Honestly, I think that's okay, at least I only create .zip files, and when I do, it's just to send several files together.
Only Power users care about the compression ratio, and they will install their favorite software anyway.
Two other common use cases I have for more advanced software like 7-Zip, beyond compression ratio, are the ability to select AES for encryption (vs the weak old school ZipCrypto) and the ability to tar things.
Sometimes I don't want compression at all, so I'll tar instead, just because it's easier to work with one big file over many small ones. Tar is also convenient for beaming groups of files over netcat.
I love the fact in 7zip you can open disk images and it can read ext4 and other filesystems to extract files out of them and write files back into them
You can create zero compression zips in Windows Explorer. It's probably the most common use-case for their "create" step (people just creating a quick zip to send projects, etc to each other).
But yes, if you specifically want a tarball you'll still need tar.
Don’t forget the need to send “naughty” files through corporate email. If you attach a .py/.bat/must-be-a-virus-extension, the entire message can get silently blocked. Compressing it with a trivial password can be mandatory.
Do they have the same behavior as when double-clicking on a .zip file? I like that I can navigate into the zip file like a normal folder without having to explicitly unzip it first.
Based on a quick test of the web player in Safari with the user agent set to Chrome, something with promises is broken in Safari (relative to Chrome, that is).
Safari is terrible and I applaud all applications that are broken on it, when Apple breaks down and actually offers a cross-platform version of their browser for testing then my various things might start working on it... Until then, if you have an iPhone, download chrome.
Ok, so I honestly do not understand this "safari is terrible" thing. I develop a fairly large web app (it's an inventory control + MRP system for electronics, https://partsbox.io/) and feature-wise Safari is on par with Chrome. I have no Safari-specific problems. Speed-wise, Safari is the fastest at running my JavaScript code (compiled from ClojureScript).
I have firefox-specific problems, I have Chrome-specific problems, but I don't remember the last time when Safari caused an issue.
People say Safari is terrible because Safari is the last to support useful web features. They only just added support for a non-royalty-encumbered video format. If you are not directly affected by these issues in your own applications, that's fine, but if you care about the web platform in general, it's hard to ignore how terrible Safari is.
I can understand (sort of) that thinking, but from my very practical point of view: I care about delivering a working application to my users, who should have a good experience. This is what they pay me for. And Safari delivers the best experience of all modern browsers, without any additional effort on my part (I do not have any Safari-specific workarounds, while I did require fixes for Chrome, and Firefox causes problems regularly).
I appear to have hit by a wave of downvotes so this comment may too be hit but I wanted to clarify that I don't think that Safari is actually more broken than any other browser but the ability to verify that features _aren't_ broken requires a higher investment - the lack of a compiled safari on windows makes it difficult to test features during development without using a browser emulator which honestly isn't worth spinning up for simple things.
> Safari is terrible and I applaud all applications that are broken on it
What you meant to say is that testing in Safari is inconvenient for you, so you don't like it. Which is fine, but does not mean that "Safari is terrible".
1) I think you can build webkit on Windows? Either way, webkit is available on multiple platforms.
2) It goes both ways, Microsoft only recently announced that new versions of Edge are coming to macOS in the future, and only because they are moving to Blink/Chromium.
3) Chrome on iOS uses webkit, soooooooo
What actual complaints do you have about safari? I definitely don't think it's perfect, but Chrome has it's own weird issues and inconsistencies (and is much less efficient on macOS). Chrome is widely chided for its poor memory management.
I thought there was an HN post recently about how browsers on the iPhone need to use WebKit. They were not allowed to be better (from a rendering perspective). Or perhaps I misunderstood that.
I've been doing quite a bit of webdev recently, and I've been testing things in both Safari and Chrome (on macOS and mobile), and both browsers have their own weird edge-cases, bugs and unexpected behaviours, but anecdotally I really don't find that one is better/worse than the other. I suspect the 'safari is a bad browser' notion is based on people's past experiences, rather than accurate view of the current state of the browser landscape. I also wonder if a lot of the safari-haters are developers who work on windows/linux, and just resent having to support another browser in general.
It's not a matter of one department, it's a matter of culture which starts from the top. Jobs insisted on perfection, and that permeated the entire organisation. Cook is satisfied with gimmicks and is contented to just coast on the reputation Jobs earned. He just doesn't have the personal stake Jobs had, he's a manager not a leader. Just like the iconic HP was never the same once Fiorina took over.
Yep. Same with Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer. Women get blamed more frequently than men when a company is failing [0]. They are also more likely to become CEOs when a company is already in trouble [1].
Marissa Mayer was a terrible CEO. Period. She was responsible for a string of 48 (!) (mostly) terrible acquisitions[1], banning remote working[2] and wasting
company money on things like motivational books[3] or lavish parties[4].
She is getting more flak than the other terrible CEOs, but IMO it isn't caused by the fact that she's a woman. At least not directly.
Back when she was appointed as a CEO, media were treating her like a second coming of Jesus (which probably indeed was caused by her gender, she was a perfect role model for feminists). That set expectations bar really high, and when she failed to deliver, people turned against her.
Could it be that the amount of bugs have exploded with the ever-growing complexity of their software combined with an unsustainable pace to guarantee solid, reliable software?
It seems like a house of cards right now, and it will only get worse as they keep having the next crunch time just to deliver on an arbitrary management deadline...
Most of the iOS ui SpringBoard bugs are due to them rewriting the codes in Swift. Many Autolayout bug. Music app can’t even align the play button at center. Also Craig Federighi is busy with Siri, and busy shooting down Note 8 in social media. I was annoyed when the text replacement bug took one beta to solve, where the Calculator bug took 5 or 6 releases to solve. And the third reason is they expect users will actively test iOS for them. With so many bugs surfaced in media and in released version, my guess is no one is telling them the bugs during beta. Another reason is iPhone X is iPhone fragmentation with different home screen UI. You’re are right this will introduce complexity to the code base. I’m thankful for the touchbar in MacBook Pro and the notch design in X, both I dislike. This make me realise the many good points in other platform. Sort of like bursting my Apple fanboy bubble.
Seems improbable to happen right now; there isn't really a large amount of newly-added complexity. Compare to QA in the beginning of the iCloud Document Sync (Ubiquity) era, where every app and many parts of both iOS and macOS had new features: Ubiquity itself broke down frequently, but the QA and maintenance engineering going into it didn't seem to make anything else in those releases less solid.
I'm under the assumption that, for some reason, the rush and all things surrounding iPhone X caused QA to only happen a bit, and only on the newest devices (I have an iPhone 6S and an iPhone X, and the 6S is noticeably slower in a lot of cases, for example having to wait half to one second to type on the keyboard). I'm giving Apple a general benefit of the doubt and think that iOS 12 will be better since there shouldn't be any major paradigm shifts in the next series of phones, but it is a really bad image to see Apple not able to effectively QA these relatively simple bugs (how did they miss the notification issue? Is all testing done by hand?)
Considering that some people will continuously adjust their iPad clocks into the future to be able to play Candy Crush without waiting (sic!!!), this bug must have affected people, and was certainly somewhere on Apple's radar.
It's just that management then shrugs and sticks to yearly releases instead of working down this mountain of debt.
I created a separate account to write this comment, since it's going to be harsh.
I work for a Bay Area technology company with a decidedly mediocre engineering team.
My experience over the past 2-3 years is that the worst software engineers (at our mediocre organization) are being hired by Apple. This is totally anecdotal and the sample size is maybe five. But I just cannot escape the fact that Apple continues to hire our engineers that barely know how to program.
Hiring engineers in the Bay Area is hard. I'm sure Apple has a deep bench of talented engineers, but my own anecdotal experience tells me they have very much reduced their standards.
Hah. I can't help but wonder if Apple has started mindlessly implementing contemporary "software engineering best practices" (yuck):
- Everything must be Scrum or a similar sprint system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734
- Move to an open office layout to foster collaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962663
- Kick out high-performing "heroes" like Scott Forstall
- Instead, build teams of mediocre (but probably nicer) engineers. They can then lift each other up through positivity and pair programming.
This is of course a lot of speculation (and wishful thinking) on my part, and honestly it's likely that any process would be doomed to failure under Apple's self-imposed deadlines. But I almost want to get a job at Apple only to see what it's like on the inside.
It may also have to do something with scope. In 2000-~2010 Apple was basically and iPod + UNIX desktop company. The iPods did not spectacularly until the iPod Touch/iPhone, OS X had a relatively narrow scope: a UNIX system supporting a small hardware range, with a nice modern display server, and good object-oriented frameworks.
In the last years their scope has expanded immensely, both hardware-wise (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, now HomePod) and software-wise: AirPlay, CarPlay, Homekit, HealthKit, AR, Apple Music, Force Touch, machine learning, Siri, Handoff, Airdrop, Emoji with face recognition, etc. A lot of these technologies work somewhat, but are glitchy.
Of course, there are many times larger than the Apple of 2007, but managing an extremely broad palette of technologies is difficult. Especially when you want them all to produce something in-sync in the autumn. In some sense, Apple may have spread themselves to thinly.
I think think that we would be better served by an Apple that was more focused on core technologies and would let the third-party ecosystem focus on applications. Or perhaps completely separate divisions that would focus on macOS, iOS, and hardware. Or shipping features when they are done (rolling-release style) rather than one big drop every year.
At any rate, their current direction is hurting core, traditional use cases for Apple products. E.g. Preview.app/PDFKit has been really terrible the last two releases, to the point where I can barely use it for previewing my lecture slides, etc. Basic technologies like PDF rendering used to be stuff that they had nailed down extremely well.
I agree 100%. But that "only" explains why we are seeing so many bugs, not why Apple would possibly settle for average engineers (which is scary if true).
> let the third-party ecosystem focus on applications
I'm worried that this is exactly what Apple tried to do with tvOS, and since it hasn't worked out (Amazon is still MIA), they're now going to spread themselves even thinner by producing content and related apps themselves.
> Basic technologies like PDF rendering used to be stuff that they had nailed down extremely well.
I have yet to find a pdf viewer which does anti-aliasing right except acrobat reader. If you have two colored objects with a common edge on a white background, that edge will be lighter in color.
Why are they the worst? Without directly refuting your comment, it's hard to believe that Apple hired the worst programmers at your company, without knowing why you think they are worst.
they have to invent new things every year or a complex negative feedback starts because people, analyst and ultimately stock holder won't accept that an iphone iteration is just a little faster and has more battery
I agree that it is stupid that they have to deliver new things every year or they get negative feedback, but that doesn't mean they should deliver features that make their products worse or that QA should quit doing their job. Apple is a company with many many billions of dollars in the bank. There is no excuse for this. If their QA sucks, fire them all and hire 10,000+ new QA staff. They easily have the money to do that. If they pay all the new QA staff $100,000 each, then that's only $1 bn for the new staff and they'd probably pay a fair bit less to let the existing staff go. Apple has more than $250 bn in cash reserves right now. They can easily afford to do that. In fact, I think that probably should hire a few thousand new QA staff, firing the existing staff should be up to their discretion, but not hiring significantly more when it's clear that they have a QA problem, for a company with so much money, is not acceptable.
they have cash reserves but still they issued corporate debt in the US indicating that they're financially savvy AND they don't have free access to their overseas cash hoard. So hiring within US and spending 1bn will cost them a lot more. And if they leverage debt using their overseas cash...well that'd be another pandora's box as they're so big they'll probably move the prices of the entire industry along with every US corporation with funds outside the states...
Hiring more QA staff doesn’t mean more bugs will be fixed if the bottleneck is engineering output and deadline-driven features. The latter might be better fixed with a re-org.
That’s one explanation but if one company has the resources to innovate and keep up quality control it’s Apple. Especially since they have such a limited number of device models to support. I just hope this is a bad year and not an inflection point.
As usual with large vendors nowadays, we are the QA department. From an in-house perspective, QA is a cost center. As far as upper management is concerned, it literally doesn't earn its keep... especially when consumers have shown they're willing to overlook and forgive one gigantic blunder after another.
