Rosyna,

That's some serious writing! Can I please get the Executive Summary?

Ok, some of the things you got wrong:

- there is no QT Pro Key with Mac DTK, I checked that
- there was no XSan License, it was a time limited license
- and above all, Pepsi is not the only true Cola. Pepsi is the Cola you drink, when there is no more Coke available within a 20 mile-radius.

1. Yes, there was. It wasn't a key you entered it was a media pro key dealie like the one that comes with FCP. Otherwise I couldn't have tested it.

2. Ok, this is true. It was a developer preview. My bad.

3. You are so very, very wrong about this it isn't funny. I only drink Coke when I was to sit bleeding on the toilet for 30 minutes.

Executive summary: Rosyna urinates on Apple again, making history as the whiniest individual ever, beating out Al Gore and even Trent at AppleXNet.

1. Not seeing it right now. Empty fields in QT Registration pane.

3. No-one can blame you if you have an allergy for the best beverage in the world. I will drink all those Coca Cola for you then.

Ok, can I replace 3 with "there's no way OmniPlan is going to win an ADA as it has been released after the ADA deadline and it's a beta anyway"?

Call it whining, call it urinating on Apple, or call it ranting, but (almost) all of Rosyna's points are valid and truthful. Would you rather she ignore these issues and take it up the ass, continuing to pay good money and time and energy to just accept things the way they are?

I'm a wanna-be developer, but I'm also good friends with a bunch of long-time, hard-core Apple developers and all of the complaints listed here are serious and more importantly, counter-productive to efficient development.

It's like working for a bad company or manager - you have all this passion, intent, and direction, and there's those stupid, illogical roadblocks and stupidity sucking the life and energy out of you.

Sure, you could classify anything that breaks down and "calls out" issues whining, but you should seriously read this article and understand that the facts stated are (sadly) legitimate and something Apple SHOULD take note of and start to (at least) think about changing.

I'm an Apple fanboy, too, but it's stupid to defend them just for the sake of defending them, because you want to seem like a true believer. And forcing them to change their ways and fix these issues will only make things (and their developers) better!

PS: The food thing at WWDC is true whining, ;) but I still agree with it. $1300 is a lot of money, and the service they provided at past WWDC's (and I've attended my share) was world-class, where now it's non-existent. What message does it send to the developers taking their time and spending their (or their company's) money to be at an event that ultimately helps Apple and is a marketing event? And don't fool yourself in thinking otherwise. It's a marketing event that Apple profits and benefits from WAY more than the attendees do.

I've not been to a WWDC but I'd say that it isn't really much of a marketing event. You have the keynote but beyond that the rest is under NDA, which I'd hardly call marketing (I would call it annoying as I have no way of finding that stuff out as I don't have the money to afford an ADC account yet). MWSF is a true marketing event

First, the Human Interface Guidelines are not rules and, believe it or not, they do change.

There are plenty of applications that broke the once sacred Human Interface Guidelines for good reason. My favorite? PageMaker! What was with that "floating" window running around? It had a title bar, looked like a regular window, but wouldn't go behind the document window! Other DTP programs didn't do this--they stayed within the Human Interface Guidelines of the time! Evil, Evil, Evil Aldus!

Oh, wait. Floating palette windows are actually a pretty good idea. Never mind.

They're Guidelines. They're not Laws.

That said, they're pretty good ideas. If you don't have the resources to do user testing in order to determine whether your interface is confusing or not, slavishly following the guidelines is a good thing. If you do have the resources to do user testing--like Apple does--you can fiddle a bit.

Personally, I had no problem figuring out Mail's interface changes from 10.3 to 10.4.

Going onto to WWDC and the dating scene, there are some cute girls at WWDC. Check the QuickTime sessions. I chuckle because a couple of years ago, I got out of the network kernel hacking world and went back user-land and graphics. Yes, at the kernel sessions, the audience was male. At the QuickTime sessions, there was more of a mix.

Heck, I met a very cute girl from Taiwan at WWDC several years ago.

The food thing is always funny. I'm sure you don't remember the way way way back whens, when ARA catered WWDC in San Jose. It was so bad that a couple of developers (this is back when companies had "President/Chief Engineer" titles) ordered in pizza for everybody. We walked in, sat down, ignored the ARA food and waited for the pizza delivery guys to bring 100 cheese pizzas. Apple got the message--the next year, the food was better and one day Apple bought the pizza.

So the food is definitely better. One interesting thing, also, is there is evening food. I remember that the conference used to shut down around 6:00PM and you were on your own. Now, if you're going on the cheap, you can snack heavy pretty much every night, which saves on the food bill.

My biggest complaint with WWDC is that I don't drink coffee or eat donuts in the morning--I'm not a morning food person. I like my caffein the way I like my women--cold and yellow. That means Mountain Dew, baby! But there are no caffeinated soft drinks in the morning--they don't usually come out until after the first session. So I pick up a bottle of Dew on the way. Not a huge deal...

The Swag Issue is variable--there are good years and bad years. But since they moved to San Francisco, it has proceeded downhill. I don't mean things like iSights and such--that is the exception, not the rule. For me? T-Shirts! Gotta have T-Shirts!

The best year was probably 2000(?) when they introduced Mac OS X. If you didn't come out of there without a half-dozen Mac OS X shirts of various types, you were a complete loser. I think my personal best year was 1999, but that was because somebody left the T-shirt cart with all the Apple Employee shirts sitting unattended at the Beer Bash.

The one thing I miss from San Jose is the conference shirts. Back in San Jose, if you wandered over to the right people at about 2:00PM on Friday afternoon, you could talk them out of two or three extra conference shirts. Since they moved it to San Francisco, they send the shirts back to Apple on Thursday (I think they stick them on the bus with the attendees). And the people behind the counter will not give out extra shirts--period.

Speaking of San Jose, one convenience of San Jose also was it's proximity to Apple. So rather than waiting around for the bus, you grab two other developers and split a cab to the Apple Campus right after the last session. The cab ride would be about 50 bucks, so you split it three ways (or find someone with a very forgiving expense accountant) and you end up getting to the Company Store before everybody else. I'd hate to think of what a cab ride from Moscone to Cupertino would be--even split three ways!

I dunno. Maybe San Francisco is more expensive to run a conference in, so they've gotten more anal about stuff.

Well, this rant isn't as horribly bitter and abusive as I'd expected it to be. But I think you do yourself a disservice by your discoursiveness - stay on topic, stay on point, and your points will be easier to read and digest, and you'll have a better chance of people actually, you know, paying attention to them.

And incidentally, every single Apple bug I've ever filed, ever, is currently open, with zero comments from Apple. The first is from 2004. Annoying, to say the least. It's very rare that I'll now spend 30 minutes of my time to file a bug with Apple when I get absolutely no validation from doing so.

Damn it, sorry about the double post (my first ever in the history of my internet usage!!!). Router is flakey.

"First, the Human Interface Guidelines are not rules and, believe it or not, they do change."

HIG are not laws but they are rules. And if Apple could respect them a little more, I could respect Apple on this matter.

Regarding Bug reporting, "can not be reproduced" is probably the most irritating Apple's sentence after "Description forthcoming".

Um, macg? Rosyna is a dude. (As in male.)

I am a longtime user of Unsanity products and admire same. But this type of RAMBLING, INSANE posting raises doubt about the Co. As a happy user and Mac consultant I hope none of my clients see this post and wonder if the products are the same.

Peter, if I had been drinking something while reading your post, I would have spat it all over the monitor.

Yes, the *real* food at WWDC last year was scores better than previous years. But the food that matters to me, the junk food, was the worst it had been since I started attending WWDC.

I'm not saying that violating the HIG is always bad, just that Apple should stop contradicting it just to "experiment". Drawers are evil, the Mail.app toolbar is unexpectedly blue, and metal seems like a fad.

But there are some things, like the unified toolbar and the HUD windows that are good "violations".

raymond, did you read the second paragraph or just the title and then see the length and assume it was a typical negative nelly post?

Wow!!! I am not a developer and could even Applescript my way out of an unlocked handcuff if my life depended on it, but I read this whole frelling thing... Gods I need a drink!

Raymond, maybe only being a Mac user and consultant doesn't open you up to the world of developers, but these are long standing complaints within the developer community. If you go search for the video of Evening at Adler you will see Rosyna as well as other top developers such as Brent Simmons, Wil Shipley, Jason Harris, Gus Mueller etc all saying pretty much the same things

Haven't finished reading this yet, but I want to note a quick correction before I forget:

The URL scheme for Radar bugs is not "radr:", it's "rdar:".

Also a note on style: it's not helping you. If this post hadn't been recommended-via-link by Brent, I would probably have stopped reading halfway through the 'incest' paragraph at the beginning. As it is, I did stop, had breakfast, then decided to continue. You are raising valid points, but the way you raise them screams "chip on shoulder" and sometimes even "crank".

I spent several years as a listmom (of Apple's "MRJ-Dev" Java list) and I think I did a good job; but I can tell you that in such a role the people you pay the most attention to (in a good way) are the ones who write clearly and, however negative the content might be, don't rant or flame.

Now I'll scroll up about 10 pages and finish reading the post...

the Radar application registers bother radr: and rdar: so both are valid.

I'll have to disagree with you on the list-moms issue.

I have zero desire to make my inbox a place for random other developers to 'let off steam'. Rants on a list are similar to trolls. They set off a firestorm of off topic, opinionated, content-free posts. Even worse if I care about the topic - I consider a programmer's list to be 'work-related', so I'll read it while working. A ranty post that sucks me in will distract me from doing work. I also have not seen this 'get it out of the list's system' effect you mention.

Weblogs, on the other hand, are an expected place for rants. :-)

As a side note, Aki Inoue answers tons of hard font question on cocoa-dev. I looked through my archives, and the first unanswered font post from you I see on cocoa-dev[1] appears to (a) ask for hidden implementation-type info, (b) comes off as vague and a bit combative, especially given the (probably undeserved?) reputation you have for cocoa slamming. I think you have a totally valid question, but you've phrased it in a way that may discourage response. No need to increase the activation energy required for someone to decide to answer you.

[1]: http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa/2005/6/1/137551

See, that's what's great about it being a mailing list. You can opt to get the list messages in digest form or you can just outright ignore emails either by ignoring them or marking their author as going straight to /dev/null. On some of the more open lists, this is exactly what has happened. The people reading the list get to decide what is inappropriate for themselves. And others should not be punished for your inability to do work. (smiley face thingy)

Do you seriously have all your mailing list email go into your inbox? I think you should invest some time into making filters.

I don't often ask font questions on cocoa-dev with that one being a noted exception. Well, except for asking why the changeFont: delegate method doesn't, has never, and still doesn't work....

And that opinion of me is deserved. It just ticks me off when people won't bother to accept a perfectly valid solution to a problem just because it isn't cocoa. Like getting the size of the screen in inches. NSScreen can't do it so people were going on and on about how it isn't even possible. But CGDisplayScreenSize() exists and gives you the size of the screen in millimeters. Not possible by butt.

I don't often agre with the rants here, but this one hits many nails right on. I've filed maybe 4 bugs with Apple, two marked duplicates, one that they claimed was "Engineering is no longer able to reproduce this with Apple Remote Desktop 3", and a link to purchase it! Bah. My last bug rdar://4188127 remains open over a year after I logged it, with only one "please send us the output of a command" to come out. Maybe it'll be fixed in Leopard.

Patrick, yeah, that's the thing that annoyed me most. You file a bug, they fix it, then they want you to buy the new version to confirm it. How nice.

Stepane, why didn't you return the DTK yet and get an official ICBM from Apple for free?

Someone above suggested that Apple does user testing? Ha ha ha ha ha ...

Back in the 80's and early 90's Apple did usability testing in labs. These days? Those groups are gone. I've worked at Apple on and off since 1997 - nearly a decade - and have never seen any evidence of it. What Apple has is good graphic designers, smart engineers (most of whom understand HI design), and a base of dedicated QA folks who complain if the interface doesn't work for them. No actual users are ever consulted at any step in the process.

In a nutshell, that's why Apple's approach sometimes breaks down and they create horrible abominations. QA folks are not a perfect substitute for end users; they are either more or less expert than users. And since they see the product during development, they grow accustomed to new interfaces and such over time -- while the end users have it sprung on them like a nasty surprise.

Apple also has Steve Jobs. But the less said about that guy, the better.

By the way, I wanted to clarify what I meant by QA folks being "more or less expert" than the users.

Apple's applications which are designed for experts -- server administration, pro apps, etc -- sometimes have designers or QA folks who are less expert than the actual users, and that can result in a grossly simplified design. This frustrates the expert users, who wonder why on earth Apple would bother creating such a cruddy and limited interface that breaks down so often and fails to meet their needs in real-world situations.

Meanwhile, Apple's applications which are designed for ordinary people -- Mail, iApps, etc -- have QA folks who quickly become power users, and therefore have a much deeper understanding of the domain than a regular user would. These QA folks become skilled at pretending that they don't know how to get around a problem, ie, simulating an actual user, but because they are only pretending it's not quite the same as doing actual user testing. They can easily overlook problems which half an hour of focus-group testing would have discovered.

In short, QA folks are not the same as users ... even though many organizations, including Apple, try to pretend they are.

I wish Rosyna had more experience with Microsoft before making this a comparison piece. Without this, a list of grievances with Apple would have been more appropriate.

The passing acquaintance with Microsoft and their developer relations seems like a case of the grass being greener on the other side. I consider Microsoft to be, first and foremost, a marketing company. They have shown time and again that they can charm the pants off of wide swaths of the consuming public, but they typically fail to deliver on many of their promises.

It would have been compelling if Rosyna had gotten deeply enough into M$'s developer world to find out whether their packaging of the services, etc. lives up to the pretty talk, or whether it falls flat. (Guess what my bet would be.)

I take the complaints to be generally valid constructive criticism of the way Apple deals with its serious developers. As much as a "fanboi" as I am, I can't find much to scream about -- this piece is not your typical Dvorak crap.

I'd LIKE to develop some software and I have the ideas of what it should do for my business. I'm a long time Apple user (4-digit Apple ][+, 1979) and when I read this article, I wonder if I have anything on what it takes to be a developer. Discouraging to say the least.

But, it is not only Apple. I currently run a mail and parcel centre and dealing with couriers and Western Union leads me to believe that the old comment about the infinity of the universe, hydrogen and stupidity (and not really believing in the infinity of the universe or hydrogen) is true.

I know I've done a few rants to our reps on things that affect us. It wasn't posted in public, but one of my rants (about 3 pages of email) did eventually go up the chain from the rep to head office and the head office even called and talked to me about the issues. Was anything done on it? Not so far, but sometimes getting an ear is one thing to calm you down a bit. Time will tell if anything does get done, but I'm sure not going to hold my breath waiting.

The big companies are the ecosphere and we are but gnats living off of the ecosphere. If one of us disappears, it is hardly noticable, so the big company doesn't really care at all. It is only when one of us gnats grows large enough to affect the big company (ie. Adobe, Microsoft) that they get taken seriously because now the big company is affected by another big company.

Or, if ALL of the gnats that help the ecosphere grow were to simply move to a different ecosphere would the big company notice. Then that affects the ecosphere and the big company can not survive if no one supports it, but by then it is probably too late.

Such is the wonders of the universe as we all try to be big companies. Some succeed, some keep trying, some burn out in trying, some people and companies are just very trying for the rest of us.

Best of wishes to all the developers on their products, projects and have a good time at the upcoming WWDC.

1. "HIG are not laws but they are rules" -- I think they might be guidelines
2. If you are at WWDC and you eat lunch in the Moscone Center you are truly missing out, SF has some of the best restaurants in the country
3. If you think WWDC is a marketing event, casually mention it to someone in line at an Apple Store with an iPod box and wait for the blank stare
4. If you don't think WWDC is a marketing event, check out Apple's org chart -- DTS is a division of Marketing
5. Relax, man! You have the best job in the world -- you make Mac software

I actually read this entire piece twice while on a long international flight (one of the few with inflight internet access). I have more than a passing familiarity with many of the issues you raise, and they are important. Presenting it in its current form, though, makes them look like they're from the mind of a delusional, somewhat demented person (which you aren't...I assume). Cut out all the sidebars and extraneous crap, i.e., edit the hell out of it, and then submit it to the powers that be and just maybe, you'll get some results. In its current form though, it won't even get read by those folks, let alone catalyze any of the changes you rightfully point out as being absolutely necessary.

The medium is the message, Rosyna. Come on, do it right. If you need a copy editor, I'll be happy to help.

ishan, while I appreciate your comment. I can assure you that I am a very demented, delusional person. Just ask anyone that's seen the links I usually paste.

ishan's point (and mine earlier) is that, in its current form, this article is nothing but mastubation as it's too bizarre to affect change.

Trim it substantially and it might make actually make a difference. As it is now, it's just a vanity press.

The swag so far this year is worse than last. The bag feels much cheaper, it's a lot smaller. Not even sure if it will fit my 17 inch AlBook. The pen is also gone this year.

Shame shame. You leave Apple looking pretty bad and only report on a fraction of what MS does for devs. Certified Parter program, Action Pack, TechNet Plus. Empower Program....

http://pcversusmac.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1183

When reported in full, Apple looks even worse. Canceled my ADC years ago and went with MS and the finances have never looked better.

"Stephane, why didn't you return the DTK yet and get an official ICBM from Apple for free?"

Oh, it's been exchanged. It's just that I haven't sent back the DTK yet.

i used to delicious library to manage DVDs and iSkysoft DVD-Library to backup DVDs