I installed Mavericks on my MacBook Pro at work. It has been a very bumpy ride. I really wanted multiple monitors to work better, and it does to a point. I have been able to unplug from my second monitor at my desk, move the laptop to a conference room, connect to the TV there and have it mirror the image then reconnect to my monitor when the meeting was over and have it restore the window positions. That is awesome.
The problem? If my machine goes into a deeper sleep, say when I lock and close it for the night, the next morning or maybe even after an hour lunch and an app window will be hosed. Outlook will disappear into the upper corner and you can move it but no resize it. I have to kill the app and start it back up. It has happened to Chrome, Outlook and VMWare fusion so far. Can't find a definite pattern but it sucks when it happens.
I installed Slate which allows me to take a snapshot of my desktop and restore it. I still have to kill Outlook as the restore is not strong enough to put it back where it belongs but after I restart Outlook doing a restore puts it back on my primary monitor sized correctly. I really hope they fix this mess with an update to the OS.
Next up is Apple decides to wipe out or install older versions of tools such as perl, java, etc. The way the base operating system works is you install common libraries and other tools use them. Of course if you have an old library version things go bad. Also if it used to find the library in one place but it moved then things stink too.
I use xml-grep a lot. It was not working post Mavericks. I updated perl and it still did not work. I reinstalled Twig and no go. I looked at where it was attempting to load things and they did not sync up. I ended up doing a copy + paste of the XML/Twig stuff from one perl directory to another. While doing all this fun something dropped a skeleton .bashrc file in the root directory which load before my .profile so iTerm did not have the proper settings.
MacPorts did not work for the first few days after Mavericks came out. They fixed that pretty quickly but it was failing on the SVN 1.8.4 update. I finally just downloaded the tar file and put it where it wanted and was able to move on. Right now MacPorts is updating and installing as expected but I know they got bit by another Apple tool shift.
Look, DLL hell was no fun on Windows. Most ended up including their DLL copy in their own directory. I did not run into issues upgrading Windows like I have on the Mac. Yes, this only applies to developers (probably) as most folks are not dealing with command line tools. Heck the graphic artist I have worked with had never seen this magical terminal window I spoke of. The problem is Apple is just not very developer friendly which makes me mad at them and hard for me to recommend them to family members.
At this point I am back up and running. I have to kill programs at least once a day to get them back visible on the screen and not is some weird docking mode. That has the potential to affect a lot more than just developers. I am sure I will get bit by another command line tool that is not working as expected soon enough. I am trying to get past all the surprises so I can just do my work.
Showing posts with label problems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label problems. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Mobile app usage and development - do you just have to magically know what to do?
The more mobile development I do the more I am finding you are just expected to know things magically. There are very few help screens, tips of the day or on screen tutorials. There are so many potential gestures in any app that you need to magically discover. What can we do to make this situation better?
A lot of apps allow swipes to perform an action. Swipe left to call, swipe right to text. Long presses may do something or bring up a menu. Some actions are instant and others prompt you but you are never really sure what will happen. Delete should prompt. Add a new item most likely does not need to unless it will cost money i.e. send a message or use your data plan or will take a long time to perform.
Some will answer the mobile device is so small and we all want to save on code size and people never use help or only use it once so skip it. The original apps were very small and had few features so that worked. News apps have a ton of features. We basically have computers in our pockets and we do a lot of work on them.
Do we need a standard "Cool Features" button showing quick help? Maybe it should show a standardized overlay on the screen to explain the swipes and long presses so people can get more out of our apps.
The other side of this is developer tools. They have a boat load of features too and a lot of their power is there but hidden from the coder. I know Xcode drives me crazy with its lack of right mouse button menus. I expect to be able to perform most actions a context sensitive menu. In general the menus are very terse. Want to add a view controller to a story board? Right click on the story board and you get zooming only options. You have to know to drag a view controller for the Utilities panel. But first the Utilities panel has to be visible. That is the only way to perform this operation. That is not friendly.
Speaking of the Utilities panel it has 6 tabs on it and I seem never to go to the correct one to do what I need. Do do nearly anything you shift between 2 or 3 of the tabs. Somehow I would like the most common settings on a single tab that I could define.
Right click on a segue control and you get zoom options but nothing associated to the segue. Click on the Scene Name in the left hand panel and nothing at all happens. I excepted the editor to scroll to that Scene. You have to click on a view of the scene for that to happen. Oh and it changes your zoom factor when you do that. Just scroll there! If I was zoomed out I want to stay zoomed out!
Is the layout of your windows wrong? Can you right click on something and fix it? No, you have to go to View -> Assistant Editor and pick the layout you want. I did not even know the window I was looking at was called Assistant Editor as nothing on screen indicates that. You can mouse hover over the toolbar button to find that out. Those same buttons are inconsistent. The first three toggle between modes of a view and only one can be pressed at any time. The next three toggle the visibility of views and any or none of them can be pressed but the two sets visually they look identical.
Highlight a word in the editor and hit Cmd+F most editors will automatically put the highlighted word in the search box but not Xcode. I get to copy / paste it up there. Heck I can highlight a word in Eclipse and just hit Ctrl+K to find the next occurrence skipping the Find prompt altogether.
Add files to a project and guess what? They are not flagged as needed to be added to version control. Why? Right click on them to add them and that menu is not there. I have to fire up SourceTree to add them to GIT for this to work. Xcode version control integration is crappy at best.
A lot of apps allow swipes to perform an action. Swipe left to call, swipe right to text. Long presses may do something or bring up a menu. Some actions are instant and others prompt you but you are never really sure what will happen. Delete should prompt. Add a new item most likely does not need to unless it will cost money i.e. send a message or use your data plan or will take a long time to perform.
Some will answer the mobile device is so small and we all want to save on code size and people never use help or only use it once so skip it. The original apps were very small and had few features so that worked. News apps have a ton of features. We basically have computers in our pockets and we do a lot of work on them.
Do we need a standard "Cool Features" button showing quick help? Maybe it should show a standardized overlay on the screen to explain the swipes and long presses so people can get more out of our apps.
The other side of this is developer tools. They have a boat load of features too and a lot of their power is there but hidden from the coder. I know Xcode drives me crazy with its lack of right mouse button menus. I expect to be able to perform most actions a context sensitive menu. In general the menus are very terse. Want to add a view controller to a story board? Right click on the story board and you get zooming only options. You have to know to drag a view controller for the Utilities panel. But first the Utilities panel has to be visible. That is the only way to perform this operation. That is not friendly.
Speaking of the Utilities panel it has 6 tabs on it and I seem never to go to the correct one to do what I need. Do do nearly anything you shift between 2 or 3 of the tabs. Somehow I would like the most common settings on a single tab that I could define.
Right click on a segue control and you get zoom options but nothing associated to the segue. Click on the Scene Name in the left hand panel and nothing at all happens. I excepted the editor to scroll to that Scene. You have to click on a view of the scene for that to happen. Oh and it changes your zoom factor when you do that. Just scroll there! If I was zoomed out I want to stay zoomed out!
Is the layout of your windows wrong? Can you right click on something and fix it? No, you have to go to View -> Assistant Editor and pick the layout you want. I did not even know the window I was looking at was called Assistant Editor as nothing on screen indicates that. You can mouse hover over the toolbar button to find that out. Those same buttons are inconsistent. The first three toggle between modes of a view and only one can be pressed at any time. The next three toggle the visibility of views and any or none of them can be pressed but the two sets visually they look identical.
Highlight a word in the editor and hit Cmd+F most editors will automatically put the highlighted word in the search box but not Xcode. I get to copy / paste it up there. Heck I can highlight a word in Eclipse and just hit Ctrl+K to find the next occurrence skipping the Find prompt altogether.
Add files to a project and guess what? They are not flagged as needed to be added to version control. Why? Right click on them to add them and that menu is not there. I have to fire up SourceTree to add them to GIT for this to work. Xcode version control integration is crappy at best.
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