pushing back against awful variants.

It is definitely possible to have “nice” ads, like simple text or images, with no creepy or CPU-draining elements in them. Nothing is preventing those ads from supporting free services.