There's a lot of hyperbole here. "Everything" doesn't break from release to release. I can name more apps that worked correctly after 10.5 than apps that did not. At the same time, I know that there were little bugs in many apps after release. (I'll comment as to why in a few moments here, cough cough ADC seeds . . .)

I don't think they shift as much these days as you seem to imply. Definitely in the earlier years of Mac OS X. Things do change from release to release still, of course, and sometimes it does affect developers adversely. Not always, but sometimes.

What does renaming an application have to do with "reinventing the wheel"? Renaming an application is a pretty trivial thing.

It's not really clear to me what you mean here.

Yay! NetInfo is finally dead, long live Directory Services!

In all seriousness, it looks like it was a good engineering decision moving forward. These articles come to mind:

http://www.macgeekery.com/hacks/software/netinfo_dead
http://www.afp548.com/article.php?st...LocalDirectory

There's a very, very good chance that Apple's long-term engineering strategy isn't very compatible with the older NetInfo technology, and when they finally saw an opportunity to move, they did. (And provided a ton of tools to help people use the new kit.)

That's definitely true. Mac OS X is very nimble platform and Apple makes the most of it by improving wherever they can. The downside of this is that in earlier releases of Mac OS X, there was a ton of API flux. Apple acknowledged this in the lead up to Tiger, and things have settled down since. The APIs don't shift like tectonic plates anymore, except when an older API doesn't meet the needs of current designs and it (or portions of it) become deprecated in favour of something designed to improve things.

Of course, but the sentiment of this statement is very different than what you said before, isn't it?

It's definitely a trade-off, and Apple's done well not to shake things as much as earlier versions did.

Oh, changes are always troublesome (though to what degree is always dependent on what kind of change and how you relied on the technology prior). But to imply that Apple is drastically altering everything left and right these days is way, way different than simply acknowledging that they do replace older with newer from time to time or that developers may have to update their software in response to changes made by Apple.

I was affected, too: Sandbox isn't Leopard-ready. I just haven't had the time to work on it. There isn't much I need to fix to bring it into Leopard, but I really need to fix some other things that will take a little more time when I go back into the source, so it's been pushed aside by other things.

The following statement doesn't apply to everyone, but it applies to a lot of developers:

The most common causes of incompatibilities when moving from one release to the next are incorrect assumptions or otherwise faulty designs on the part of the developer that become a problem when the underlying technology changes.

It's totally true that it's not easy for the indie devs. A big problem that they have is a lack of resources. One or two guys making the app, limited hardware configuration resources, and not enough QA resources. The indie guys do have it tough. So when Apple does change something that affects them, it might hurt indie dev A more than indie dev B.

Apple's pretty good at letting us know when things are being deprecated and providing new paths (the deprecation of FSSpec and introduction of FSRef, for example), and their documentation is typically sharp (unless you're a QuickTime C API developer, oops, sucks to be you guys) . . . but where third-party devs ran into problems during the push toward Tiger and Leopard was not getting the golden masters soon enough. For some unknown reason, Apple sat on the GM seed and it affected us sorely. This sucked.

I'm not saying that Mac OS X hasn't changed in ways that have affected developers, and I'm not saying that Apple's developer relations are perfect; I simply think that there was a level of hyperbole in TL's post that needed expanding on.

Yeah, I heard a bunch of people complaining about that one. That's a good example of when Apple does drop the ball.

I'm first going to say this--you people all seem to be on the same page, are you reading each others posts? Mikey-San? tlarkin was actually fairly balanced in his posts if you read the whole thing, he was just a bit dramatic at times. Using worlds like "everything" and "always" when "some" and "at times" probably would have worked better.

One thing I do take issue with:

I remember having a hard time running some Windows 95 programs on Windows 95, quite honestly. And most of the Windows 95 programs I have will not function on XP (granted, I don't exactly go out of my way to fix them and I don't have all that many.)

But, as Tlarkin said, change is good in some ways, and bad in others. It's absolutely true that the easiest development platform will be one that never changes. It's more stable, and it's easier to know all the tricks. But the again, how badly do we want to be programming on Windows 3.1? So a balance must be struck.

For my part, I like the constant evolution of OSX, but I'm not in IT, nor do I deploy OSX in a business setting. I have it for personally use, and the gadgets intrigue me, it's the same reason I like Linux, if I am to be honest.

But, the point of this thread is that Apple sometimes has a hard time owning up to the mistakes it makes. If it wants to be evolving all the time, then it needs to expect problems, and thus tech support must be top notch. And not just for developers, for all users.

Hey Zalister - I think you are right. There is a lot of commonality in what people are saying. We can complain about a lot of stuff of course with every company, and there will be good and bad people in every organization. It's not fair for me to presume because I had one bad experience its a "common problem".

And Apple is generally pretty good - their stores, their genius bars, and their products of course do stand out above many other options (ever try to get your Microsoft machine serviced or solve some technical problem?). But I do think that Apple grows bigger and more popular their service is suffering, which is probably inevitable.

But the reason I posted this originally is in taking responsibility - which is not a hard thing to do. Sure, not every tech support will know every problem - but when you raise the problem to them they sure as heck can do a search and see that 100's or 1000's of others are having similar problems.

In this particular case, iTunes 7.6 is causing a lot of problems for a lot of people - and in my case, and many other postings Apple staff have claimed it's the first they've heard of it.

Why can't they simply step up and say "there is a big problem, and we're working on it"?

AND: why does this denial extend to deleting questions about it from the Apple user forums?

OK, yes, I was using hyperboles. It is true. However, as a hobby I like to write and well, I can get carried away when doing so. However, I digress, what I stated is true to what OS X is, what it has become, and perhaps the future of what it will be.

netinfo is a pain, I know it, and everyone in my field (network administration) is rejoicing. I was using it as an example. To me, after learning netinfo and using it from 10.2 to 10.4 and relying on it, they just up and took it out. I haven't had to bound too many Leopard machines to my domain controllers except for a few and for the most part it is easy. However, using the dscl isn't the most intuitive way of configuring the directory. Also, they changed lots of utilities from 10.2 to 10.3. Again making administration a bit hard. It seems once I learn a method that is proven to work for me Apple up and changes it.

Just to give you an idea right now about what I am dealing with currently with all my Apple products I am supporting.

I have had about 300 macbook batteries die on me in the last month. Right now I have over 150 macbooks shipped out for repair. Over half of them being a failed hard drive. I white listed CS3 in the directory so all users could use the application, and when doing so the directory for some odd ass reason on three groups (three sets of 4 groups actually) it disabled every application but whitelisted only CS3. Not a huge deal and easy to fix, but it took about an hour for the ODRs to finally sync up with the ODM.

All of this is nominal in my opinion with the exception of the batteries and the HDs. I am stationed at one building in particular as well as the other mac IT staff. Overall, we have like 300ish batteries and 300ish HDs fail. To me that should send up a flag at Apple, however they seem to think it is normal behavior. 300 failures of out 6,000 macbooks isn't all that bad either. Everything has a failure rate, everything. Yes, Apples have flaws.

RE: Apple stores

I have had very mixed feelings about their "genius bar". Not only does it come off as sounding arrogant, they are arrogant. I have had to swap out products that were defective with them and they sit there and argue with me, and then treat me like I am some off the street customer that has no idea what I am talking about. Then I explain them that I admin over 6,000 macs and our organization spends millions with Apple. I hate having to explain that to get them to listen to me. I just hate retail stores in general though as well, so I am sure there is a bit of bias there.

I am thinking that it might be the same way that you are told not to say "I am sorry." when involved in a car accident. It's an admission of guilt that now makes you liable when the hungry lawyers come around.

It's safer for the wallet to say: "We fixed a big problem."

Controlling perceptions and protecting the brand.
Albeit in a very misguided manner...

I don't know the specifics of this case, but in general, Apple deletes posts from the forums when they diverge from the stated terms of use. The Apple forums are stated clearly to be for help requests, not for complaints, so as soon as someone starts to complain, they are violating the terms of use for those forums.

I was penning a reply to this, but the reply became extremely long and in-depth, so I'm reconfiguring it as a blog post. I'll post a link in the thread when it's ready. :)

It will cover this. :)

apparently, apple does give at least an idea of what fixes it's making when it seeds copies to beta testers. see this...