MacOS Sierra Beta(developer.apple.com) |
MacOS Sierra Beta(developer.apple.com) |
Metal: it's good that Metal exists, even though Apple has no ambitions to introduce performant or even recent graphics adapters into its PC products. Some people may even have wished for Metal adoption beyond Apple, but that's not happening. What's conspicuously missing from Sierra is Vulkan support, so gaming on the Mac is basically a prohibitively walled garden that can only be tackled economically by the big graphics engines (which have mostly ignored the platform) and pre-existing iOS developers.
Swift 3 and Apple Pay: this should not be an OS feature, or at least one that is featured as spots #2 and #3 on the bullet point list.
Picture in picture: in a better world, this would be a window management feature, but OS X is reducing its windowing capabilities in anticipation of a full merge with iOS, it seems. So this is going to be a specialized video component feature instead. Even on the screenshot they chose to show this off with, it's clear this is drastically worse than just lining up non-fullscreen windows side-by-side.
macOS is not becoming iOS ever, unless you mean apps being migrated over which I also find very hard to believe.
I wish I had your confidence, but even if they keep the Mac line and name, the only UI improvements they have been championing lately are tablet-mode activities.
For me at least, there is no way to look at that screenshot of a space-wasting yet partially occluded fullscreen app with an awkwardly-placed naked video component on top of it and say it "looks great".
> windows side by side, but that's a huge pain
Window positioning on OS X is a huge pain because literally no work has been done on this by Apple for many years now. Other OSes all have window snapping and other conveniences, but on OS X I need 3rd-party software for that. What's more is that PiP is a barely adequate specialized component from iOS. The more generalized desktop element would instead have allowed to "PiP" any window content I choose by essentially being an always-on-top decorator-less partial window. But the way they are presenting it is not going to be empowering for desktop users in any way. It's a thoughtlessly ported component from the more unpleasant corners of the Youtube iOS app.
[1] http://www.opera.com/blogs/desktop/2016/04/opera-beta-update...
Do not enroll in the macOS beta if you have your user account login linked to iCloud, as there have been documented problems with this. My wife still can't get in to her account on our Mac; I'm hoping they fix this in Public Beta 3.
All things considered, it probably wasn't worth enrolling in the betas. I don't want to risk messing up my devices by stepping back to production versions, so I'll just ride these out and get off the beta profile when the final versions are released in the fall.
Hopefully the public betas get more stable as we approach release time.
Moreover there seem to be a few memory leaks. Finder eats up more and more RAM until it requires a force-relaunch. Unfortunately the same seems to be true for the kernel, which therefore requires a sporadic reboot. I also encountered the calendar notification service using 100% of the CPU a few times.
I'd wait for a later beta release or the final version.
I don't understand - do you pay for everyday goods and services with wire transfers and direct debits? Because that's the use case of Apple Pay isn't it?
I'm not sure how anything could be quicker than a credit card. A normal contactless transaction from me taking my wallet out of my pocket to being done takes about two seconds. Apple Pay is no different except I take my phone out of my pocket instead of my wallet. Maybe Apple Pay by watch could be quicker?
I pay for as little as 70p for water with Apple Pay.
Maybe have some of the gimmick crew look at all those crash reports I keep sending instead?
The betas have been on a roughly 2 week release cycle.
The deeper platform features, especially the new filesystem, are exciting primarily because they're replacing vastly outdated predecessors.
I'm thinking about installing the iOS 10 beta to my main phone but couldn't find any decent info on its stability for a daily driver. macOS is more dangerous anyway so I'd only get into iOS beta.
Google fixed go for Sierra recently, lets hope they do it again:
PiP: From https://developer.apple.com/macos/: "And if you use a custom video player, it’s easy to add a Picture in Picture control using the JavaScript presentation mode API." -> Seems like it's possible for 3rd party browsers to implement it!
Certain Apple first party app background processes don't seem to be updating status as background tasks progress:
- App Store Updates tab doesn't show progress in the circles. Shows initial circle, appears frozen, until app is ready to open and moved to the recently updated section.
- Photos "Uploading n items" status doesn't update until changes to time stamp of when done updating or Now.
Leaving and coming back, force quitting, even rebooting, doesn't seem to cause these screens to update until background process is complete.
However, they are definitely progressing in the background as the tasks eventually finish, then screens update to show completed.
Still cautiously optimistic about macOS Sierra Public Beta. The latest update did fix the login issue. We'll see how it works otherwise.
One thing particularly annoying for me is HTTP Proxy: it seems that as of Public Beta 2 setting it will cause the device flood the server with many requests. I'm using GlimmerBlocker and on the server side it'd get 1k+ threads almost instantly after I turned on the proxy setting on the iOS side.
Other annoying bug is WebKit View would lose width setting randomly in 3rd party apps (e.g., Reeder).
I would wait for a while.
watchOS 3 is fantastic, like beta 1 was better than the release version of watchOS 2.
iCloud Photos wouldn't update on the devices because iOS 9 thought the devices were still restoring from backup. Apparently a known issue with tedious workarounds involving mounting phone as a drive.
iOS 10 beta fixed the issue (perhaps expectedly, as it wouldn't make sense to preserve a pending iOS 9 restore after update), and all the iCloud Photo Library syncs worked again.
From what I've read the vast majority of Apple Pay payments are done in the US, so it's not unfair to call it "America-centric".
The point of Apple Pay in Safari is to move it to online transactions.
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/ [2] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-payments-wg/2016...
It's telling when hangouts in Safari takes up less CPU (and performs better) than in Chrome.
Regarding WebRTC: I've not run across any usecase which requires WebRTC to this day - everything I do with web-based communication is one to many, necessitating something like Google hangouts or Skype for video or audio, and Slack/Hipchat/IRC for IM.
Depends, I'm much more likely to have to go to Firefox because a site doesn't work on Safari than I am to go to Safari because something didn't work in Firefox.
I would like to keep all my work related sites in just Safari, but I can't.
It appears, however, that ClickToFlash doesn't work on Safari anymore: http://clicktoflash.com, and the general "ClickTo" plugins don't work: http://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/: "Due to Apple’s new development policies, version 3.2 is the final version of ClickToPlugin." That's a huge backwards step in usability IMO.
You say that like it's a bad thing. But why does anyone need Flash anymore?
I would switch to Chrome (for its built-in Fash) when I used speedtest.net, but I just now tried and there's a beta version that runs just fine using Safari w/o Flash.
Are you using some legacy apps that are Flash? What's your need?
But most people have CCs now as well. It's the only sane option besides paypal and quite useful when traveling. I'm pretty sure though that a rather large percentage of CC users pay it within the month and avoid interest.
It depends on what we're talking about. I would expect UI design elements to merge where the capabilities of devices are converging. That's not happening from the desktop since Apple is against desktop touch input; if anything the mobile side should be moving closer to desktop, but that's not happening either. I would also expect UI designs to be merging where innovation is concerned, say if they invested in better desktop/window manager UI, but in actuality all that is happening is the backporting of iOS ideas that are all centered on the fullscreen mode.
> I wish they would spend time looking at some of their interface changes and really work extra hard to help non-techies "get" them
In my experience that's not really a pain point. I have seen several of my clients adopt an OS X-only landscape in their offices (mostly non-technical people). I feel Apple is actually making heavy inroads in office and home use, but for many reasons is losing the support of technically-minded people who - at the risk of sounding self-absorbed - are early warning indicators that the base of the platform is withering significantly.
And—look—the way the desktop works is not going to be changing drastically any time soon. Their is not much to innovate on, so the obvious next step is to perfect every single interaction and to fine tune every single component of macOS (or Windows or any other OS) to make it faultless. That will keep me and many others around. (And keep trying to innovate and revolutionize in the backroom)
I'm inclined to agree, but we're starting to hit the zone where I feel I'm using a tool of questionable qualities because of lock-in and the absence of sane competitors. The Unreal Engine IDE runs at 10 fps on my current-gen iMac, an expensive machine based on 2010's hardware and no upgradeable parts that takes minutes to boot up into an increasingly DRM-plagued OS where all the innovation goes into iOS-like features I don't use.
> so the obvious next step is to perfect every single interaction and to fine tune every single component of macOS [...] to make it faultless
I disagree vehemently that this is what's going on. If that was the "problem", my (software) complaints would not exist.
I imagine like Iron Man where he can divert resources to his weapons from his thrusters and stuff. They do keep adding things that need to run when I wish I could selectively turn some things off.