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Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

A lot of awful software shipped under Steve Jobs. X Code has always been a buggy mess, iTunes bloated greatly under Steve (remember Ping?), iMovie '08, etc etc.

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Yeah. The revisionist hero worship and sanctification of Steve Jobs has reached absurd levels since his death.

The Cult of Steve? It think it's actually declined a little.

That Isaacson book really leveled him for a lot of people.

OP is right about him not putting up with crap. Sure, not everything that came out of Cupertino was rock solid. But I think as much of an aesthete that he appears to be have been, it's also pretty evident that he was incredibly shrewd and knew he had to ship at some point.

The cruddy software might be coming from Apple repositioning itself from an innovation to a legacy brand. Acquiring Beats (can you imagine Steve championing this - lol), less of a focus on the high-end workstations for consumer electronics and watches, removing the grunt from high-end apps like Logic and FCP. Certainly no longer the underdog we root for, as the article points out.

> That Isaacson book really leveled him for a lot of people.

To me it actually had the opposite effect: after reading it I had a newfound respect towards Apple and Jobs. The book was honest and fair, I don't know why people think it does a disservice to him since everyone knew he was an asshole. This is coming from someone that avoids Apple products, FWIW.

That's the book that uncritically repeats Jobs' (completely bogus) claim that Apple invented the switching power supply.

http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-powe...

[ q.e.d. ... dang, c'mon dude. give it a rest. ]

Totally forgot about Ping. I love being reminded of old "features".

Its funny watching the announcements of these products now.

I just get sad seeing Steve with meat on his bones... We watched him wither away.

iTunes was hideous. I once tried to reverse engineer the XML that stored the library and concluded it must have been designed by a distracted intern.

Why reverse-engineer? The format (known as "Apple XML property list") has always been openly documented:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...

There are also many libraries available to decode and encode these files in various languages.

The reason why XML property lists look this way is that they were a direct translation of the older NeXT "property list" format, which was sort of like binary JSON. Dumping an alternating list of keys and values isn't pretty XML, but it ensured minimum translation headaches from the old format.

Right, so technical debt then.

It's still hideous. Case in point, although this is a combination of things I guess but, when I upgraded to a iPhone6S+ 2 months ago I backed up my 5s in iTunes then restored on the 6S+. 22 apps could not be restored, among them 6 of Apple's own apps.

Yes, good software applications from Apple have been the historical exception rather than the rule. Great hardware, good OS, mediocre software for the most part. This reflects the company's priorities as a hardware vendor: they make very little money from software, and hence have little direct incentive to put a lot of resources into it.

I don't agree with great hardware, if we're talking about durability and easily fixable. At least the Macbook line seems designed to fail after a number of years or be too expensive to continue fixing in favor of buying a new one. Apple products, besides the high end desktops, seem disposable, no matter how well made it looks.

Years is still a long time to measure the lifespan of a laptop. Plenty of less-expensive laptops fail at the one-year mark, some fail at two, some laptops equally as expensive as a Macbook will fail before five years are up. Some Macs fail before five years, some last beyond that.

And five years is a long time when it comes to computers.

Jobs didn't care about Xcode. iTunes was decent or even good. He hated social and reluctantly allowed Ping to go forward. iMovie is a tiny niche.

I agree with OP. There is no way Steve would have allowed some of the current stuff to see the light of day.

> iTunes was decent or even good

You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.

You clearly have never read his biography ;)

via an All Things D event:

> What’s more, thanks to the popularity of iTunes on PCs, Apple has become a major Windows software developer. “We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people who say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows,” noted Jobs. “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.”

That quip apparently caused Bill Gates to become quite angry:

https://books.google.com/books?id=6e4cDvhrKhgC&lpg=PA463&ots...

Steve Jobs publicly mentioning only praise about things Steve Jobs made? Unbelievable!

I can only conclude that the people sending such letters had only previously used GTK+ apps on Windows or something.

That may have been by design.

iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out (until about 4.0?). Compared to its contemporaries, Music Match, which was a bloated piece of junk, and Winamp 2.x which while awesome, had a steep learning curve to get really useful (J for the win) and had an extremely unpleasant UI.

> iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out

It forced a bundled QuickTime install (still does I believe), and back then, it tried hard to become the default media player on your system (even reverting your "no" choice after updates). This led many people to remove QuickTime, only to discover now their iTunes refused to work. It would fail halfway through sync's and upgrades of iDevices routinely, had a generally pretty buggy interface that wasn't very responsive most of the time. It's iDevice backup process was cumbersome for normal users, and often failed without the user knowing (leading to very upset individuals when they needed to restore but couldn't).

Now it seems every new version redesigns the UI in major ways, causing even long term users to not know what to click, etc...

If you really just listen to music, maybe it's fine. For all other purposes, it was/is horrible, however I can't complain because it generated quite a lot of work for my side repair/contract business back then.

> iTunes was awesome on Windows when it came out

Whip the Lama's A WinAmp is still better.

I had whatever version was around when the video ipods came around (and a bodgy bit of hardware that was). I couldn't sort videos the way I wanted to - itunes says that that file extension means "tv episode" instead of "movie"? Sorry, it's a tv episode. Not to mention the terrible UI with tiny targets that doesn't blend in with the user's desktop theming. Maybe that was v4+, but all I remember is hating to use itunes (including managing updates as already mentioned)

The software that went with Microsoft's Zune media player was amazingly good. Sadly, even though it was available separate from the Zune hardware, almost nobody downloaded and tried it.

iTunes sucks everywhere. And it's a horrible UX that it's needed for syncing an iPhone. A better UX would be just to plug it in and move things around.

| You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.

IME, every terrible thing about iTunes applies equally to both platforms.

It's worse on Windows. The Windows version would hash file names or something. Probably to get the search features working. So once you imported your files you didn't know what was what. The Mac version probably just uses spotlight and file names were always readable.

My iTunes library has made several round-trips across platforms and I've never encountered anything like that. My music, apps, books, and podcast files all have consistent, readable naming schemes.

iLife was very important to Steve, he dedicated a lot of time demoing the apps on stage. He was a huge fan of ripping out all the features of iMovie.

Same with iTunes (which has gotten a ton of criticism over the years), he was the one that kept cramming everything under the sun into it.

I don't know if he was as passionate about X Code, but he sure liked to brag about having the best development environment. Interface Builder in particular seems right out of Steve Jobs' brain (even if it sucks).

Here he is introducing X Code: https://youtu.be/Rh5spZrzu6c?t=59m3s

There are old videos of him speaking about development environment at NeXT (against Sun). Sir Steve did like allowing 'creation'.

Interface Builder is superb once you get the hang of it.

It does a great job of getting you from zero to an app, but it breaks down terribly once you try to do anything custom with it. The fact that it hides code from the developer drives me nuts.

Well it depends what you mean by custom. I create custom views all the time and its even better now we can render them 'live' in IB:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/recipes/xcode_help-I...

Ooh I forgot about that feature. It does at least answer my big problem with IB: you execute code you didn't write and can't read. I'll have to give live rendering another look.

I won't start a religious war here, but IB is awesome in demos and less awesome in real world. Versioning alone is enough to make you go crazy (especially back in the .nib days!).

I understand both sides of the argument - it took me considerable time to wrap me head around IB and for the longest time I just assumed I simply wouldn't "get it".

Interested to how you do versioning on UI with or without IB though. Personally I just maintain branches until an agreed upon design is in place.

Don't forget early OS X. So slow it was nearly unusable until performance improvements in 10.3.

Improvements of a new OS are happily received. However, we're talking about the reverse, deterioration of mature products.

What mature products deteriorated (apart from iTunes) and in what concrete ways?

Mail is much better than it was even a year ago, XCode too, the OS is stable...

And FCPX didn't deteriorate over 7 -- it was a written-from-scratch reboot of the platform that just happened to cut some features people used (most got back with a vengeance).

There a number of examples in the surrounding threads. I find most software getting worse these days on all platforms. See CADT: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

And most of that is simply looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.

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