'Apple's Mojave is a Mess'

From the forum.

Get It Try It

Having an ENORMOUS struggle with Mojave. The question here isn't if this is an extremely sloppy environment, but if the fanboys will let it get out. Nothing works as advertised. Bugs and potholes in the road everywhere.

We have here a platform used by millions. Not at all as many as Windows, but still and all. Most vendors here are small dinky outfits with one or two titles. They do nothing else, have no other interests, attend the WWDCs, start early to make changes, find they have to scrap those changes as, for example, Ali comes on stage and tells them the old macro definitions are being renamed (YES) and so forth. With so little to take care of, they have little work up front and can tackle the typical Apple anomalies. As for Apple's own crew: what's to say? They have no one working on the OS itself. They scuttle over from iOS of an afternoon to add a few lines of code. No one does anything significant, no one give a shit, and it shows.

Working here on Xfind's progress bar. Program's worked great FOR OVER FIFTEEN YEARS. EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. Now here comes Mojave.

First: they want proper threading. Background threads cannot interact with the UI. O RLY. But this has worked without a hitch for nearly 20 years. What's the objection? No one knows. BUT IT'S BAD. Yet checking what's going on under the bonnet reveals the iOS designers have added TONNES of exception traps - these are not things wrong with code, these are arbitrary traps put in there by iOS engineers. Operative word: 'arbitrary'. So we never learn what actually lurks beyond - they crash you before you can find out! And remember: they're attacking code that's worked perfectly, compiled and linked perfectly, with zero memory leaks etc, for nearly twenty years.

But whatever. We have a responsibility to our customer base. 16 apps all told to 'gussy up'. Time to get to work. There are other seemingly insurmountable issues with the OS itself, further down the road, and this is really fucking depressing, but let's push on, OK? Mojave was released on 24/9, we still haven't announced our own update, let's push on. Agreed?

Agreed. We take on Xfind. Xfind's progress bar is supposed to be hidden when inactive. OK. And it's marked as such in Interface Butcher. But is it? It has been for nearly twenty years - is it now? NO IT IS FUCKING NOT.

So we spend an entire day working around this Apple shit. We put text where once there was a cool progress bar. Cool. Sort of. It works OK. After a long hard night's day of it, we turn off the boxen and get some sleep.

We take the new Xfind up to the Mojave machines when waking. To test. THE TEXT WORKS THE FIRST TIME AND FAILS ON ALL SUBSEQUENT ATTEMPTS.

Try to deal with that.

Try to deal with the fact that Xfile and all other similar programs worked without a hitch on all versions of this crap OS for the past twenty years.

Try to deal with the fact that 60% of the time their buggy Xcode can't find our include files. Add to that the fact that THEY HAVE HAD SO MANY BUGS OVER THE YEARS THAT WHO KNOWS WHAT'S IN THOSE CONFIGURATION FILES ANYWAY.

Try to deal with the fact that 40% of the time their buggy Xcode can't find our frameworks. This bug dates WAY BACK. We had to use a two-step workaround in the old days.

1. Copy all our frameworks into the project directories.

2. Reconfigure Xcrap, close, replace frameworks with symlinks to real locations, start Xcrap again.

This went on for YEARS. The geniuses at Apple finally fixed the bug - and guess what? Xcrap's new version can't find our frameworks! So we try just adding the frameworks from their REAL location, and guess what? This time it really works! IT TOOK YEARS!

[Question: how many dim bulbs at Apple use their own external frameworks? Zero, right? See where this is going?]

And so on. And so forth. And so on. And so forth. You got one program, or two, or three? Like Punk-Ass Red Sweater? You can hack it. Like Panic? You can do it. But how much do you run into if you got 70+ apps like we do? Who else has that many apps anyway? And this is only scraping the surface. How about new compiler diagnostics that come out like this?

Warning source code file
acme.m line
27 column
135 you may
not place parentheses
across
multiple
domains

Let's move on. Cos this is so much fun. Did you know, for example, that they'll no longer allow 'events' sent to Terminal? Who knows what any of this is good for. But now you can't tell Terminal to change directories.

OK, it works the first time. You get an alert asking if you're OK with it. You click OK. But that's the last time it'll work.

Enough of this puerile nonsense.

The list is endless.

We feel a responsibility to our clients. But FUCK APPLE. What a worthless piece of shit company. Really.