Broken APIs ... Has Mountain Lion broken something AGAIN?!

coolspot18 said:

Hi all,

Each upgrade with OS X seems to break a major feature, for example:

Snow Lion --> Lion: Rosetta, Spaces, and Samba.

• Rosetta caused some older apps to break
• Spaces was replaced with the something less functional
• Samba discovery APIs were removed causing some third party programs to stop working (i.e. PathFinder)

Is Apple butchering any APIs in Mountain Lion?

OS X upgrades seem painful in comparison to Windows (ironic).

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1. Apple said nothing about Rosetta staying forever, it was a tool to ease the transition.
2. To whom?
3. That sucked.

P.S. Windows and upgrades shouldn't be used the same sentence.

Upgrades aren't painful if you don't depend on companies that rely on outdated technology.

So far Mountain Lion hasn't broken anything major.

Comeagain? said:

Upgrades aren't painful if you don't depending on companies that rely on outdated technology.

So far Mountain Lion hasn't broken anything major.

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By that logic, the Model T shouldn't be allowed on the road because it doesn't have airbags. Not everyone wants to upgrade, or in the case of games, there is no upgrade. And it seems like with each OS X "update", it butchers more and more games.

thejadedmonkey said:

By that logic, the Model T shouldn't be allowed on the road because it doesn't have airbags. Not everyone wants to upgrade, or in the case of games, there is no upgrade. And it seems like with each OS X "update", it butchers more and more games.

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No, but there's a reason we've moved on from that. Again, don't upgrade if your games are that important to you.

Comeagain? said:

No, but there's a reason we've moved on from that. Again, don't upgrade if your games are that important to you.

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It's not always a choice of "not upgrading". For example, my apartment was recently broken into, and my MBP was stolen. I replaced it, but the new one can't run any of the old games except under Windows. Short of buying a used mac off of ebay, I'm screwed.

Reason or not, it sucks. And this is the internet, ergo I can bitch.

Of course, now that I've been forced to get rid of all my legacy crap - I am looking forward to a lot of ML features, much more than I was looking forward to Lion.

coolspot18 said:

[*]Samba discovery APIs were removed causing some third party programs to stop working (i.e. PathFinder)

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Path Finder works fine in lion.

Apple has screwed up everything. I suggest you move to Windows.

OS upgrades require developers to update their applications. It's been like this for decades.

SMB wasn't removed, it was rewritten from scratch, removing the dependency on the Samba project they once used. Spaces had no APIs to break, Rosetta wasn't an API either, it was a build of the frameworks to a different processor architecture.

So which API do you feel is broken in Mountain Lion ?

coolspot18 said:

Samba and Bluetooth are not outdated? Those two features were broken in Lion.

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Samba was removed because the Samba team moved to GPLv3 which prevents its use in a commercial OS - nothing that Apple could do about it

Samba Discovery

I use Pathfinder, actually.. Pathfinder helps me be more productive allowing me to make more money. Finder gets worse with each version of OSX as Cupertino continues on it's rampage to take the computing out of computers. Some of us actually still needs files and a way to manage them and share them. They are building that spaceship so they can be further out of touch with the actual user.

The lack of SMB/CIFS discovery in 3rd party programs on SL is pathetic. I wonder if we can install SMB/CIFS directly from SMB themselves? I'm looking into that this morning

I was so angry when I discovered my bluetooth earpiece no longer worked in lion (and my USB webcam would get ignored sometimes too). It will now connect, work for a little bit, then barf. At least it won't kernel panic now.

I really doubt mountain lion will fix bluetooth.

SMB became a licensing nightmare, so Microsoft and Apple had to move onto a new implementation of samba before they were ready to. SMBX is actually usable now.

coolspot18 said:

[*]Rosetta caused some older apps to break.

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No.
1. Rosetta is not an API.
2. Rosetta did nothing. Apple broke the compatibility, because the removed the necessary code from the mach_kernel, which was able to start the ppc - i386 translation.

coolspot18 said:

Is Apple butchering any APIs in Mountain Lion?

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As always idiots appear (no, not you) and say Apple removes Carbon from Mac OS X, which is a big joke, because the CarbonCore.framework is part of the CoreServices.framework and many Cocoa-functions use Carbon behind the scenes. And 64-Bit Cocoa-*ROTFLMAO*. Objective-C is very inefficient, and 64-Bit will not change this fact. And Apple likes compilers, which generate slow code:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macosx_lion_precise&num=6

They should use the Intel compilers or the GCC v4.7.

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Comeagain? said:

Upgrades aren't painful if you don't depend on companies that rely on outdated technology.

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Apple should give us an "invisible" virtual machine with a smaller version of Snow Leopard (compare this with the Microsoft XP-Mode). That would solve a lot of problems with "older" software.

Weird, my 3yr old Kensington BT headset works great with both of my MBA laptops running Lion. Never had an issue.

Also have no problem browsing Windows shares using Finder or ForkLift.

Maybe it was fixed in a patch - I only came in at 10.7.3 or 10.7.4. Previously only used Windows.

thejadedmonkey said:

It's not always a choice of "not upgrading". For example, my apartment was recently broken into, and my MBP was stolen. I replaced it, but the new one can't run any of the old games except under Windows. Short of buying a used mac off of ebay, I'm screwed.

Reason or not, it sucks. And this is the internet, ergo I can bitch.

Of course, now that I've been forced to get rid of all my legacy crap - I am looking forward to a lot of ML features, much more than I was looking forward to Lion.

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And if someone stole your Model T, would you complain to Ford about it?

since you mentioned samba, have they been doing any work for their dreadful custom smb implementation (or have they been too busy developing the notes app...)?

Anyone here connecting to an smb network? Has anything been done about problems with finding printers, inability to search shares, and the general sluggish performance of smb share in finder (to the extent that lion via ethernet is much slower than the ipad with a 3rd party smb app on wifi... )

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Mr. Retrofire said:

Apple should give us an "invisible" virtual machine with a smaller version of Snow Leopard (compare this with the Microsoft XP-Mode). That would solve a lot of problems with "older" software.

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Good luck with that. That was pre ios success apple when they gave a damn about their os x users, enough to support them with proper options and to allocate resources to do so. Support for older apps? Only ms is crazy to do so because it's windoze . They can't even be bothered to write a bunch of drivers for mac pros that can perfectly well handle ml with their gfx cards, and they 'll do software development for backward compatibility with apps? At the very least they could have allowed vm or parallels to virtualize os x, but they won't even allow that.

(good post btw, helped me understand a few things I wasn't aware of)

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itsamacthing said:

I use Pathfinder, actually.. Pathfinder helps me be more productive allowing me to make more money. Finder gets worse with each version of OSX as Cupertino continues on it's rampage to take the computing out of computers. Some of us actually still needs files and a way to manage them and share them. They are building that spaceship so they can be further out of touch with the actual user.

The lack of SMB/CIFS discovery in 3rd party programs on SL is pathetic. I wonder if we can install SMB/CIFS directly from SMB themselves? I'm looking into that this morning

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I might be wrong here (that is i might not have understood your request) but macports provides a samba port to os x.

blow45 said:

Good luck with that. That was pre ios success apple when they gave a damn about their os x users, enough to support them with proper options and to allocate resources to do so. Support for older apps? Only ms is crazy to do so because it's windoze .

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Not true.

First of all, the actual champion of backwards compatibility is Sun.

Second, Apple actually does give a damn about this stuff. The problem is that many, many developers depend on stuff that is never specified to be stable. And then when that changes, their apps break and they cry.

This is why on iOS, they actively reject apps that use private frameworks. I believe very few apps on iOS don't work in a newer version. Sure they probably exist where they depend on behaviour that is actually a bug, but there are relatively a lot fewer than on Mac.

Basically the only things on Mac OS X that consistently break are system tweaks. But stuff that only uses published APIs tends to work for a long time. For example, Filemaker Pro 5.5, made for Mac OS X 10.0, runs absolutely fine on 10.6.8. That's six releases of OSX and not even on the same hardware platform. (It's a PPC-only app though, so Lion finally kills it.)

Comeagain? said:

No, but there's a reason we've moved on from that. Again, don't upgrade if your games are that important to you.

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That's not really a response is it? It's part of the responsibilities of an os manufacturer to provide backward compatibility for their users or to EXPLICITLY declare that compatibilities they are breaking before getting that hard earned money from the user. $19.99 for what is essentially a service pack (no, notes and reminders don't cut it as an upgrade) might seem not that much but factor in say (modestly) 1/3 of the user base upgrading (20 mil macs) and it's $400,000,000 for apple. Does anyone here (anyone with any sense that is) think mountain lion justifies such a dev. cost? For what? Airplay? For staying a darwin kernel behind ios?

I don't really like ms, but that guy you have in your avatar (yeah I think he is a bozo too, but that's not the point) has made sure his company still supports windows xp, and games that run in windows 20 years ago can still run in windows. Windows 7 is also much much faster than vista, and faster than xp despite requiring more resources in some cases. It's thus extending the life of the computers it's being used on. Actually windows 7 extends the life of any intel mac it's going to be installed on and is much, much faster than lion. And that's not because new os's require newer hardware (that's a bunch of horse manure by anyone claiming this), because at the end of the day lion has brought a couple or so fancy ui tricks (versions), it's because unlike apple ms has been maintaining and optimizing their os, while apple hasn't.

Completely opposite of OS X. Core duo support has been dropped and most macs that used to fly on sl run like a dog on lion. And they are still going to be running like a dog in ml too. Because ml has done nothing to be a sl type release and optimize things in os x, it's just slap on features and some bug fixes, and maybe a tweak here and there to make up for lion's problems.

Let's put things in perspective boys, just cause we are in an apple forum doesn't mean we are all fanbois here, or we leave our judgement behind as soon as we start posting and reading at mr....

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CyBeRino said:

Not true.

First of all, the actual champion of backwards compatibility is Sun.

Second, Apple actually does give a damn about this stuff. The problem is that many, many developers depend on stuff that is never specified to be stable. And then when that changes, their apps break and they cry.

This is why on iOS, they actively reject apps that use private frameworks. I believe very few apps on iOS don't work in a newer version. Sure they probably exist where they depend on behaviour that is actually a bug, but there are relatively a lot fewer than on Mac.

Basically the only things on Mac OS X that consistently break are system tweaks. But stuff that only uses published APIs tends to work for a long time. For example, Filemaker Pro 5.5, made for Mac OS X 10.0, runs absolutely fine on 10.6.8. That's six releases of OSX and not even on the same hardware platform. (It's a PPC-only app though, so Lion finally kills it.)

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Remind sun's commercial os and it's installed user base please? Just cause we can't say that ms have been doing one thing very well, we have to find another example? Yes ms has by far the best legacy support and it dwarfs apple there.

I am not aware of the technical details you mention, but as a not so well informed outsider to actual development, may I ask why are they specified to not be stable to begin with? Are there alternatives to use other than the non stable counterparts? Because if not then their hands are tied I guess. And where do games fit in all that? In any case a virtualised sl mode won't be some kind of technical fit for apple to achieve, why are they not offering this option? God knows with just a 1/3 of the mac user base upgrading they can afford 400,000,000 in development. I am not sure ms will even make that money with $30 licenses to oems for a brand new os, and what with their own os still running perfectly well on older pcs and not being the dog that lion is on older macs.

JohnDoe98 said:

And if someone stole your Model T, would you complain to Ford about it?

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If the new model Ford's couldn't run on back roads, but the model T could, than yes. That would be Ford removing useful features, and it would be just as backwards as Apple cutting old API's.

Then don't upgrade. The whole point of a system upgrade is that something is new and improved.

Good heavens, manufacturers have been releasing OS upgrades for decades and there are always the same sniveling whiners who want their OS unchanged: If that's what you want, then don't change your OS.

Alameda said:

Then don't upgrade. The whole point of a system upgrade is that something is new and improved.

Good heavens, manufacturers have been releasing OS upgrades for decades and there are always the same sniveling whiners who want their OS unchanged: If that's what you want, then don't change your OS.

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Maybe you should be treating your fellow posters here with a bit more respect than to call them sniveling whiners for their real os usability problems. Way to misconstrue what someone said btw, I didn't here anyone saying they wanted the os unchanged. Welcome to the forums btw since you 've recently joined, I am sure you are going to be a very useful poster by attacking others just because you want to play apologist to apple. And I am afraid to say if you are not an apple stockholder (even if you are one, you are not helping them anyway) you really are a victim to feel you need to offend others and play apologist to apple because they aren't doing nothing for you other than taking their 40-50% margin off your money.