Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote my first review of Mac OS X for a nascent “PC enthusiast's" website called Ars Technica. Nearly 15 years later, I wrote my last. Though Apple will presumably announce the next major version of OS X at WWDC this coming June, I won't be reviewing it for Ars Technica or any other publication, including the website you're reading now.
The best software reviewer in the business calls it quits.
Apple has released updates for both OS X and iOS today. OS X 10.10.3 adds Photos as a replacement for iPhoto, while iOS 8.3 updates and adds a whole bunch of emoji.
Apple released a beta version of OS X 10.10.3 today, and it includes the first preview of its new Photos application.
Apple might have just fixed that for Mac users with the new Photos app. It's the final piece in a plan that Apple unveiled last June, and one that both fixes and unifies a patchwork system it rolled out in 2011. It's a rethink of how people manage their photo library on a Mac, something that's been iPhoto's home turf for more than a decade. Apple's discontinuing that software along with Aperture (which is aimed at pro photographers), in favor bringing the tools people have on their iPhones and iPads to the Mac. It's also been built with Apple's iCloud in mind instead of an afterthought, which feels years overdue.
Over time, iPhote gradually turned into an iTunes-esque behemoth of a program that couldn't handle larger amounts of photos and generally had serious performance issues. This new Photos applications looks amazing, and I know many, many people who are going to love this.
Back in the days of Mac OS X 10.2-10.4, I toyed with backporting some of my programming projects, originally developed in Carbon with Project Builder, to MacOS 9, and downloaded MPW (since it was free, and CodeWarrior was not) to do so. The Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop was Apple’s own development environment for developing Mac apps, tracing its lineage from the Lisa Programmer’s Workshop, which was originally the only way to develop Mac apps (yes, in 1984 you could not develop Mac software on the Mac itself).
A follow-up from last week's MPW story.
Steven Troughton-Smith:
Just to provide an example for this post, I put together a trivial drawing app called BitPaint. It isn't very interesting, but it should illustrate a few things:
The answer to the third question is surprising: a lot. In fact, Steven managed to build an application that runs on every version of Mac OS/OS X, all the way from System 1.0 to today's OS X 10.10 Yosemite. I've been following Steven's progress (and by following I mean 'looked at pretty screenshots' because I don't understand the developer stuff), and it's quite incredible to see a single codebase run on such a long string of Mac OS/OS X releases.
A crucial aspect in this whole endeavour has been mpw, "an m68k binary translator/emulator whose sole purpose is to try and emulate enough of Classic Mac OS to run MPW's own tools directly on OS X".
I am incredibly psyched about mpw. Its developer, ksherlock, has been very responsive to everything I've come up against as I stress test it against various tools and projects.
Right now it's a fully usable tool that makes Classic Mac OS compilation possible and easy to do on modern versions of OS X, without requiring emulators or ancient IDEs or the like. To my knowledge, this is the first time this has been possible (excluding legacy versions of CodeWarrior).
This entire post is a must-read.
Don't look now, but Google's Project Zero vulnerability research program may have dropped more zero-day vulnerabilities - this time on Apple's OS X platform.
In the past two days, Project Zero has disclosed OS X vulnerabilities here, here, and here. At first glance, none of them appear to be highly critical, since all three appear to require the attacker to already have some access to a targeted machine. What's more, the first vulnerability, the one involving the "networkd 'effective_audit_token' XPC," may already have been mitigated in OS X Yosemite, but if so the Google advisory doesn't make this explicit and Apple doesn't publicly discuss security matters with reporters.
You'd think a writer at Ars Technica was aware of what a zero-day is. These are 90-days, meaning Google is giving - int his case - Apple two to three times as long as industry sort-of standard (which is 30-45 days). Of course, Google dropping zero-days on Apple will draw a lot more clicks, but that doesn't make it any less bullshit. Then again, it isn't like this is the first time this particular author sensationalises to the point of ridiculousness.
The other points from before, of course, still stand. In addition, it'd be great if other companies started combing through Google's stuff too.
For 12 years, the mDNSResponder service managed a surprisingly large part of our Mac's networking, and it managed this task well. But as of OS X 10.10, the mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd, which does the same thing. Mostly.
Some of the bugs in Yosemite discussed in an article linked last week seem to have origins in moving from mDNSResponder to discoveryd. Here is an explanation of what specifically is not working, and how to fix it. However, it is not for the faint of heart: you can potentially leave your Apple in an unbootable state, and who knows what will happen when an update is installed.
OS X Server's rate of improvement has slowed in recent years, though Apple is hardly ignoring it. It did get a full Yosemite-style visual overhaul, after all, which suggests that Apple cares about it enough to keep developing it in lockstep with the consumer version of OS X. The continuous addition of features and fixes over the course of the Mountain Lion and Mavericks releases of Server suggests that Yosemite Server will continue on in slow and gradual but still active development.
If we were going to worry about the state of the Mac server in 2014, our primary concern would actually be hardware. First they came for the Xserve, and I did not speak out, because Apple was clearly not going anywhere in Windows- and Linux-dominated enterprise-level server rooms. Then they came for the Mac Pro Server, and I did not speak out, for the cheese-grater Mac Pros were far too expensive to be practical for the new home-and-small-business focus of latter-day OS X Server. Then they came for the Mac Mini Server, and there was no one left to speak for it.
OS X Yosemite Server reviewed in-depth by Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham.
Apple officially released OS X Yosemite today, and to mark that occasion - as has become tradition among our people - the only OS X Yosemite review you need, from John Siracusa.
OS X and iOS have been trading technologies for some time now. For example, AVFoundation, Apple's modern framework for manipulating audiovisual media, was released for iOS a year before it appeared on OS X. Going in the other direction, Core Animation, though an integral part of the entire iPhone interface, was released first on the Mac. Yosemite's new look continues the pattern; iOS got its visual refresh last year, and now it's OS X's turn.
But at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple made several announcements that point in a new direction: iOS and OS X advancing in lockstep, with new technologies that not only appear on both platforms simultaneously but also aim to weave them together.
These new, shared triumphs run the gamut from traditional frameworks and APIs to cloud services to the very foundation of Apple's software ecosystem, the programming language itself. Apple's dramatic leadership restructuring in 2012 put Federighi in charge of both iOS and OS X - a unification of thought that has now, two years later, resulted in a clear unification of action. Even the most ardent Mac fan will admit that iOS 7 was a bigger update than Mavericks. This time around, it's finally a fair fight.
Grab some tea or coffee, and enjoy.
My ultimate fear is that the complacent state of the Mac App Store would lead to the slow erosion of the Mac indie community. The MAS is the best place to get your software, it comes bundled with your OS, it's very convenient but when all the issues compound, developers will vote with their feet and continue the slow exodus. I feel that Apple needs to encourage the availability of high quality software rather than quantity over quality - the first step would addressing the core issues that have been known for years. The Mac platform would be a much worse place if we prioritise short-term gains, boasting about the hundreds of thousands of free abandonware rather than concentrate on the long-term fundamentals to sustain a healthy and innovative ecosystem.
It's finally starting to dawn on people that application stores' primary goal is not to make the lives of developers easier. No, the one true goal of application stores is to drive the price of software down to zero or near-zero - and if the side effect of that is that the independent and small developers who built your platform go out of business or leave the platform altogether, that's just too damn bad.
It was fun in the short term, when the low-hanging fruits were ripe for the picking, but everyone with more than two brain cells to rub together could see the unsustainability of it all. The 'app economy' is pretty close to bust, and I suspect zero to none of the suggestions listed in this article will be implemented by Apple. It's not in their interest to raise the prices of software in their application stores.
HFS+ lost a total of 28 files over the course of 6 years.
Most of the corrupted files are completely unreadable. The JPEGs typically decode partially, up to the point of failure. So if you're lucky, you may get most of the image except the bottom part. The raw .CR2 files usually turn out to be totally unreadable: either completely black or having a large color overlay on significant portions of the photo. Most of these shots are not so important, but a handful of them are. One of the CR2 files in particular, is a very good picture of my son when he was a baby. I printed and framed that photo, so I am glad that I did not lose the original.
If you're keeping all your files and backups on HFS+ volumes, you're doing it wrong.
HFS+ is a weird vestigial pre-OS X leftover that, for some reason, Apple just does not replace. Apple tends to be relentless when it comes to moving on from past code, but HFS+ just refuses to die. As John Siracusa, long-time critic of HFS+, stated way back in 2011:
I would have certainly welcomed ZFS with open arms, but I was equally confident that Apple could create its own file system suited to its particular needs. That confidence remains, but the ZFS distraction may have added years to the timetable.
Three years later, and still nothing, and with Yosemite also shipping with HFS+, it'll take another 1-2 years before we possibly see a new, modern, non-crappy filesystem for OS X. Decades from now, books will be written about this saga.
There are still many rough edges in the new OS but overall I am really excited about the visual direction that Mac OS X Yosemite is taking. It demonstrates a more mature and subtle approach in adapting iOS 7 design language. No ultra thin fonts, no crazy parallax, no ridiculous icons, just subtle use of translucent materials accompanied by a bright and cheerful palette. Using the new OS feels fresher, exciting, and more modern. I am looking forward to exploring other design changes in the the new OS that I may have missed.
Something else I've noticed: is it just me, or does Apple use a different theme on-stage during a keynote than what actually ships in the beta right now? The transparency and colours pop way more during the keynote than while using the beta. Odd.
Virtualizing OS X is a thing that can today be done very easily, with VMware and VirtualBox fully supporting it under OS X hosts. But what about virtualizing it using a bare metal hypervisor and QEMU? Under Linux? Finally I've got Mavericks fully working under QEMU (with no extra kexts(!)) and it wasn't easy.
Impressive.
Close, minimize, and maximize are now close, minimize, and full screen, eliminating the extra full-screen control and consolidating the window controls in one place. Streamlining these and other elements of the interface means you can navigate the desktop more efficiently.
OS X' idea of "maximise" was "some random window resizing nobody really used anyway", so I'm glad Apple finally replaced it with something else. Too bad OS X' fullscreen view is way too disruptive for my tastes to be of any practical use.
Like most of you, I've always wanted want to code and compile 68k Mac OS applications in OS X that work on System 1.1. This question kept me up night after night, but thanks to Steven Troughton-Smith, we now know that it is, indeed, possible. It started with a 68k application on System 6. Not long after, he managed to compile a simple application that worked on System 1.1. This test application's code is available on github.
This is possible using ksherlock's MPW Emulator, which, as the name implies, is an emulator that allows you to run the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop on any OS X 10.9 system (a case-insensitive HFS+ volume is required).
I'm glad this matter has been settled. In all seriousness, while the number of useful applications for this is probably limited, it's still very cool.
One side effect of the iTunes 11.2 update on Thursday, May 15th 2014 has been that some but not all Macs were seeing the /Users and /Users/Shared folders disappear.
The permissions on the /Users folder were also changed to be world-writable, so that anyone could read and write to the /Users folder.
As far as bugs go, this is a very fascinating one. Initially, people thought the OS X 10.9.3 update was the culprit, but as it turns out - it's the iTunes 11.2 update. I'm interested to (eventually) hear the root cause of all this, but for now, the linked article contains a temporary workaround.
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