On Sep 28, 2011, at 3:45 AM, Jim Thorton wrote: Apple software developers and Mac App Store reviewers are hypocritical. Their own software titles violate review guidelines they've created. And Mac App Store reviewers just close their eyes. The worst offender is, I say, Xcode. The Xcode installer accesses a prohibited location to install command-line tools. Mac OS X Lion violates review guidelines, too. If you press Command + Shift + #3, where do you get a desktop screenshot?
I think you have to remember that the Mac App Store guidelines exist in order to make sure that applications delivered through that channel are of a quality and consistency that will serve to elevate the platform. I don't think Apple has an official definition of "app" but among Google's definitions an app is "a program or piece of software designed and written to fulfill a particular purpose of the user."
Operating systems are not "apps". The fact that Apple chooses to use the App Store to deliver Lion doesn't change that. Lion is not an app, it's an OS. It would be impossible to build an OS that conforms to the guidelines (see guidelines paragraphs 2.5, 2.15, 2.16, 2.17, 2.18, 2.21, 2.23, etc). xCode is the IDE for developing on the Mac and, as such, is also not an app in the App Store sense. App's do one thing. IDEs and operating systems do much more.
In the App Store you're playing with Apple's ball, Apple's bat, Apple's field, and Apple's referees. Apple writes the rules. It would be naive to assume that they would be required to follow them. The guidelines do not exist to ensure that Apple software is high quality, which it normally is (Lion excepted), but to ensure that independent developer software is high quality. It would be nice to have a review system that was less readily abused by newbies. It would be nice to have more accountability in the review process (which should never, ever, take months).
In regards to Lion being a bit of a miss: I agree with most of what you wrote. I'm fed up with how long TextEdit takes to open sometimes (it's related to Saved Application States and document revisions). I really dislike the monochrome sidebar icons (Apple: color recognition is a useful part of vision, bring it back to the sidebar). I find absolutely no use for the "All My Files" view in the Finder (which annoyingly is the default view for new windows). I have to restart my Lion computer from time to time because things just get funky (slowness, choppiness in display, short freezes, AppleScript run time weirdness, etc). The only time I restart my Snow Leopard machines is when I've installed software updates that require it.
Not all of Lion is bad though. There are some things that I love and don't ever want to do without: 1) Mail's tokenized searches. I can type "today" and choose date today, type "Ben" and choose Ben from People, type "camping" and choose Subject line. In moments I have generated a focused search that enables me to find emails very, very quickly. (side note: sometimes the tokenizor breaks and I have to quit and relaunch Mail to get it to work again, I don't love that). 2) Saved states. Rebooting used to mean starting from scratch and having to launch applications and open documents again. Reboots today are far less painful. Everything I was working on just shows back up. That's the way it ought to be. Applications should remember what windows were opened, and where. To go all Jeff Raskin: It's the humane thing to do. 3) Document revisions and the death of Save. In my youth I learned to command-S constantly while writing documents just in case the application crashed or power went out or some unknown catastrophe struck. After every new sentence, command-S. After ever minor format change, command-S. Automatic save and version control make those years of training irrelevant and obsolete. Every edit is saved, all the time. If I make a bunch of edits to a document and then want to go back and recover something good that I lost along the way it's super easy to do. In the past I had to manually manage document revisions. What a pain! 4) ~/Library/ being hidden by default. The vast majority of end users never, ever, ever need to go into the ~/Library/ directory. As such, it was just confusing to people to have it there. As a developer I use it all the time but for the masses it was a waste of space and confusing to boot.
Overall 10.7.0 and 10.7.1 feel lower quality than their Snow Leopard equivalents. I'm hopeful that Apple will rethink some changes and fix lots of bugs. I'm definitely not switching to Windows (or anything else) any time soon though. The grass is still greener on this side. Snow Lion is going to be awesome, I think.
Zack
P.S. Mac user since 1986: Mac Plus with 4 MB RAM and a 40 MB SCSI hard drive. The last time I started it was two years ago and it booted up just fine. |