> However, I want to emphasize that my major goal here is to explain the > situation as it currently exists, so that you can more effectively work with > Apple to get what you want.
I for one appreciate your taking time (as usual) to lay this out for us and offer constructive suggestions about how to navigate the system effectively. If any of the longtime denizens of this list were ever put in charge of Apple, I’m certain our first official act would be to commission a ginormous bronze statue of you for the quad. Not to suggest you’re anything like alone among Apple employees I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with in your dedication and helpfulness, but as our ‘patron saint’ your remarkable and relentless energy and generosity (even as glory beckoned elsewhere) have been absolutely invaluable and indispensable to the grizzled weary oarsmen (uh, sorry Ann, oarspersons?) banished by mad gods to this ship of lost souls… ;-) Of course we have our own online system for tracking bugs built right into the apps, but in spite of this (as you of all people can doubtless appreciate) getting folks to actually use it is like herding cats (probably in no small measure because it’s under the Help menu, where alas Mac users are relentlessly conditioned to expect little but annoyance and frustration…). However if bug reports are really weighted the way you describe (rather than simply tallied) then I guess I need to figure out how to get them to complain more! Seriously though I’m sure we all grok priority. But systemic bias in what goes onto the scale inevitably distorts even careful measurement and triage. Though I can’t speak for other commenters, personally I’d ask only that when making these decisions the Powers That Be take a moment to consider a few simple points… First, none of us WANT to be here. We’re just stuck because we naively swallowed Steve’s self-serving fairy tale about Carbon, and now (frequently as a direct result) lack the resources to port our often hundreds of man-years worth of exquisitely tuned legacy code to Cocoa (at least not unless we want to spend literally the entire remainder of our waking lives in a coding trance with little realistic prospect of financial gain just to produce a Mac-only app that’s Unicode-savvy and slightly prettier but ten times bigger and slower and only runs on last year’s OS and up…). But we're also too emotionally engaged and personally responsible (and just plain stubborn) to simply throw up our hands and walk away, abandoning the tight-knit communities of users we’ve known for decades who've come to rely on us. In short we're invested to the hilt, have no Plan B, and so can’t help but take this stuff VERY personally... Second, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence (particularly if you insist on looking only where you expect to find it). It's cold comfort to learn Apple relies scrupulously (and in its view ‘impartially’) on a system we apparently all know hopelessly undercounts us (however unintentionally). Those whose oxen are being gored fervently believe that the ‘minor collateral damage' Apple regularly inflicts on them nowadays would seem much less minor viewed through the other end of that telescope, but like Galileo find it oddly difficult to persuade church authorities to actually look. Finally, when they write off new bugs added to old API just because it took a while for fickle winds to carry the wails and laments of the far-flung stricken to the ramparts of Cupertino, they may effectively be destroying entire ecosystems built up over decades around rich, powerful, and beloved apps now senselessly and wastefully crippled or rendered useless with the stroke of a key. Down the drain along with that goes the life’s work and livelihood of lots of nice people just as insanely dedicated to specialized Macintosh user communities that depend on them as you are (though probably less marketable, and with much crappier pension plans…). Extended online 'tribes' like these are where experienced users turn to offer or obtain answers and guidance regarding all things Macintosh, so the impact of torpedoing one typically extends far beyond the scope of the particular app in question because it deprives members of a vital ‘crowd-based’ knowledge resource that can’t easily be replaced. That kind of extinction-level event makes the overall Macintosh community poorer, weaker, sadder, angrier, more cynical, less diverse, less attractive, less enjoyable, and ultimately less viable and sustainable. It sucks hugely for all involved even when it’s genuinely necessary, but far more so when it manifestly isn’t. Though they’re admittedly challenging to quantify, if there’s no cells anywhere on your spreadsheet in which to somehow enter these factors then the answer it spits out is bound to be epically, tragically wrong at least some of the time almost no matter WHAT you plug into the ’# of radar reports’, ‘est. hours to fix’, and ‘potential code impact' fields. <<soap box back on shelf alongside 512K>> Thanks again, -Mark _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Carbon-dev mailing list (Carbon-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/carbon-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
