Re:macOS 10.15 Vista
by derefr on Friday October 11, 2019 @07:48PM
(#21229426)
> iOS and macOS is basically the same OS.
Sure, but when people talk about "macOS being neglected", they're referring to a neglect of work put into the things that are uniquely macOS: multi-user support (better Fast-User Switching; better Screen Sharing; OpenDirectory et al; AFS back when that was considered a good idea; Server.app features); workstation productivity (evolution of the windowing paradigm seems to have stopped after Mission Control was introduced); fault-tolerance features like Time Machine; treating non-sandboxed (incl. POSIX CLI) apps as first-class citizens; and, well, any updates at all to the natively-desktop apps like Finder and XCode.
When was the last time you saw Apple announce a new feature of an app that exists only on macOS? Or announce a new OS feature that only makes sense, design-wise, on a desktop? They used to do both of these pretty frequently. The only things I can name from the last two releases are tabs (Finder) and dark mode (macOS generally.) Those are pretty small beans.
Oh, and there was also the whole NeXT-y paradigm of document bundles, Spotlight discovering app bundles and registering their file-type handlers and provided components, etc. That seems to have been lost in the shuffle—maybe the people responsible for it have all left. Remember QuickLook plugins? Remember when Preview worked on basically every file-format that you would run into on the internet, rather than not even knowing how to display a WebP?
Sure, but when people talk about "macOS being neglected", they're referring to a neglect of work put into the things that are uniquely macOS: multi-user support (better Fast-User Switching; better Screen Sharing; OpenDirectory et al; AFS back when that was considered a good idea; Server.app features); workstation productivity (evolution of the windowing paradigm seems to have stopped after Mission Control was introduced); fault-tolerance features like Time Machine; treating non-sandboxed (incl. POSIX CLI) apps as first-class citizens; and, well, any updates at all to the natively-desktop apps like Finder and XCode.
When was the last time you saw Apple announce a new feature of an app that exists only on macOS? Or announce a new OS feature that only makes sense, design-wise, on a desktop? They used to do both of these pretty frequently. The only things I can name from the last two releases are tabs (Finder) and dark mode (macOS generally.) Those are pretty small beans.
Oh, and there was also the whole NeXT-y paradigm of document bundles, Spotlight discovering app bundles and registering their file-type handlers and provided components, etc. That seems to have been lost in the shuffle—maybe the people responsible for it have all left. Remember QuickLook plugins? Remember when Preview worked on basically every file-format that you would run into on the internet, rather than not even knowing how to display a WebP?