I’ve never used Mail because I’ve never felt comfortable with Apple’s apps when it comes to long term data storage. Here Mail is said to delete data. This has happened before, IIRC. Someone in this discussion has written that their old downloaded podcast episodes were deleted on upgrade. In the distant past, Apple has also broken compatibility in data formats (for its iWork apps) and left those who upgraded with almost nothing.
Apple seems to focus too much on reinventing things, as if every app team gets a new (and inexperienced) set of developers each year and they see whatever is there as bad, incomprehensible code...so they write things from scratch, introducing tons of bugs and removing backward compatibility. Look at its app history and you’ll see a lot of work just thrown away every few years, only to be replaced with crippled applications that would take long to mature but aren’t allowed to.
Mozilla Thunderbird is “boring software”, and hasn’t made huge strides in UX in the last several years, but I trust it more than I would ever trust Apple Mail.
If I want “office software”, I have LibreOffice, which has its own issues in UX, but I can trust that it won’t drop backward compatibility at the drop of a hat.
If I want a browser, there’s Firefox. Safari 13 has become just ok now (from decent) because of the new extensions system that has junked all old extensions. It’s fine for firing up an ephemeral window, and it still provides the best battery life.
I feel the days of power users on the platform are numbered. I doubt if AppleScript and Automator will survive and be around in the next two years.
Is there any Apple app on Mac that’s been great and really improved in a stable manner?
> If I want a browser, there’s Firefox. Safari 13 has become just ok now (from decent) because of the new extensions system that has junked all old extensions.
To be fair Firefox did that recently with their transition to WebExtensions too, and Chrome will soon do something similar when they move to Manifest v3. Sadly all mainstream browsers have become "move fast and break stuff", mainly in their desperate bid to keep pace with the de facto standard that is Chrome. But most of them don't have browser dev teams the size of Chrome's...
Firefox’s transition to WebExtensions has caused pain to developers and users, but there was a warning for some years about the transition. I still don’t like where the WebExtensions API support is, and Mozilla hasn’t done much for erstwhile popular extensions like Tab Mix Plus and many others. The case with Safari 13, IIRC, is that extensions have to be developed in Swift and have lesser access than before.
While I get the privacy benefits with block lists that have been/are being/will be implemented in these browsers, the overall extensions scene doesn’t look very good. Hopefully Firefox will delay or not go with everything that Manifest V3 proposes, whenever that becomes standard in Chrome.
A counter-example I can think of is iPhoto/Photos, which seems to have just gotten better and better for me. But it is tightly integrated with iCloud so if you don’t use that I could see how you consider it to be getting worse and worse.
I recall the last version of iPhoto, before it was junked, was more powerful in editing. The Photos app that replaced it was heavily crippled and still doesn’t have some features that iPhoto had.
Apple seems to focus too much on reinventing things, as if every app team gets a new (and inexperienced) set of developers each year and they see whatever is there as bad, incomprehensible code...so they write things from scratch, introducing tons of bugs and removing backward compatibility. Look at its app history and you’ll see a lot of work just thrown away every few years, only to be replaced with crippled applications that would take long to mature but aren’t allowed to.
Mozilla Thunderbird is “boring software”, and hasn’t made huge strides in UX in the last several years, but I trust it more than I would ever trust Apple Mail.
If I want “office software”, I have LibreOffice, which has its own issues in UX, but I can trust that it won’t drop backward compatibility at the drop of a hat.
If I want a browser, there’s Firefox. Safari 13 has become just ok now (from decent) because of the new extensions system that has junked all old extensions. It’s fine for firing up an ephemeral window, and it still provides the best battery life.
I feel the days of power users on the platform are numbered. I doubt if AppleScript and Automator will survive and be around in the next two years.
Is there any Apple app on Mac that’s been great and really improved in a stable manner?