A Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Idea: Disrupt US Politics - <AUTHOR> http://sina.is/disrupt-us-politics/

<comment><USER2> If all you've got is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail...

The problem with US politics isn't that we need some magical way for assholes on the internet to bicker more efficiently; it's that political culture is just _broken_. It's Us vs. Them mentality, the news and blame game, and the fact that nobody has any fucking idea how the economy actually works, in spite of having very strong opinions about it.

<comment><USER3> This is why it's important to oust both parties. Even if you think only one of them is the real problem while the other isn't so bad, if one of them remains, most people and media will remain stuck in the old Us vs Them culture. The system and everybody in it is toxic. They all need to go.

<comment><USER4> But doing that will require the obscene political step of a vote of no confidence, a recall election, and a complete reform of campaign finance laws.... for which we need the help of politicians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like a lot the idea of a proxy agent inside the parliament voting for online citizens. It seems like the only viable path to direct democracy. A few times ago I imagined a similar platform where people would vote using gov-issued credentials. But now I don't believe that is the right solution, I don't see my grandma vote about startups taxation and I don't see myself voting about agriculture problems. Then using friends or "online parties" seems a nice solution, though it will undoubtedly create lobbies, fishing, hacking, any new kind of piracy to get people set you as their proxy.

 _Anyone can suggest a new bill, and if there is a quorum of voters who approve the bill, it is voted on by the full membership, with a simple majority deciding the result._ There is a similar initiative in the EU, it's called Citizen's Initiative, if at least 1 million people support a bill (total of EU Citizens being over 500 millions), then it goes to discussion at the European Parliament: [http://ec.europa.eu/citizens- initiative/public/welcome](http://ec.europa.eu/citizens- initiative/public/welcome)

Anyways, that's a sweet dream, and a very challenging startup idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a fan of direct democracy at all. The majority of people's knowledge of important statistics on subjects such as crime, employment, taxation, etc, has been severely twisted by media sensationalism. Putting people who have a shaky grasp on reality in charge of a country is a recipe for disaster.

Though Liquidfeedback doesn't seem to be quite as direct as that. Whether it would work in reality would depend on how these proxies get their information. From reliable sources, or newspaper headlines and angry blogs.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you want to persuade people of the benefits of direct democracy, you probably don't want to bring up the California initiative system as an example. Ballot initiative's in California are part of the reason the state's government is so disfunctional, and they've ended up that way because they're such a bad version of direct democracy. Ballot initiatives just involve an up- or-down vote on specific issues in isolation, without involving the population directly in the responsibilities of day-to-day governing, so, as in California, you get an incoherent patchwork of spending commitments and limits on tax increases. A better example of direct democracy might be something like participatory budgeting. I see there's a plan to test this out in San Francisco [1], although the SF plan doesn't seem to involve the public deliberation that participatory budgeting in Brazil involved, which may make it exhibit the same problems as ballot initiatives.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/11/san-francisco-to-test- onlin...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/11/san-francisco-to-test-online- participatory-budgeting/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I was thinking about this a while back when a comic on convictions was posted here and one of the comments asked if we should trust someone in politics who holds strong convictions or someone who bends with the wind.

If a politician holds to their convictions they are derided for being inflexible, if they change their mind they are accused of just being in it for the votes.

Can't we just let machine learning take over and train a bunch of digital politicians about the stuff we want to happen? Or are we so used to being told what to think by charismatic leaders that we couldn't live in a data driven political system?

(Only somewhat tongue in cheek.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Equivalent in Australia: [http://www.senatoronline.org.au/](http://www.senatoronline.org.au/)

Going by this page, they received all of 209 votes in this year's election: [http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal- election-2013/results/par...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal- election-2013/results/party-totals/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think we need to find a way to stop people voting for unaffordable policies that benefit them.

</comment><comment><USER11> When I started PlainSite ([http://ww.plainsite.org](http://ww.plainsite.org)), my friends and I talked about how cool it would be--given the country's current state of affairs where money trumps all else--to allow people to donate small amounts toward a specific cause, and then allocate funding to politicians based on their willingness to forward the cause, as a kind of uber-lobbyist responsive to the people.

Unfortunately, that would constitute money transmission. So I kept working on the parts of PlainSite that didn't involve that. But maybe one day when the money transmission situation gets resolved (and it's been 593 or so days of waiting so far on one federal judge), that will be possible.

Generally, it's worth noting that the problems in American politics are mostly not technological in nature. They're a lot deeper, and this is precisely the kind of argument where Evgeny Morozov is correct: technology cannot solve all problems. It still can solve some, but at the end of the day, the simple fact is that we have extremists in Congress running the country.</comment>


Guy Crosses Canada on an Electric Bike Using Only $10 of Electricity - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/08/crossing-canada-electric-bike-bicycle-justin.php

<comment><USER2> Justin's a really cool guy. He runs the <http://ebikes.ca/> site and has built a bunch of other cool vehicles, like a segway-style self-balancing skateboard (the "e-manual") and self-balancing unicycle.

I worked on a weight-controlled electric skateboard with him that we took down to the 2007 Maker Faire.</comment>


Talking seriously with children is good for their language proficiency - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512172529.htm <comment><USER2> Kids learn not just the language, but the _dialect(s)_ that they're exposed to. At that age, being talked to is the only way they have of acquiring language, so they're going acquire exactly what they're exposed to. The idea of dialects is absolutely critical, but a lot of people aren't aware of them[1]. A kid isn't going to learn proper English unless they're raised hearing and talking it, no amount of grammar instruction is going to make proper English anything more than another foreign language unless they're actually speaking it for themselves.

This is not to say that "proper" English is any better than dialects of English. I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. That said, a) "proper" English is a pretty significant signalling mechanism so it's socially advantageous to speak it fluently b) if language influences thought patterns, "baby talk" is a pretty crippled language and you shouldn't cripple your kid's expressive or reasoning abilities. Even if they grow out of it, replacing their language facilities is lost development time.

[1] Going sociopolitical for a second: This is more of a problem for people who are members of the group "in power," for various definitions of the term, but being a middle-class white guy in America qualifies. If you're "in power" and your own dialect is the default, then you don't have to switch dialects depending on the social situation, which makes you less sensitive to the presence of dialects as well as their role in social interactions.

<comment><USER3> > if language influences thought patterns, "baby talk" is a pretty crippled > language and you shouldn't cripple your kid's expressive or reasoning > abilities.

Kids are actually pretty insensitive to the precise form of linguistic input they get. It doesn't matter much if it's baby talk directed at the kid, or the ambient speech of other adults. Any regular exposure to a language/dialect is sufficient for a kid to acquire it perfectly. (Bearing in mind that perfect acquisition of a non-standard dialect may be viewed by the linguistically ignorant as imperfect acquisition of the standard dialect.) There's certainly no evidence for "baby talk" crippling kids reasoning abilities.

There are even cultures where parents don't talk to their kids until the kids can talk back, but the kids don't grow up with any kind of linguistic deficit.

Of course, there may be sociological benefits to having your kid acquire something close to standard English as their native dialect. But if schools could get over prescriptivism and do a better job of teaching standard English, I doubt this would be so much of an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aside from the generall "well, duh" factor (see e.g. Groxx's comment), the usual complaint applies here: there are some really hard-to-control-for factors. For instance, I bet "talking seriously with children" is very strongly correlated with parents' intelligence, which in turn is strongly correlated with children's intelligence, which in turn is strongly correlated with language proficiency. (For any reasonable definition of "intelligence", slippery though that term is.)

The relevant publication here seems to be the one available in pieces at <http://dare.uva.nl/record/334829> and, indeed, it doesn't look as if the researcher has tried to control for parents' intelligence, education, etc. For that matter, the sample size is only 25 so it would be difficult to do so and still get any results worth reporting.

I'm underwhelmed by this.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have noticed this about people I know that have good vocabularies and were top students when they were young: Their fathers don't do baby talk. When I've seen their fathers interacting with young children, they talk to them as young adults. Is this a known correlation or is my sample size too small?

<comment><USER6> When I was a kid one of my teachers asked me if I'd gotten a boo-boo. "No," I told her, "It's an injury."

My parents always spoke to me as an adult. I'll leave it to you to judge how well it turned out.

<comment><USER7> My native language is Finnish. There are plenty of dialects in Finland, and the official written form of the language is kind of an artificial synthesis of various dialect traits -- nobody really speaks written Finnish.

That is, except me when I was six... My parents would go to a school meeting and the teachers and other parents would be surprised -- "Oh, you don't speak in written language like your son?".

I guess I had been spending quite a bit more time with books rather than people.

<comment><USER8> My problem with learning English (my native language) from books rather than people was knowing tons of words but not how to pronounce them.

<comment><USER9> Occasionally I'll use an unusual word without even thinking about it, and then later realize that I've never uttered that word aloud before. Ever. It's a pretty weird feeling.

<comment><USER10> We play a game where you think of words you've never said before and try use them in a sentence. (So if you don't know roughly what it means, it doesn't count.) It's fun because you try unsuccessfully to search for words with the weakest indices before eventually finding profitable seams by thinking of the crazy stuff you've read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hey, I do remember as a kid being frustrated when people would dumb down when talking to you. Also, when they refused to talk to me about things because "I was too young to be concerned about these things." Pissed me right off. I always liked the adults who took me seriously.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. My son was just born, and I fully plan on talking to him like an adult when possible, and not shying away from things like sex and politics just because he's young. That doesn't mean I'd describe graphic sexual acts to him, but talking frankly with honest language I think will be best.

I cringe when I see parents get upset when they have to explain something slightly embarrassing to their children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like this deserves a "well, duh". If you speak gobbledygook or fluff around them, that's all they'll learn. How can you expect otherwise?

This does propose an interesting experiment: any of you lawyers out there, read laws to the kids as bed-time stories! Maybe we'll finally have someone who can translate between Legalese and English. Maybe they'll come up with a pidgin / creole the rest of us can learn.

<comment><USER14> There's no real secret to legalese. It's just an attempt to say as little as possible in as many ways as possible in order to avoid any interpretation being applied.

The problem isn't the language, it's that the human brain doesn't function that way.

<comment><USER13> _"The problem isn't the language, it's that the human brain doesn't function that way."_

Yes, but this sort of implies that we have a genetic predisposition to _not_ understand Legalese. Attempting to get a kid to learn it as a "native" language would effectively show that it _is_ possible to learn, it just may be a radical departure from all other forms of language. If it's not possible, it could be that we're genetically prevented from learning it... I wonder if that would be an argument that Evolution has decided Legalese is counter to our best interest as a species.

Maybe someone fully understanding Legalese could help us communicate with aliens. While I doubt _they_ would speak Legalese, and may attempt to destroy us if they heard it directed towards them as a first-contact language, having a second fundamentally different language model may shed light on understanding other, more radically different ones.

Unless of course Legalese is on one extrema and the rest of Human languages is on another. Which would imply aliens speak some form of language we can understand...

Hmmmm.....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The only reference I could find for this was the following conference presentation:

[http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/l.henrichs/bestanden/LHenrichs...](http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/l.henrichs/bestanden/LHenrichs_Paper_EARLI2007.pdf)

It seems to be based on some rather odd (and completely unsupported) ideas of what constitutes an "academic register", and the results are pretty messy. It would be better if Science Daily could give a real citation to back this up.

 _edit_ : There is also this, listed on the author's homepage:

Henrichs, L. F., & Schoonen, R. (2009). Lexical features of parental academic language input. The effect on vocabulary growthin monolingual Dutch children. In B. J. Richards, H. M. Daller, D. D. Malvern, P. P. Meara, J. Milton & J. Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Vocabulary studies in first and second language acquisition: the interface between theory and application (pp. 1-22). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've always thought that if I had children I would try to treat them less like little kids and with more autonomy. For example if they misbehaved, instead of just punishing them, I would give them a chance to write a paraphraph or two if they wished to dispute the punishment. Or giving them some (though not complete) freedom in choosing what to do, such as "would you prefer to go the opera, play, or concert?" Is this a good idea or am I being too optimistic?

<comment><USER16> Maybe too optimistic but the right idea. The tricks I've found with giving my 4 year old autonomy and responsibility are

a) make it abundantly clear that sometimes, what Daddy says, goes, and

b) realizing that kids behavior fluctuates up and down with their energy level and environment. Trying to rationalize with a kid who didn't eat lunch, or who's wasted at the end of the day is a lost cause and you just have to step up and enforce.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. I've tried trading one punishment for another, and the only thing it seems to teach is that punishment is malleable, and that they can start "gaming" the punishments for less harsh ones, even if the situation calls.

I promised myself when I was a child that I would never tell my children, "because I said so." You know, sometimes it really is "you just have to put up with it and do what I say...because I'm Daddy, and I said so."

<comment><USER14> Because I said so works, but you aren't actually thinking this in your own head, so why not just take the time once everyone is back in listening mode to give them the long version?

Dad: Go to bed, please.

Kid: Why?

Dad: Because I said so.

post hysterics...

Dad: Why do you think Dad was telling you to go to sleep?

Kid: I don't know.

Dad: Well, what are you doing today?

Kid: Going to school.

Dad: And if you don't sleep before you go to school, what happens... etc etc.

Of course this is variable on the child, the issue and the level of understanding. I've done this though and while it doesn't solve the immediate concern, it sure as hell helps with any possible recurrence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We use this approach with our two-year-old. He has never had baby talk, we use the proper words for everything, and he gets multiple reading sessions per day - which he enjoys.

Health professoinals have told us that he speaks with the proficiency of a 3-4 year old, and he is noticeably more advanced than his peers. To me this is plain common sense and doesn't need a scientific paper.

<comment><USER19> are you serious about this common sense business? There are a lot of plausible reasons why "baby talk" could actually be essential for linguistic or emotional development. While it does seem dumbed down to an adult, in some ways it simplifies language and conversational protocols. How would you know who is right without a scientific study?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is, however, a purpose to using baby-talk with infants. It just shouldn't be used with children as they get older and have already developed their language skills to a certain degree.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_talk#Use_with_infants>

<comment><USER13> _Infants actually pay more attention when parents use infant-directed language, which is a slower, repetitive tone used in a regular conversations._

How many "baby-talkers" do you know speak slower or more repetitively? Most babble quickly and in a high pitch.

At least, that's been my experience with what people consider to be "baby talk". Speaking slower and more simply / repetitively with infants seems to be essentially the same as speaking "seriously" with them, as you don't use complex words or phrasing with adults starting to learn your language, and you deal with _them_ seriously too. (or, you should be)

<comment><USER21> Infants are at a completely different stage of language acquisition than 3-6 year olds, so there's no reason to think that there's a single best "essentially the same" way of speaking regardless of age.

<comment><USER13> I meant equivalence, not equality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't know if it's the same effect, but I've found that I write as if I were giving a speech or a talk. I suspect this is because, growing up almost all of the arguments I presented were oral ones, in school we didn't really write persuasive essays until upper-middle school, however, I'd been arguing politics, science, history and whatever else over dinner with my family.

</comment><comment><USER23> to kill a mockingbird</comment>


Super Rare NES game in eBay auction at $89,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.ebay.com/itm/221357006206?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1438.l2649

<comment><USER2> Just a reminder that anyone can bid any amount for anything on eBay, with no repercussions.

Source: I once put a website for sale on eBay. Bids went up to $10M. The press covered it like crazy. Turned out the bids were fake.

For example:

[http://www.salon.com/2000/09/11/ebay_deadpool/](http://www.salon.com/2000/09/11/ebay_deadpool/)

There were articles about it in Forbes and Cnet also.

<comment><USER3> What happens in that case? Does it get sold to the next real bidder?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone who has no idea what this is: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_World_Championships](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_World_Championships)

<comment><USER5> I looked up it in wiki. Still have no idea what it is...

<comment><USER6> Its a cartridge that only finalists of a competition were given.

<comment><USER5> How many of these exist?

<comment><USER7> There was a guy on reddit who was actually a winner in the 18+ category who still has his with its label

If this one is worth 90k then his must be double that

<comment><USER8> This one is not worth 90k. It got published on multiple news website and now there's ton of fake bid on it. In good condition it's worth 6k but I've never seen one in this bad shape, it's probably worth much less. The gold one is worth way more, about 20k in good condition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sometimes, I wish I kept my rather comprehensive collection of Squaresoft games, Nintendo consoles and games, and rare Capcom imports. I got about $2000 total for all of them a couple years ago on eBay - much less than what I thought they would be worth.

I had imagined that someday I would just be able to emulate the games on future computers, and there was no rational reason to waste space with the dusty relics I was not playing. What was less obvious at the time was that I really had little intention of actually re-playing most of these now collectibles which I had already played to a pulp. The future of perfect hardware and software emulation was as irrelevant as was impossible.

What I gave up for some quick cash was basically a life long historical record with the physical artifacts to match. It will be a bitter sweet day in the future when I visit the Video Game Museum to see my lost history. At least I still have my Marvel cards.

</comment><comment><USER10> The Nintendo World Championships gold cartridges are more rare than the grey ones (only 26 of them were made). The Nerd also covered it some time ago in an avgn episode. Having seen it's not a "super rare elusive game", he smashes the overglorified cartridges with a hammer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2wczJXETM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2wczJXETM)

<comment><USER11> Just to be clear: he didn't actually smash the _real_ cartridges. Doing that would be, well, pretty stupid.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the clarification. Given their value, that would indeed be foolish. Don't smash rare cartridges with a hammer, kids! That's not really the point of the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The price seems super high. It's not in great condition and more rare games have gone for less fairly recently.

<comment><USER13> Game collecting has become a thing lately and the more rabid collectors are, frankly, idiots.

<comment><USER14> You could say the same about arts, mangas or Pez dispensers. Having owned and sold a large Super Famicom and vinyl collection I can definitely say that collecting is (was) way more fun than owning.

<comment><USER13> Do art, manga and Pez collectors pay almost six figures for beat up junk? For stuff that isn't even readily identifiable? For context, these carts have previously sold for between $10K and $20K. In much better condition too.

The only conclusion I can come to is that rabid video game collectors are a special kind of stupid.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't call collectors who act out of irrationality stupid since you have to look at the motivation behind a deal situationally — I'd just say it's on the edge of being an unethical waste of money.

<comment><USER13> > I wouldn't call collectors who act out of irrationality stupid since you > have to look at the motivation behind a deal situationally — I'd just say > it's on the edge of being an unethical waste of money.

Unethical? Huh? Ethics is concerned with morality; with right and wrong. There's nothing inherently wrong about paying large sums of money for beat-up bits of electronics. It's just plain ol' stupid.

<comment><USER15> One good reason might be if you think the value is going to increase beyond what you paid for it, like people paying whatever mad amount for bitcoins.

I think people who spend huge amounts on diamonds are stupid, but everyone has their reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure if someone will fork out 100k for a dev build of Angry Birds in 20 years from now.

<comment><USER16> The thing about this cartridge is that it's a _physical_ object, and people can generally see more value in possessing one rather than effectively just a very large integer... someone has already dumped the ROM for this one and you can find it offered in a lot of places online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do believe that the cartridge from the 94 Nintendo PowerFest is even more rare. Something like only 2 being left as they weren't given out to winners. It's for the SNES though. I remember winning a round of this competition and getting a shirt I still have, a Virtual Boy hat, and some other Nintendo swag. Maybe the shirt is worth something these days.

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&rt=nc&item=2...](http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&rt=nc&item=221357006206)

Why would someone bid multiple times when they already have the highest bid?

<comment><USER19> Ebay only shows the leading bid any time a big is placed. So when someone bids higher than the currently visible bid, but lower than that person's max bid, the leading bidder is shown as placing another, larger bid. You end up with the appearance of someone outbidding themselves repeatedly.

<comment><USER20> I'm surprised they don't show the new second-place bidding in the history, if only to make it obvious what's happening. Like if there's a starting price of 10, I bid at 100 and then someone bids at 20, then it could show me bidding 10, them bidding 20 and me bidding 21, instead of just me at 10 then me at 21.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> let James enlighten you: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2wczJXETM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2wczJXETM)

</comment><comment><USER22> I just like that he gives the provenance. Some sort of official registry can't be far behind.

</comment><comment><USER23> People really have money. That's one year salary for a developer!!!!!

<comment><USER24> That's one year's salary for an _extremely well-paid_ developer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was hoping it was a NES version of Mire Mare, myself.

</comment><comment><USER26> Be careful with flash photos of those EPROMs..

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, at least he gets free shipping.

<comment><USER28> It looks like game is $0.99 and shipping is $91,099.00 price combined for convenience. =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> there is a marquee tag there and I can't see anything else.

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks fake/conterfit without label. Why anyone whould pay thousands for some game I could never understand.</comment>


Show HN: Sktch.io - <AUTHOR> http://www.sktch.io/ <comment><USER2> I just wrote something in the link posted by woogiewonka and someone replied. It looks much more useful if you can test it with someone.

Now this autogenerate a new board each time you enter the site, but it would be nice to have a sticky public board, that where you can test with any random person that is in the site. In particular you shod be around this public board to "chat" wit users.

Expect to see lots of penis drawings! Also, clean it regularly so no one expect that the art in the public board will be there forever.

I want colors! :) (stickers?)

Also, it can be useful to have a sound like a bell when someone writes after a pause of a few minutes. So you can left one of this thing open shared with a friend and get a ping sound when the other person decides to write after a few hours. Don't make a sound at each point, because it would be annoying. Also, please make it optional, because some times I'd don't like sounds.

This sound can be especially useful for you, to have an open tab with the public shared board, and go to it when someone is present.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://sktch.io/631114](http://sktch.io/631114)

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't seem to work, at all in Safari on iOS.</comment>


Rogue computerised cameras plague BBC news presenters - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/05/bbc-robot-cameras-rogue-presenters-frustrated

<comment><USER2> "I'm not touching your precious robots!" you can feel the animosity in that one statement alone!</comment>


Apple has lost the functional high ground - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground <comment><USER4> Former OS X developer here.

I'd say the biggest change in the development methodology happened when Bertrand Serlet was replaced with Craig Federighi.

With Bertrand, we would move in giant monolithic releases where every group would just dump in whatever they had ready and the whole thing would get released with nightly builds. With SnowLeopard in particular, I remember three dozen releases in a row where Xcode was unusable due to obj-c garbage collection issues. Random stuff you didn't expect like CoreGraphics would have showstopper issues and then we'd report it and it would get fixed by the next week.

This resulted in extremely late releases that had a ton of bugs that we piled patches onto as time went on.

Craig moved the organization onto a sprint system, where we would develop new features for 2 weeks and then spend a week fixing bugs. After 10 or 12 or 16 of these cycles, we would deem it ready and ship it out.

I felt this produced more stable but more conservative software. It seemed like giant rewrites and massive features would be very difficult to introduce and if they did get done, wouldn't happen until two thirds or so into the release cycle.

On the other hand, Craig has consistently been able to release on time with most of the features promised.

I was only there up to the release of Lion (the first Craig release), so I don't know how updates and patches worked from then on. Maybe they're worse now.

But I've been using OS X all this time, and honestly I don't think it's any worse than before.

What has changed is that releases and features happen more often. Tiger and Leopard had a good 2 years to mature and get patches while their delayed successors missed target dates. In the meantime they stagnated with ancient unix tools, safari build, QuickTime frameworks, graphics drivers etc.

They felt stable because they were just old, sort of like Debian stable. Meanwhile, the development versions of Leopard and Snow Leopard (the two I spent most of my career at Apple developing) were downright horrible and unreleasable. Each of those releases went gold and had an almost immediate .1 release to fix glaring issues.

It's just that you remember them better because they had a longer history as a stable legacy OS than the modern versions.

<comment><USER5> current apple engineer... the sprint (milestone) development system is still in place... it's not the problem though, it's the problem is the focus on new useless [imo] features at the expense of core functionality and quality

hope marco, geoff and others keep writing these articles so that eventually tim or someone sees one and shakes things up. pressure from the bottom has not worked so far

<comment><USER6> would be interesting to hear what the distinction is between useless and core features.

Maybe I'm just not hitting core features with OSX 10.10, but the features I'm using seem fine. And not seeing stability issues with third-party software.

<comment><USER7> Fwiw I can crash the entire OS by abusing tabs in Chrome. Too many tabs open => System freeze, hard reboot required. OS X Mavericks on MBPr 15".

That shouldn't be possible. Crash the browser yes, not the whole OS.

<comment><USER8> I was also experiencing something like this. I would open lots of tabs, and at some point the machine would freeze and I would need to do a hard reboot. This got worse after installing Yosemite, where I could rarely go a day without having to reboot my system.

I was about to take my laptop in to see if it was a hardware issue when a coworker pointed me to a forum where someone suggested turning off automatic graphics switching. I did that about two weeks ago, and since then I haven't had a single occurrence of the issue. You may want to try the same thing to see if it helps.

<comment><USER6> Interesting! Wonder if it's a quality control issue with the code handling the graphics switching. Afaik, Apple engineers write custom video drivers for every supported hardware device. Wonder if Intel is now contributing more to the graphics driver updates and maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Windows is still worse overall

Ugh, no it isn't. That myth from Windows ME era must die. For as much as the Windows 8 / Metro thing is an annoyance, under the hood it is a solid OS - <USER2> am running it heavily loaded - 4/5 HyperV VMs, IDEs, SQL Server etc and it is thoroughly reliable even counting suspend / resume.

Edit: Elaborating a bit - I got a Win 8 Pro license for $39 when it initially went on sale. I run it on my HP Z series Workstation that I got refurbished for $1199+$(Disks+ 16G ECC RAM). It allows me to run with 5 disks, a 8 Core Xeon CPU, 32GB RAM. The OS came with a very good hypervisor that allows me to run older version of Windows in cheap memory footprint, RHEL 7 and Server 2012 - all decently supported.

If I tried doing that on Mac hardware, even ignoring the considerable cost increase, getting a reliable hypervisor on a Mac is itself a challenge. Last time I tried Fusion and Parallels they were complete toys compared to HyperV.

So no, for techies Windows is still a darn attractive ecosystem - if you are just browsing and emailing any OS from 2013 onwards works fine, including Linux if you find the right hardware.

<comment><USER10> Windows are getting better and better.

95/98 crashed all the time, xp crashed if you really tried. Windows 7 hasn't crashed once after two years of daily usage, and/or keeping it running without a restart for months. Even when the system locks up due to user abuse( me ), and would require a reboot on anything older, you just wait a minute and it recovers.

<comment><USER11> I'd like to throw in my experience with Linux here. My backround is that I used Windows 2000 and XP from 2001 to 2003 after that Linux for three years and then OS X until 2013, now back on Linux.

I bought a used ThinkPad because I heard that that is the hardware which would work best with Linux now and I installed Ubuntu on it. Everything worked ok but just the OS filled up half of my small 128 GB SSD and running only Firefox for browsing got up the load to over 0.5, which made everything not so snappy.

A couple of months ago I moved to archlinux with Gnome 3.x, it was a bit more complicated to install, that I admit, but it was so worth it! After installation the system used less then 3 GB of my SSD, and now running just firefox the load is on about 0.01 which makes this ThinkPad from 2010 one of the snappiest computers I ever used. All animations are smooth, not a single application ever crashed or hanged itself and so on. But yeah admitedly I mostly only do development, email and websurfing on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This discussion is just going around in circles with nobody adding real useful commentary to the discussion other than "I perceive Apple's software quality to be worse based on my own anecdotal experience." This opinion is being perpetuated by a few people and it's just going everywhere.

I don't think the software quality dropped, it's all about perception. Just a few years ago, everyone was moaning about software quality with Lion but nobody remembers that now, because bad headlines are easier to create than good ones. Yosemite has some bugs, yes, but so do almost every other major releases of Operating Systems.

Apple _does_ have some bugs to iron out, but in six month's time when they're fixed, everyone will forget and start complaining about something else. Perhaps a few happened around the same time, but that's no indication that things are getting worse. People just like to complain.

Those who want to experience a lower "functional high ground" should switch to Ubuntu and discover how much further ahead OS X is.

To the everyday user, there is no drop in software quality. They wouldn't have even noticed unless articles like this continued to circulate. People are just noisier these days.

<comment><USER13> You don't think Apple's software quality has dropped? Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

Yosemite is riddled with blantently broken issues like this. I'd love to enumerate them for you, but frankly, Apple should be doing that with a flood of automatic updates. Of which I've seen 1 since installing Yosemite.

As an everyday user, there has been a massive drop in quality. Far, far worse than previous OS X upgrades. This is just not a case of people wanting to complain for the sake of complaining. I've been saying it for weeks now: Yosemite is Apple's Windows Vista.

<comment><USER14> > Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

I haven't seen that happen on either of my Macs.

I've experienced exactly one major new issue in Yosemite, and it's only affecting one of my Macs: when my iMac Retina sleeps, it often doesn't wake correctly and ends up doing a system reset so all my terminal state is lost. It's really fucking annoying. I managed to work around it by changing something in the sleep settings.

<comment><USER15> I've experienced a similar issue with my 2012 iMac: after waking from sleep, I find that all of my terminal tabs are in a "Restored" state, so the history is correct, but anything running ends up detached. It's frustrating, and only started happening with Yosemite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a person who uses OSX in technical environments that are not well-connected for long periods of time (at sea research) -- my strong perception is that a huge host of the 'not behaving as I would want or expect' issues have to do with the way cloud services are getting integrated 'transparently' into so many places across the various systems and applications. 'Transparent' integration of network services has always been a concept with oversold value -- take as an example: NFS, which, even when implemented in tightly controlled high-availability networks, comes with a lot of obscure failure modes that are basically unresolvable because the consumers of the service have essentially no visibility into the notion that there is a network involved.

Hiding the operation of the network completely from the user leads to application design where there is just no sensible way for the user to build an expectation mind for how things are going to behave -- or what the source of mis-behaviour might be at any particular time. It makes things these problems feel exceedingly random. I get to see all sorts of application quirks that pop up when the network is not behaving exactly as the application designer would've hoped when they decided that some cloud api call or another should transparently affect some aspect of their ui which wouldn't even necessarily seem like a cloud behavior to a user ... Just listening to music from your own iTunes library without a network or with a spotty network is an exercise in extreme annoyance.

I understand that the cloud's not going away -- but I would love to see apple add standard UI somewhere in all their applications to in some way indicate when network operations are in effect and something about the status. Attempting to build this kind of 'awareness of network activity' into the ui might really help application designers avoid including codepaths that amount to 'if network is bad: goto random-ruin' throughout their application's ...

<comment><USER17> What would you like besides the network status and network activity indicator in the upper left hand corner of the screen?

<comment><USER18> I think he was thinking something to indicate that the current thing you were doing is using the network: an alternative wait cursor would be a nice touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I fear that Apple's leadership doesn't realize quite how badly and deeply > their software flaws have damaged their reputation, because if they realized > it, they'd make serious changes that don't appear to be happening. Instead, > the opposite appears to be happening: the marketing-driven pace of rapid > updates on multiple product lines seems to be expanding and accelerating.

I've come to realize (or believe, rather) that very often, leadership is actually more aware of flaws than journalists and commentators think they are. It's hard to imagine that tens of thousands of really smart people within an organization haven't thought about these things themselves.

If Apple or any other company isn't making serious changes, I don't think it's because their leadership is ignorant about something we know. More often than not, I think it's because they know something that we don't.

Highly recommend reading Daniel Ellsberg's thoughts on Secrets: [http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel- ellsber...](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg- limitations-knowledge)

> "First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having > it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, > almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, > talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by > presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this > information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must > have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess. In > particular, you'll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for > over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all > this information you didn't know about and didn't know they had, and you'll > be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well."

</comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone give specific examples of OS X backsliding in the feature department? The article he links to talks about having to tweak some settings, and not liking Messages... not really egregious issues in my book. I've been pretty satisfied with how it's progressed (and I'm far from a fanboy. There were times in my life when I was using Linux, Windows, and Mac OS on a daily basis.)

I can think of several features that have improved my productivity... mission control, handoff, updated notifications, the new spotlight to name a few. They also finally fixed multi-monitor support in 10.9 which was a huge deal for me.

I do feel far more productive in OS X than other OS's, but perhaps that's just familiarity at this point. I'm curious to hear what other people's major complaints are.

<comment><USER21> Speaking of the OS not as the desktop, but what traditionally an OS means: device support, memory and process management, application environment, file system and networking.

As a developer, I find OS X to be immature, undocumented, arcane and volatile. Online Core documentation is very sketchy, often no more than a listing of argument types. Googling for help results in only questions, rarely answers. Versions add new APIs as quickly as they obsolete the old standard ones, leaving everybody hopping to update, often several times per year.

<comment><USER22> Depending on what you're doing its still frequently better than Win32 (which has an extremely broad range of API and documentation quality), or linux (which is just downright screwy at times).

Although all bets are off if you're including headers from within mach. You're better off finding what you need in POSIX at that point, or, failing that, an external library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I tend to look for the simplest explanation to a question, as quite often the simplest explanation is the correct one.

So in that spirit, if the question is "why does it seem like OS X isn't of the quality it used to be?", the simplest answer might be that _Apple just doesn 't care about OS X anymore._

I mean, look at their financials ([http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/3797471556x0x789...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/3797471556x0x789040/ED3853DA-2E3F-448D-ADB4-34816C375F5D/2014_Form_10_K_As_Filed.PDF)) On page 29 they list their net sales for all their major products from 2012 through 2014. And the things that jump out from that page are:

1) The iPhone business generates 4x as much revenue for Apple as Macs do -- and if you add in iPad sales that figure goes up to 5x; and

2) The iPhone business has grown by more than 10% each year, while Mac sales have been essentially flat.

So if you're Apple, where does the Mac fit in your product line these days, exactly? People still buy them, so it's not like you completely don't care about them, but the importance of those sales to your bottom line is diminishing year by year as sales of mobile devices dwarf sales of Macs. And there's no indication that those trends are going to turn around anytime soon -- no new major piece of hardware coming from Intel or somewhere that's likely to light a fire under sales of conventional PCs, or software package so compelling it would drive the Mac into new vertical markets.

All of which means that maybe, if you're Apple, you see the Mac business as basically a cow to be milked at the lowest cost possible until it dies of natural causes. You don't cut the hardware build quality (at least, not yet), but you don't put a whole lot of effort into developing revolutionary new features for OS X or wringing every last bug out of new releases of OS X, either. You just do the minimum possible to keep those existing Mac customers from jumping ship, or at least to delay the moment when they do jump ship for as long as possible. And by the time that day eventually comes, you won't care because Macs will be a footnote to your real business, your device business.

<comment><USER24> "So if you're Apple, where does the Mac fit in your product line these days, exactly?"

It worries me that everyone, everywhere has been asking for a retina MBA for about three years now, and it keeps not coming.

I'm suspicious that the "new MBA", whatever that is, will be the first step of a "mac" becoming an iDevice. It will be a "macbook" running iOS.

I hope I'm wrong.

<comment><USER25> I wouldn't be surprised if there _is_ no Mac in a few years. Recall that one of Jobs's less-noticed, er, _innovations_ was removing the word "Computer" from the company's name.

Yes, you need a Mac to write iOS apps. No, that is not some kind of immutable law of nature, as any game console developer who works in Windows or Linux can attest.

On a long-enough timeline, being in the "computer" business may turn out to be more trouble than it's worth to Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is striking, considering that Apple is a wealthy company with a small product line. They have the money to put resources behind getting their products fixed. They have total control over the hardware environment, so they don't have to worry about compatibility with external hardware.

Microsoft has put a lot of work into making Windows fixable. The two big developments for Windows 7 were 1) requiring all signed kernel drivers to pass the Static Driver Verifier, and 2) running incoming crash dumps through a classifier system which attempts to identify similar crashes and sends them to the same maintainer. Those two tools put a big dent in crash-for-unknown- reason problems. Is there any indication that Apple has developed similar tooling for their systems?

</comment><comment><USER27> I just have this vision of OS X like a model of the golden gate bridge made out of dried pasta. If you grab one end and point it in a different direction a lot of noodles break and its crappy until you get them fixed. If you turn it very slowly you can do so without breaking any noodles, but it takes a long time to get to a new orientation.

My assertion is that OS X (and Windows for that matter) are trying to serve two masters, one is the 'appliance user' who never puts anything on their device except for what came out of the App store, and the 'computer user' who uses their machine as a tool to develop software for themselves, or appliance users. While not a mainstream idea, I think a Macbook with IOS would be a better "answer" for application users than a Macbook with OSX, and a Macbook with OSX and none of the appliancey features might be a better Macbook for developers. Developers would no doubt run IOS in a VM on their Macbook which would both provide them a test platform when delivering new code, and a place to use their own appliancy type apps, away from the core development world. Windows could do that as well, splitting into an 'end user' and a 'developer' mode.

That said, it is really frustrating all around.

<comment><USER28> I think that might work well in practice, but I think a lot of us hold out hope that a lot of the 'appliance users' will dig deeper and become proper 'computer users', and we worry that going the separate route will prevent that, and create a population with a low computer literacy rate. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way we're going, with many people adopting iPads as their main computing platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The decline of "It just works" is one side of the problem. The other, more painful side (driven by the iOS-ification of the OS, I suppose) is: "When it doesn't work, you're helpless".

<comment><USER30> How have users of OSX become more helpless than they were at any point in the past?

<comment><USER29> To take a simple example, faster OS updates combined with more aggressive OS version requirements for Apple apps (e.g. iPhoto) mean that getting the latest app bugfixes demands much more upheaval in your computing environment than it used to.

<comment><USER30> Sorry, what has that to do with helplessness? The claim was that the influence of iOS makes OSX less able to help themselves.

<comment><USER29> In the past, when you were having a problem with an Apple app you had a relatively large window during which you could just update that app without touching anything else to see if the upgrade fixed your problem. In trickier cases you might even try installing a specific version that wasn't the latest and so on.

Today, far more often, updating the app you're having a problem with requires an OS upgrade, bringing in tons of unrelated changes and triggering updates to other apps and ...

If you don't see how the first scenario involves wider options for self-help, plus greater agency and control than the second, I don't know what to say.

<comment><USER30> The only difference in the scenarios is the rate of change. If you are arguing that change itself reduces users agency then I won't argue with you, but I'll say that it is a problem that is broader than Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I feel like the software really hasn't changed enough for me to feel differently about Apple at all.

However the the fact that the hardware is GLUED together and non-upgradeable in all models is the thing that has me looking elsewhere. Is anyone else frustrated that their retina machines are completely obsoleted on purpose and that even the minis have memory chips soldered into them for no reason but wasteful planned obsolescence?

I think that Apple is going to hit a major backlash when people realize that their memory and hard drives are trapped and limited for no real technical reason.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately for tinkerers, these processes allow Apple to produce very small and lightweight hardware. These qualities are more valuable to consumers than tinkerability.

<comment><USER32> Except that they're not needed to get to small and lightweight. Those qualities are driven by the size of components decreasing due to die improvements. So they can stick smaller, better components onto boards every year.

Look at enough device tear downs, and you realize that lack of repairability is more about laziness than it is about legitimate tradeoffs.

<comment><USER17> There are physical limitations on socket sizes and construction that can allow owners to reasonably upgrade the equipment without damaging it. There are design limitations on arranging components in such a way that they can be accessed. Also the majority of users never open their machine; why should they have to pay more so the privileged few can pay a little less for storage and RAM?

As someone who has recently assembled a commodity PC (Mini-ITX) and someone who has fiddled with RPi hardware, I can see the disadvantages facing a consumer hardware manufacturer attempting to satisfy a tinkerer's urges. Notebooks, all-in-ones, and Mac Mini-sized desktops are just at the edge of serviceability, and clearly the mobile and tablet product lines are well beyond it.

<comment><USER32> It's not just tinkerers. If you crack your screen, the glass is generally glued onto the screen, necessitating replacement of the entire display assembly, which isn't all that much cheaper than just buying a new one. They do this on purpose to force people to buy more devices.

The only reason they get away with it because we don't force them to take repairability seriously. As someone noted, most customers prefer new devices.

<comment><USER17> You only need to purchase more devices if you make it a habit to break the ones you have. No one's being forced to do anything in the repairability case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've long said that the Apple hardware is second to none ... and I have a G3 Wallstreet that not only still runs, but it's battery lasts for a couple hours.

My mid-2012 rMBP is pretty amazing too, but I quickly became irritated by OSX. It's now running Linux Mint with the XFCE WM now and I couldn't be happier (note that with a kernel upgrade, it even supports my Thunderbolt Cinema display).

The one thing I wonder is: "Are we in the minority?" Do the "unschooled masses" simply accept that this is how computers have to be?

<comment><USER34> Two previous mac books died on me after a year or so (they were already used for a year or two when I bought them). One died due to GPU solder problem. The other due to some unspecified damage to HDD controller.

Hope our new retina will live longer. If only my girlfriend that actually uses it would allow me to kill the osx and put Windows 10 there it would save us both a lot of frustration.

Mac OSX is hardly usable. I get how developers can get used to it. Once you start Terminal you have a fairly usable sort of linux computer. I still don't get how graphic designers use it. Its UI is so buggy, glitchy, uncooperative towards hardware (wacom tablet! or just ordinary mice).

As for the hardware it's really powerful and the price is right or better than right for those components. The thing is that you wouldn't build PC out of those component yourself, because you'd rather use processor that's 8% weaker but costs half as much.

<comment><USER35> > Mac OSX is hardly usable.

You cite anecdotes that you don't even pretend to justify with examples. Are you speaking from experience? I'd bet not. And it's interesting that you think putting Windows 10 on your girlfriend's machine would solve your problems - moving my entire family to a Mac running OS X has solved all of mine.

<comment><USER34> To list problems I had with Mac OSX over last few months I'd need at least few blog posts.

But that would be redundant because a lot of them are not unique. When I'm infuriated by something I search for solutions an I'm seeing lots of people expeiriencing same glitches or "featurs" and sharing some workarounds (working if I'm lucky) often paid, or just piling up comments about the issue.

Are you sure your familiy still uses computers you migrated to mac osx? Maybe after that stunt they are just afraid to ask you about anything else?

There was a joke where a guy who was sneezing went to the doctor but the doctor made a mistake and perscribed him a laxative. When the guy shows up at the doctors again in few day a the doctor asks "Do you still sneeze?" guy replied "I don't dare..."

<comment><USER35> > Are you sure your familiy still uses computers you migrated to mac osx? > Maybe after that stunt they are just afraid to ask you about anything else?

Yeah, I'm positive, since they're not entirely without problems and I still get pinged periodically. I also live relatively near them and talk to them all the time.

It's worth pointing out that while you say your issues with OS X are numerous and well documented on the Internet already, you didn't like to any of them. So it's still unjustified anecdotes. Here's a practical one I just dealt with - there's one hold out in my family on Windows, and he wants to set up a syncing calendar between his computer and iPhone. Outlook can't natively support CalDAV - the backend his company's server runs uses IMAP and Cal/CardDAV - so I could either pay for a plugin or convert him to Thunderbird. If he had a Mac, it'd have been a two minute deal since the built-in tools have CalDAV support. But that's just one example, of course.

<comment><USER34> Don't even get me started on iPhone. Putting mp3 ringtone on it is some serious trick coercing of itunes even on Mac. Ios web browser can't even download arbitrary files. You can't mount iphone as a thumbdrive to move files around.

As for mac, magic mouse is basically useless as clicking causes unwanted scrolling especially in adobe apps and google maps. All praise to good people who made Mouse Prefs app and give it away for free. They should get a pot of gold from apple.

Finder is such a piece of crap that basically first advice given to mac users is buy a file manager. It can't display directories above files. You need to install xtra finder for that.

Image browser is nowhere near the functionality of Fast Stone on windows. Also 3rd party browsers are far behind.

Network drive doesn't autoconnect sometimes and often disconnects. Remote folders visible in finder window don't show up in save dialog of a web browser. Folders disappear from favorites in finde for no aparent reason. Finder sometimes doesn't indicate if contents of the remote dir ar still loading so when seeing empty remote dir you don't know if it's empty or it just didn't load yet.

Some high dpi usb mouse can't be used because it feeds mouse move events too fast for mac osx and they swamp mouse down event so dragging a window becomes very hard and deliberate operation.

Dropown menus on finder got damaged after some use. Clicking away from the dropdown menu on some button locks this button, as if it didn't register mouse down event until it gets mouse up event that somehow got swollowed by dissaperaing menu.

Computer sometimes closes very slowly. Finder just hangs and blocks computer restart. Multiple desktops, multiple fullscreen apps, fullscreen apps at all just get in a way. Switching them with gestures is source of additional confusion.

Additional monitors display weird lines when they are turning on an off.

I even installed clean yosemite in hopes that it will fix some obvious defects. It didn't help much.

So far my expeirience with mac that costed three times any of my previous computers is that it's pile of failing crap.

Yosemite is pretty win 98. Maverics was the same but with different skin. Even linux wasn't that bad. At least not for the last 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Personally, I've been using Yosemite and iOS 8 every day.

iOS 8 - no complaints whatsoever, at least on iPhone 5 and 6. I've heard some people complain that on iPhone 4/4S it could be slow but that's a few years old hardware and Apple probably doesn't spend the majority of their time optimizing that most likely.

Yosemite - major bug is that my WiFi stops working once in a whole (~once a day) and have to turn it off/on.

Overall, I think the the criticism is definitely a little bit overblown.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm going to suggest that the 'functional high ground' was relied on a unique combination of marketing, market penetration and era.

Of course, we know Apple always pushed the 'it just works' mantra, but this was when Apple was supporting a small number of devices, and when they had forced everybody to update to new hardware in order to run OSX anyway, so what you had was an OS that worked VERY well for a small number of people on a small number of devices.

Those few (like myself) who claimed that OSX was not any better than windows (my first experience with OSX had me in a reboot loop trying to get Pages or Keynote working), were a minority of the OS users and a tiny percentage of overall computer users.

As OSX has grown in popularity, the 10% who dislike the newest versions has gone from a few tens of thousands (may hundred thousand) to a few million. Some of them very vocal, like Marco.

Lastly, I mentioned the 'era'. When OSX was gaining in popularity, many people were moving from Windows '98 and XP. They had skipped Vista and didn't try Windows 7. Moving to OSX was a massive improvement, as it was a much more modern and cleaner OS. Those same people are now used to the bells and whistles of OSX, and each new upgrade shows minor improvements and a few odd little features that, from what people tell me, come with the recommendation of "turn off the new stuff".

Those who complain about Microsoft OS quality, didn't compare Apple OS quality of a similar era. If you compare OS9 to 98 or XP, I think you'd find that it's a much more even comparison, and Microsoft may even come out on top.

</comment><comment><USER38> The article is completely devoid of content.

Any particular gripes he had with latest OS X version?

And most importantly, anything for which similar things couldn't be said for OS X version's from 10.1 to 10.9?

FWIW, I find Yosemite a fine and stable release.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't know, I've been a Mac user off and on since Macs were 68k based, had a 2007 MBP that I was really unhappy with (of my still functioning machines from that era, it's easily the worst, by $300 netbook is easily a better machine at 1/10th the cost). The last 3-4 years or so my daily driver at work is a rMBP.

I use Windows 7 at home, but feel _about_ as comfortable in front of either system.

If I compare any of the last 3-4 versions of OS X to Win 7, I'd say they're roughly comparable. There's pluses and minuses on both sides. I just spent a few days writing some Python code on Windows, and the experience was generally about as good as OS X. Win7 is the most rock solid non-x-nix OS I've used, and once you learn your way around it generally flows well.

I don't perceive a huge downgrade in quality on OS X. Things change, bugs get introduced. I don't aesthetically like where Apple is going with their flat design, but the chrome of most apps I use takes up so little real-estate of what I use that I can ignore it. I think you have to do a bit more work to get an OS X machine into a real usable state than Windows. But once it's working it's relatively pain free. I _don 't_ think it's as stable as Win 7. But it's like comparing 4-9s uptime to 3-9s uptime. On a day-to-day level I don't really notice it as much.

I'd say uptime on my Win 7 machines is better, but Microsoft forces restarts and updates too frequently to make that kind of claim. It's nice that OS X is a x-nix in the sense that what I do on it is more easily translatable to other x-nix systems so deployment is easier. And that's great until it isn't, because some tool or library or something is different or not available. But then again, development on Windows forces you to assume all sorts of crazy non-standard stuff as a constant.

I don't really know where this perception that it's getting worse is coming from. I recently fired up my 2007-era MBP and it really feels like a worse experience, top-to-bottom. Modern OS X really is nicer.

I suspect that people are finally starting to look at Apple products more critically (at long last). Perhaps it's because the pace of innovation seems to have slowed down, perhaps it's because Jobs is gone, but I'm starting to notice Apple pundits are finally starting to see that things aren't perhaps as good as they dreamed, and looking for ways to push the fruit forward.

</comment><comment><USER40> In mavericks, I could hit command-space and start typing, and knew that even though the spotlight box hadn't popped up yet, my text was being captured. Now in yosemite, it's more like... hit command-space, start typing "chrome", wind up with a box 1.5 seconds later filled in with "ome". This is only a problem on my i5 mac mini. My macbook pro (same year - late 2012) is just barely fast enough to pop open the window in time to capture my text input. But that just shows that their UI stack is too deep to provide the kind of snappy user interactions they are shooting for.

<comment><USER41> Maybe there is something odd about the mac mini that causes this; my 2009 mac book pro with mavericks has no problem with it. I tried, but couldn't hit a character fast enough to cause a miss.

It wouldn't surprise me to find out there was something hardware related with the mini that leads to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Couldn't agree more. I can't open my coworkers KeyNote presentations because my copy is a year newer. My two year old Macbook Retina Pro black screens half the time it tries to wake up from sleep and yes, I've wiped every startup program and kernel extension. I'm just glad it isn't my work Macbook Pro which black screens on login half the time and insists I forgot my password and won't let me time my password in another quarter. I suspect it has something to do with disk encryption since it started after they turned File Vault or whatever it is on.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's not just the functional high ground that Apple has lost, it's the look and feel battle.

To me, both Windows 8 and Windows 7 look way, way more modern than the latest Mac OS. There's animation, there are colors, consistent and solid keyboard support, strong consistency (why can't I still rename a file in the Mac OS file dialog but I can in Finder? They both look identical!).

For a little while, Mac OS had the UNIX foundation advantage over Windows but these days are gone. Today, I use git, ssh and bash seamlessly on Windows.

I think Apple just lost contact with its users.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've used OS X daily through every public release (including the public beta). I actually wrote a column about OS X during its early days. All of these articles are anecdotal, and I agree with other commenters here who say it's all about perception. The fact of the matter is that Apple has had some high profile "quality scandals" the last year (some would argue 2/3 were not deserved):

\- iOS point release that bricked phones and was pulled

\- Bendgate

\- iCloud hacking scandal

None of them actually were OS X bugs, but you couple that with some minor OS X bugs and everything goes into a whirlwind of negative perception. What are the major OS X bugs that everyone is referring to though? I haven't experienced them, but that's anecdotal, so that opinion is just as worthless as everyone else's. I heard people are having some Wifi issues - that sucks - but where is the showstopper that's affecting everyone?

On the other hand, I do feel that iOS and Swift have been buggy enough for developers the last couple of years that its hurt Apple's rep in a legitimate way amongst the intelligentsia - programmers who have a pedestal to preach from. But let's be real - in terms of day to day problems, things are much much better than they were during Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.2, and yes, they're still better than Windows/Linux (which will always be plagued by the huge number of hardware configurations they must support).

</comment><comment><USER45> Lest we don't forget, interacting with SMB file shares has been a constant pain for years now, pretty much in every release.

I will spare the details from before, but in Mavericks, when things looked like were being fixed, one cannot delete an entire folder. It would delete the contents, but not the folder, then one had to delete the folder by itself after it was empty.

In Yosemite some folders are left "locked" without being able to do anything to them from OS X. This was similar and worse before.

And don't get me going on how it leaves .DS_Store, ._.DS_Store, .apdisk and ._.apdisk crapola laying around.

Oh, how about driving everyone to properly support case-sensitiveness? All sorts of things do not work or crash, or simply refuse to install if installed in case-sensitive volumes.

How about fixing random video corruption in Yosemite? [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364883/Screenshots/video...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/364883/Screenshots/video- corruption.png)

How about training the "geniuses" at the stores that there are other standards for video cabling? (And that one should not have to buy thunderbird-enabled monitors to be able to have more than one monitor on a macbook?).

My MacBook Pro froze and rebooted out of the blue this past week. It was pretty much idle. has never done that before.

And on and on ...

</comment><comment><USER46> Marco's article seems a little hyperbolic since as I recall Leopard for instance was hugely unstable on release.

Conventional wisdom with OS X has always been to wait a few point releases before jumping in. With Microsoft it was to wait until at least SP1.

I don't think things have changed that drastically.

* SMB support still sucks.

* OS X Server is still a monumental turd and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple kills it a release or two down the line.

* Yanking Spaces in Mountain Lion and going to Mission Control followed by Yosemite finally getting (flaky) multi-monitor support is classic Apple focusing on the consumer before the pros.

* Active Directory in Yosemite is a bit buggy but anyone who's used Leopard will remember that the gold master wouldn't even allow AD logons if your domain was .local - I mean did anyone at Apple even test something as basic as that!?

It goes on, but I honestly don't think Apple have changed for the worse. They're not any better in my personal opinion either.

The biggest problem we face with Apple at my company and it could certainly create the impression of increasing bugginess, is that Apple's release cycle is much shorter now.

No more 18 month releases with $100 upgrade fees.

Every developer in our shop can click 'Upgrade' on their machine and fuck their whole environment up.

It used to be much harder for them to do that in the past which goes back to my original point. Don't upgrade a production machine until you're at least a few point releases in! (that goes for your iOS devices too...)

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm surprised that he's complaining about OS X and not iOS 8.

Coming from an iPhone 5 with iOS7 going to a 6 with iOS8, it was a major regression in terms of minor annoyances.

Particularly: \- selecting text for cut and paste in a text edit field is often very broken. I hit this one daily. I used to be a prolific iOS typer, but I've gone back to using my MacBook Air 11 just for this reason. \- selecting text in a browser windows brings out the weirdest bug, where the window gets stuck scrolling all the time. I have this OCD thing where I continuously select and deselect text for no reason whatsoever. As a result, this hits me many times per day. The only way to fix it is to kill Safari. \- When you have your phone open in landscape. Power it down. Then switch it on again in portrait, iOS doesn't detect the change in orientation. You have to rotate to landscape and back before it notices.

There are just minor things, but when they hit time and again, they get annoying real quick. And they don't get fixed.

</comment><comment><USER48> _" having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering teams to keep up with while maintaining quality." ... "We don't need major OS releases every year. We don't need each OS release to have a huge list of new features."_

I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings.

However it is possible that the core of his point, that marketing trumps what engineering can accomplish while maintaining quality, may be true. There seemed to be a lot of bolt on features in the last iOS & Mac OS X releases that didn't necessarily need to be pushed out right now, and some of the regressions are painful.

<comment><USER24> "I would argue everything we know about software engineering process says that more releases is better. Incrementalism lowers risk for engineers and for users. Once a year doesn't sound often enough to me, going the other way would just repeat Microsoft's failings."

Yes, but that can be in the form of .X releases, not X. releases.

Which is to say, by all means release X.2 and X.3 and ... X.9 and so on ... keep polishing !

But OSX releases 5.X and 6.X and ... 9.X ... and so on. Those aren't the actual numbers of course, but it is major releases that keep coming rather than minor releases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> A friend of mine has just joined apple in a systems role and can't believe what a mess it is behind the scenes. He described it as being like "1000 startups all working on their own thing but owned by the same parent company" (with all the cross-group communication mayhem that implies).

<comment><USER30> That sounds like essentially a good thing. The idea 1000 startups are likely to be better at innovating than one monolithic bureaucracy seems like a familiar one here on Hacker News.

<comment><USER49> Sounds good but apparently the reality is a horrendous 'mish mash' of different tech stacks and fairly poor cross-group communication. Throw a marketing driven release cycle in to the mix (as the article implies) and it's no wonder a few cracks are appearing.

The age old problem of being a monster sized company I guess. No one is immune.

<comment><USER50> It sounds surprisingly like how I've traditionally viewed Microsoft. Microsoft has always had a lot of really great technologies, but they've traditionally struggled to leverage them in a cohesive way.

You'd see them completely reinventing the wheel between different groups while simultaneously turning around and shoehorning in MS tech places where it just didn't make any sense. Throw in all the in-fighting between different groups and you have a recipe for the company's malaise through the 2000s.

One of the clearest examples I can think of is Microsoft's acquisition of Danger and the disaster that became the Kin:

[http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2010/07/a-post...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2010/07/a-post-mortem-of-kins-tragic-demise/)

tl;dr - Microsoft buys out existing, successful mobile company, scraps their existing technology stack to rebuild with MS technology while building multiple, competing mobile platforms internally, internal turf wars ensue, and in the meantime their carrier partner basically loses patience with the whole thing and seals the fate of the entire project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> While there's a bunch of things I wish Apple would fix in OSX...

If Photoshop stopped crashing all the time and Finder stopped freezing because external hdd's were too slow. I would have less issues with OSX.

I can't believe people swear by OSX for graphic design despite the fact that Photoshop crashes all the time.

</comment><comment><USER52> I mean, all software has bugs.

To me, the major difference between Apple's OS's and the Windows/Linux/Androids of the world is that Apple _fails smoother_.

A typical bug may result in an iOS app freezing and then quitting on the user. However frustrating this may be, Apple's "something went wrong" user experience is much better than the annoying pop-up alerts, blue-screens of death, and cryptic error messages of the other platforms.

These error messages are only relevant to a small, small subset of power- users, so why show them to everyone else? The other 99% of users are just going to quit and restart the application anyway (as we've been trained to do), so why not smoothly lead them down this path?

<comment><USER53> > I mean, all software has bugs.

That's a cool mantra to repeat but it do not seem to match reality.

For instance, in over 10 years of daily usage, I do not think having ever noticed any bugs in vim, grep and PostgreSQL. Just to take grep, for instance: if it says the string is not in the file, I have 100% confidence it is not in the file. So not only grep do not freeze my PC, it is also deterministic, which means perfectly reliable when one talks its language.

OSes are more complex you will tell me. Yep, but you said "all software has bugs".

<comment><USER35> You can't acknowledge that an operating system is more complex, but then not give it the benefit of the doubt of halting a system on a bug. If grep or vim fail, they just abort. If Postgres fails, you maybe get a corrupted database and it aborts. If OS X kernel panics, the machine halts. All software has bugs.

Also, if Postgres' bugs were unnoticeable, why did 9.3 get to 9.3.5 before the went to 9.4? Just because _you_ didn't notice a bug doesn't mean someone else wasn't affected by it, and just because _you_ notice bugs in OS X (which I'd bet you didn't) doesn't make them big issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I feel like Apple software quality has been degraded because I always expected kind of top and flawless. It has been and must be to keep its position.

As far as I remember, in earlier versions of OS X, I just didn't care on visuals so much because it was very flawless, so everything felt smooth like a fluid and nothing bugged me.

With 10.10, I see visual/animation glitches very frequently on same hardware. And it is getting bugging me up and it feels flawed. I believe this is because of moving on to a new visual styles. But if this sustains, it's just a matter of time to hit the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER55> The thing I don't get in this discussion is that somehow the issue is that OS releases are too soon. If we assume that we were on a bi-yearly cycle instead, wouldn't that mean 2 times as many features would break in an instant?

Shouldn't Apple be doing updates faster (and smaller) instead of sooner? Whatever happened to agile?

Considering the amount of third party software now in the ecosystem, faster updates seem the only way forward. Unless you want your entire dev setup to be broken for 3 months every 2 years while all of your tools update to the 100 different incompatible changes.

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't agree with owenwil. Apple is actually making bugs release after release. It really brought pain upgrading to Yosemite, waiting the fucking hours copying files in the so-called "a few minutes". As I can recall, upgrading from 10.8 to 10.9, Preview begins to blur when scrolling, and more memory taken. Then in the release of Yosemite, MATLAB GUI won't work at first, then goes the ugly color theme for mobile devices. Few will upgrade to 10.10 if there were not Swift support.

<comment><USER24> "It really brought pain upgrading to Yosemite, waiting the fucking hours copying files in the so-called "a few minutes"."

I don't understand how this basic piece of wisdom has not filtered down to everyone, everywhere that owns a computing device:

Don't upgrade. Always reinstall. Always.

In 1995, don't upgrade windows 3.x to win95. Reinstall.

In 2000, don't upgrade to winXP. Reinstall.

In 2008, dont upgrade to Snow Leopard. Reinstall.

In 2020, don't upgrade to Novell Carnival Ride. Reinstall.

Don't. Ever. Upgrade. Always reinstall.

<comment><USER56> Because AppStore told me that I can upgrade.

<comment><USER57> So you're going to listen to the "AppStore"?

I always reinstall and rsync my home directory back and reinstall applications on osx. I never have any of the problems people seem to have here. Just as an anecdotal point.

Upgrades "work" but honestly I don't trust upgrades on any operating system. I'm working on finishing up ansible plays to get things sorted out entirely.

Upgrade if you want, but accept you probably have skeletons in your closet.

<comment><USER56> If I don't listen those who provide the service, am I going to listen to you? If Apple cannot give me a good solution, why would I buy its product? I know you are good at backing up your files and reinstalling, but I don't want this stuff bother me every release like this. I am just not that free, dude.

<comment><USER57> Fair enough, but then a followup question, and don't take it the wrong way. If there is a known, os agnostic, way to fix issues with upgrades, and you do not employ that solution, is arguing about upgrading without trying that option productive? I understand you don't listen to the os vendor, but in that case I can't see the logic you'll use as all os's have issues/quirks/edge cases and "trusting trust" of someone. If you're not getting value out of OS X, then honestly you should be moving off it regardless of what anyone says.

As a note, here is how I do the entire thing, I rsync my home dir on each home wifi connect (scripted for years with ControlPlane), and midnight as well. I also rsync before upgrading, then I upgrade the os, rsync again, reinstall the os and rsync home dir back and reinstall vmware.

Sounds hard right? Takes about overnight really most for the rsync back and that just happens while I sleep. I do the same thing for linux/freebsd also. As an example, freebsd 10 upgrade had issues with bhyve not working after upgrading. For linux as an example, things can be markedly worse for things like ubuntu upgrades. Which is/isn't my experience as a (thankfully now ex) devops admin. Nothing is perfect, especially upgrades. That said I have tested the tires out on upgrades of OS X and not really seen issues that others do.

I understand no time, but setting this up, which granted for me is trivial as vmware is about it that I reinstall, the rest is in ~/Applications, means its trivial to not encounter dragons needlessly. I understand you might have the adobe creative suite or whatever installed and reinstalling might be worse than crossing into mordor, but this wisdom is passed on not just by me but from those that came before me. The rsync bit could be improved but I'm lazy and it works well enough.

<comment><USER56> The first thing I have to think if I want to reinstall instead of upgrade is, how to backup MacTeX & homebrew. I have to consider if it will generate pdf documents correctly. (MacTeX is installed in /usr/texbin/) Reinstalling MacTeX is not that hard compared with reinstalling homebrew. Homebrew, though bottled most package, will take a long time compiling a version gcc with openmp support, let alone recalling who to install. And gcc is not the only thing that need a compiling job. Maybe, years later, I will follow the path of reinstalling or moving back to Linux.

<comment><USER57> So I compile llvm+gcc often with home-brew, the compile time on my laptop takes total about 5.5 hours. But I setup vagrant and vmware to allow me to automate this all away and create txz's of the install.

And as for mactex it seems to work fine for what I use, though it installs to /usr/local/texlive when I tested it a month ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I have a macbook pro, and honestly I cannot set to believe any OS like mavericks, in this age, cannot run properly with 2GB of ram.

Everything is slow. 3MB of L2 cache processor, there's no excuse.

</comment><comment><USER59>
        having major new releases every year is clearly impossible for the engineering
        teams to keep up with while maintaining quality. Maybe it's an engineering
        problem, but I suspect not — I doubt that any cohesive engineering team
        could keep up with these demands and maintain significantly higher
        quality.

And yet, OpenBSD springs to mind for not just the timeliness of their releases (every 6 months) but also the quality and features within each release.

</comment><comment><USER60> For anyone wanting to read the Geoff Wozniak post quoted in the article, here's the archive.org link:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150105063342/http://wozniak.ca...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150105063342/http://wozniak.ca/why- i-quit-os-x)

Perhaps he removed the original article because of increased traffic. At any rate, I got a 404 when I clicked the link.

</comment><comment><USER61> > Geoff Wozniak

he wasn't even using Apple's software... using the Mac as a Terminal...

I'm using two Macs (Macbook Air and Quad-Core Mac mini) all the time. There are a lot of annoying bugs in the Mac OS. But I can't say that it is more.

Some of the recent stuff is quite cool and very useful. There are some things I don't like (iCloud, iTunes speed and stability, ...), but in general the latest OS works quite good.

</comment><comment><USER62> Having drops in software quality doesn't surprise me at all. Anybody that used Mac OS back in the System 7 days likely remembers seeing the bomb message and getting intimate with macbugs (G^FINDER) to try to save your work.

I think the only way you'll see a dramatic rise in quality would be if software becomes their core business (instead of hardware)... which isn't happening.

</comment><comment><USER63> By what measure is Apple losing reputation? Their sales are at an all time high in a market that is losing ground to tablets. This is the second post on HN today about how terrible OS X is, and I just don't see it. And I hardly consider the yearly updates major OS changes. Yosemite was pretty big, but that was the first big one in a few years it seems.

</comment><comment><USER64> Just a couple weeks ago someone asked me how Yosemite was compared to Mavericks. My answer: "they are the same modulo a couple minor UI tweaks". I guess it's because I use very little Apple softwares, despite using almost exclusively Apple hardware.

Turns out Yosemite is perfectly fine to use Sublime Text, the Terminal and Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER65> I haven't had any issues with Yosemite (the last buggy release for me was Mountain Lion), but iOS in my iPad and iPhone are a mess since iOS 7.

Messages breaks in every way possible. Safari went from crashing twice every half hour to freezing and continuing to play videos after I've closed tabs, and getting stuck full screen.

</comment><comment><USER66> I bet Jony Ive will go back to focusing on design and someone else will run engineering again. Apple tends to prefer internal promotions but I wouldn't be surprised if summertime external becomes new head of software. Maybe someone who has a NeXT background.

</comment><comment><USER67> From an enterprise standpoint the wifi on 10.10 is basically a DDos attack. I know they are trying to put in a feature to send files between devices but it doesn't work on a college campus at all, which should be an environment they are testing in.

</comment><comment><USER68> Also before yosemite release apple announced a public beta, which is kind of unusual for apple since they always wait until the party to release stuff. Does that mean some part of apple's QA is now offloaded to public?

</comment><comment><USER69> Btw Gnome 3 looks and feels almost like Mac OS. But it works and does not crash like Mac OS. Everyone who uses Mac OS should try modern Linux distributions. They do not suck so much as 2 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER70> One example for me:

A recent OS update broke XAMPP/mysql. It took me a couple of hours to figure out what setting I had to change to make it work again.

</comment><comment><USER6> Losing the high ground to _what_?

Ubuntu 14? Windows 8? Chrome OS?

I'm not running OSX as a server OS and don't plan to. But even with the latest 10.10.1, I still see uptime in terms of weeks including mandatory reboots due to OS updates. I think it's easy to say that other desktop OS's are years behind and falling farther behind with each release.

As has happened in prior OSX releases, this latest release may have been rushed. The next release will probably address current bugs.

<comment><USER71> "I still see uptime in terms of weeks including mandatory reboots due to OS updates."

This now applies to every OS out there. Windows, iOS, Linux, ChromeOS (aka Linux :). It's simply not a bragging point anymore.

"I think it's easy to say that other desktop OS's are years behind and falling farther behind with each release."

You're right that it's easy to say. That makes you technically correct - <USER3> best kind of correct :). I personally disagree, and think this XKCD strip is relevant:

[http://xkcd.com/934/](http://xkcd.com/934/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Very unhappy with Yosemite. I've never had so many system crashes. I think I need to install the one 2 versions ago.

</comment><comment><USER73> I hate every single new OS X release, because that means I have to struggle with wifi issues all over again.

<comment><USER74> And changes to Xcode that break compilation a handful of open source libraries/utilities that I use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> What I always wanted to know is, why doesn't OSX have the option to disable mouse acceleration?

<comment><USER58> haha, you can use a paying software to fix that.

crazy right ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I suspect Apple's software development practices have never really been all that great, it's just that they worked harder when Jobs was around to make sure the product worked. Now without his influence, quality has been steadily slipping.

If Apple's not careful, they could wake up in a few years and find they're just another tech company.

</comment><comment><USER76> Can anyone post some specific bugs OP here is talking about ? I would love to know them.

</comment><comment><USER77> It would be interesting to find what kinds of stories give a user who submits more karma. negative or positive? It would be quite ironic if creating negativity on Hacker News is what builds karma.

<comment><USER77> it's obvious negativity in comments aren't good for karma, but stories with negative premise is unclear to me.</comment></comment>


Microsoft has created its own IFTTT tool called Flow - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/29/11535232/microsoft-flow-ifttt-competitor <comment><USER2> Seems pretty good, it has a nice selection of integrations.

What I noticed was strange was that it won't allow @gmail, @yahoo, @outlook email addresses for signup. You need to have a custom domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and they're planning to add more integrations each week.</comment></comment>