Low-Hanging Fruit ⇥ inessential.com

Brent Simmons, closing out a short list of fairly basic bugs:

So we have Apple Watch and Apple TV now. What I’m hoping for — what I’m nearly begging for, more as a user than as developer — is that Apple spend a year making things better. Nothing new. Just make things work better.

Even the new Apple TV and Watch have obvious shortcomings. The former has a bright white UI, which is pretty blinding in the kind of darkened room many people watch movies in. Siri also fails in places where you’d hope it would work, there’s no dictation for the keyboard, and the keyboard itself is an awkward long strip.

The Watch, meanwhile, doesn’t launch either first- or third-party apps fast enough to entirely work as a “glanceable” device.

Meanwhile, on my Macs at home and at work, twitter.com and t.co links regularly fail to load in Safari. It’s only those URLs, only since upgrading to El Capitan, and only in Safari — Tweetbot works fine. Baffling.

But I hold out hope. Earlier this year, Apple released an update to iTunes that made any database edit last about a minute. Change a straight prime to a curly quote? That’ll cause iTunes to hang for a minute. Making sure A$AP Rocky is listed as “ASAP Rocky” by editing the sort artist? Another minute of hanging. Deleting a track? That’ll cause another hang. Though this bug is at least five months old, I was very happy to discover this weekend that it has been fixed.

Similarly, I’ve found Mail on Yosemite and El Capitan to be way better than previous versions, and iOS 9 fixes a lot of the issues I ran into on iOS 8. I know not everyone’s experience has improved, but mine certainly has across all of my Apple devices.

My pet theory is that Apple is seeing fewer bug reports and support calls these days than, say, five years ago, but the bugs users are running into are more noticeable. I’m guessing the fallout from discoveryd didn’t spike Apple’s bug reporting system that much, but the issues it caused were infuriating, considering just how much of our computing is dependent on an internet connection.