Symless have also struggled because the CEO shut the company down in 2018 and for 2 years thereafter collected revenue while having no active developers (check GitHub) so he could pay a huge self-inflicted personal tax bill.

It is claimed Synergy 3 will arrive in 2022 or 2023, which I expect (no insider info) will likely be a lipstick-on-a-pig Electron UI around the same buggy core they've been prodding for 10 years without substantial enhancement.

Disclosure: I worked at Symless on Synergy 2, and added support for macOS media keys. Very little has been done in the last 5-6 years on core functionality.

> It is claimed Synergy 3 will arrive in 2022 or 2023, which I expect (no insider info) will likely be a lipstick-on-a-pig Electron UI around the same buggy core they've been prodding for 10 years without substantial enhancement.

They claim they are hiring Node.js and React developers to deliver something with "the rock-solid stability of C++".

So I'd wager you are correct with an Electron UI.

Was that tax bill why it went completely commercial around 2018 and why the company became headquartered in the Isle of Man? If so, how big of a tax bill was it and for what tax(es)?

In the UK company directors can borrow money from their companies, but if it isn't repaid after a certain duration a tax of 32.5% becomes due.

The public record[0] tells the story

      Year end April 2017:
        - Number of employees     : 6
        - Directors Loan          : £238K 
        - Balance sheet           : £154K
        - Tax due                 : £60K

      Year end April 2018:
        - Number of employees     : 8
        - Directors Loan          : £999K (prev rolled over)
        - Balance sheet           : £736K
        - Tax due                 : £303K

      Year end April 2019:
        - Number of employees     : 2
        - Directors Loan          : £1.27M (prev rolled over)
        - Balance sheet           : £1.1M
        - Tax due                 : £307K

      Year end May 2020:
        - Number of employees     : 1
        - Directors Loan          : £253K (£1.1M has been repaid)
        - Balance sheet           : £227K
        - Tax due                 : £15K

Repaying the loan would have allowed for the 32.5% tax owed by the company to be reclaimed, then regular corporation tax of 19% and personal dividend/income taxes would have been paid.

My theory is that his directors loans were fully invested in personal assets (or spent), which explains why the tax wasn't ultimately paid in 2018/19. So he nerfed the company so his tax bill could paid from revenue earned between mid 2018 and early 2020. This fits with the fact that he only started rehiring seriously in 2020.

Customers effectively paid for unmaintained open source software during this time. Now of course, on the website, he brags about how much he loves customers.

I can't speak for the IoM move specifically. I know the CEO has familial connections there, but I'm sure the confluence of tax advantages helps.

[0] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Barrier[0] is a free Synergy fork from before they went commercial. Though I'm tempted to try the commercial version just for something easier to use.

[0] https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

I have a license for Synergy Pro, and they've stopped pushing users to use the garbage broken Synergy 2 which has always had enough issues to prevent me from recommending it, now users are directed to the latest Synergy 1 release, which works great for me across Windows, Mac, and Linux. (Always has...)

It was $5 iirc. I got more than what I paid for out of it. No hard feelings to those that I'm sure worked hard and put a lot of effort in on Synergy 2 once long ago. It wasn't meant to be. It won't be released in 2022 or 2023 either LOL, not in any kind of shape that you want to use, (or I'll gladly eat my own shoe leather in atonement for my heavy but informed skepticism.)

Apple technologies in general are great when they work, but entirely impervious to troubleshooting.

(Not) unlocking iPhone with Apple Watch when wearing a mask was driving me crazy in iOS 14.5. It worked two or three times and then stopped working until I disable/enable this feature.

Thanks god they fixed it in 14.6

I've found that I have to hold the watch very close to get it to work.

I'd think that they intended it to be on the same wrist as the hand holding the phone, but does anyone do that? I'm left handed and wear watches on the right wrist, and that pattern is practically universal in my experience.

Not in my experience: Watch on my left and iPhone in my right. Seems to work all the time, haven’t noticed any issues thus far.

I am right handed and wear apple watch on the right wrist from the day 1. :) But yeah, it's rare.

Also, I really tried to find any technical details on how close Apple Watch should be for this feature to work, but with no success.

I upgraded my 2017 macbook to Big Sur and the OS doesn't detect camera anymore. I tired 10 different things from checking permissions, reseting SMC and VRAM. No dice :/

I had similar issues, and tried the same to no avail. The only thing that worked was a complete reinstall of the operating system. Am guessing you might need to do the same.

I was paralyzed with panic when my mac randomly shutdown, and did a 1 hour update, thinking it was upgrading to big sur.

Thankfully it was something else, and I was able to keep catalina.

I refuse to be a QA engineer for apple for no pay. Running one OS version behind has worked really well so far.

fwiw, I was of the same opinion and update cadence, but then just installed Big Sur (from Mojave) and it's been totally fine. The only exception is that Omnifocus 2 bugs out a bit and shows a graphical artifact that they refuse to patch.

It’s not a great sign when the earliest OS X success dev success story is refusing to patch bugs :(

That’s a sincere frown. I don’t use Omni’s apps but I’m really disappointed that the high quality of the Mac app ecosystem is basically gone.

I agree, although in fairness they've come out with a v3 that's fully supported. Since it's only marginally different, and aesthetically less appealing, I haven't bothered buying it.

Exactly this. Advanced tldr; I spent 2 years struggling with the inability to troubleshoot Apple's problems to help track down horrific bugs.

AirDrop from my iPhone XS to my Early 2019 iMac had always been hit-or-miss. It would usually take 3-5 times of tapping the iMac icon in the Share -> AirDrop menu before it would actually work and deliver the payload between devices. For the longest time I gave up on trying to use AirDrop… and this is only between my own devices sharing the same Apple account.

Another example was Universal Clipboard between the iMac and iPhone. It always worked in one direction (IIRC macOS -> iPhone), while the opposite direction (iPhone -> macOS) rarely worked. It made trying to copy/paste between devices such a chore that led to disappointment so often it wasn't worth trying anymore.

Finally, unlocking my iMac using my Apple Watch (Auto Unlock). It so frequently fell flat on its face that it simply became another frustrating pain point. It would unlock properly once or twice, then it would stop working. Unchecking/rechecking the option in macOS preferences did nothing, and in fact caused the System Preferences pane to glitch/hang/timeout.

I've always been on the same Wi-Fi network, with Bluetooth permanently enabled on both devices. Then… very recently–sometime in the last 1 or 2 months–I noticed that using AirDrop began to work the first time… every time; suddenly Auto Unlock stopped glitching and failing; and wouldn't you know it, Universal Clipboard also worked every time in either direction.

Note that all of the above features share something in common: they certainly all use the same underlying framework/library to communicate between Apple devices. AirDrop, Continuity, Handoff, Auto Unlock, Universal Clipboard. These all deal with passing payloads between devices; worse, they depend on Bluetooth, which has got to be the most unreliable wireless protocol ever invented. Bluetooth stacks have always been a goddamn nightmare; far too many different hardware, firmware, and operating system software/driver vendors implement their own versions of the specs, and they don't play well together.

I would put money down that Apple found and fixed a bug in either a) the framework/library that handles all of these features, or b) their Bluetooth firmware/software stack. Something was fixed quite recently that suddenly made all of these features go from being completely unreliable to working like Magic™. It took them a very long time to locate and fix this, likely because their users have absolutely no way to help troubleshoot these features. It either works, or it doesn't; and if it doesn't, you're out of luck.

I'm still sticking with the Apple ecosystem. There are some horrific bumps here and there along the way, but if I compare what I have now to what I'd have on a Windows 10 machine… not a chance in hell I'm going back. Hot damn, everything that's dropping this fall is going to be incredible. Well, at least once they iron out all the new bugs that will surely come with the amount of features they're introducing.

> It either works, or it doesn't; and if it doesn't, you're out of luck.

In a lot of ways that's my biggest complaint with a lot of "Apple ecosystem magic". I just want them to design all these interesting features -- and even the more basic uninteresting ones -- with a recognition that no matter how seamless they try to be, sometimes they will fail, and that they should fail in ways that are neither invisible nor inscrutable. While I think this problem has been getting worse over the years, in no small part as the systems get more complex, "pretend things never fail" has been a long-standing problem with Apple's engineering culture.

Comments like this make me feel like core software quality is rotting across the board. On my Windows 10 computer the start key on my keyboard does not reliably open the start menu for the first 30m or so after a cold boot and will sometimes fail at other times. Sometimes when the menu launches it's missing the search pane, or missing the files pane, or missing the left pane. This is the start menu failing, a key component of windows since 9x. I have a cluttered desktop, and sometime in the last month or so I hit some unknown limit where now loading the desktop as a folder from explorer takes forever and hangs explorer. To load a list of files and folders.

But as of the update automatically installed today, there is a pointless weather widget added to my taskbar, and clicking on it opens the news? That's a core feature of the desktop OS?

Computers and software are getting more and more broadly capable but it feels like a high level of quality is not being maintained across that broad scope, even on the essentials.

> there is a pointless weather widget added to my taskbar, and clicking on it opens the news?

I reached the question mark at the end of that sentence… and I felt that single question mark so deep within my soul. Clicking the weather widget opens the news……… "?".

Some of the most useful fundamental functionality doesn't work either, running windows 10, you can't filter in task manager. It irks me to no end that this isn't possible. Try finding a misbehaving program on windows, you need third party tools to get anywhere.

> Try finding a misbehaving program on windows, you need third party tools to get anywhere.

I don’t think that's true since they bought SysInternals in 2006 (tools are still downloadable: https://docs.microsoft.com/sysinternals/downloads/sysinterna...)

So I use Process Explorer, but I've not noticed it having a filter? It has a find, which is something, but I mean actually filtering a list should not be that problematic in this day and age? The reason I'm making the distinction is that find returns a list of handles, and then you can't do anything with those handles directly, you select them which then takes you back to the handle within the greater list of processes. It all feels pretty clunky. I am willing to admit there may be subtleties that I'm missing =)...

Sometimes moving icons around in the Windows start menu breaks the menu in strange ways with icons overlapping one another or disappearing altogether. This has happened across multiple completely heterogeneous machines.

yeah, also they made something like capture a screen recording with the desktop sound a thing that it's not for everyone.

As others have said, Synergy's problems are not technical but management. The guy who runs Symless isn't terribly good at business, no offense to him. the product is chronically mismanaged. Multiplicity from StarDock is Windows only but manages everything Apple's product does, too. There are open source VNC apps that handle copy/paste and DnD, it shouldn't be hard to at least look at that code as a guide, but without a good developer, Symless is rudderless.

Highly recommend Synergy for moving between Mac, Linux, and Windows seamlessly. It's a first day install for me on a new system

Used synergy in the past, but recently read that Barrier is the one to use these days. I installed it and it works.

I've used Synergy on both Windows->Windows and Windows->Mac. With a Macbook Pro 2015. It's really unpleasent due to constant stuttering, unless you connect to Ethernet. This is a known issue, it's appently due to airdrop. The OS switches the modem to a different channel to check for new devices or something, and then switches back. Although it does it fast enough to maintain network connections but anything real-time just looses control for a moment. Other wifi laptops seem fine. (Using same Wifi version)

The "easy" fix for this, if you have spare Ethernet ports, is to put a dedicated switch between the machines. I'm using Synergy right now, with peripherals on my Windows game machine (where having them connected directly is beneficial), but driving a MacBook most of the time. I have a cheap 4-port gig switch between the machines so that Synergy doesn't have to go over WiFi. The machines both use WiFi for all their Internet traffic. The switch is also great for VNC and SSH between the machines. I don't think Airdrop has any real effect; WiFi just has higher latency, more variable latency, and more packet loss than a switch will have.

Copy/paste works for me between Windows and Mac in Synergy.

Works flawlessly with no special setup between Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

synergy1 already has both drag and drop and copy and paste and I use those daily. However DnD doesn't seem to work between GNU/Linux and anything else.