How about fixing El Capitan first before you talk of doing anything else.
Did you actually listen to the interview? There was basically a PR interview around Swift going open source. There was very little discussion around how Apple is using it inside the company.
No, I just read the article and saw red at the mention of integrating El Crapitan features.
How about fixing El Capitan first before you talk of doing anything else.
I love these types of comments... OS X El Cap has been the best OS X that I believe Apple has ever released, especially with 11.2, and more than 100 users I support whom have upgraded to it agree with me...
Well that's just peachy for you, but El Capitan is no Snow Leopard. It might get there eventually but it's nowhere close yet. Someone else mentioned a couple days ago that there are innumerable threads on the Apple Users forums concerning people having serious problems with many aspects of El Capitan. When I moved - I won't say 'upgraded' - from Mavericks, I tried to migrate from a Time Machine backup. What I ended up with was El Capitan with no Finder, with it stuck in a loop saying the Finder had quit and is attempting to restart, several times a second. I spent a lot of time and several approaches but migration was impossible. In the whole process I think I ended up downloading EC about 6 times over a fairly slow broadband connection. I eventually had to resort to a clean install and then had to manually transfer everything from the backup.
Try this. In Finder, go to a folder with some Epubs listed sequentially. Select one and press the space bar to do a Quick View. See the cover image? Now press the down arrow on the keyboard. The text will change to reflect the next books details, as it should, but the cover image will not change from the original one displayed. That's just a minor niggle.
The Finder can't even handle utterly basic tasks like managing connected devices gracefully. Just today I was doing some stuff with files on micro SD cards. I kept getting a Finder error when attempting to eject the cards with it reporting an application was still using a file. I couldn't find any culprit and so closed all apps except the Finder. Still it insisted a file was in use so I had to force eject the cards. It did the same with the next card, even though no apps were ever opened, so I rebooted the computer. That seemed to fix the file in use problem but then when I went to eject the card nothing appeared to happen - no Finder warning, nothing appearing to have changed, the card still sitting there listed in the favourites panel of the Finder window. I even tried just highlighting the drive in the panel and on the desktop and doing a command E with no apparent effect. I then launched Disk Utility and the card wasn't listed so the card had actually been ejected at some point but the Finder hadn't updated to reflect the fact.
I have also had a couple OS crashes and there are other things, particularly with syncing devices via Bluetooth. I have Bluetooth earphones I mostly use with my Nokia phone. Turn Bluetooth on in the phone, turn the BT receiver on and and hey presto they connect and are good to go in about 3 seconds - every single time without fail and hundreds of iterations. Every single time I try to use the same earphones with my Macbook and I turn on BT, the earphones fail to show up in the BT menu as an available device and I have to then turn them off and turn then back on again and engaige pairing mode. Do they then appear in the BT menu list - oh no - you have to open the Bluetooth control panel to find them and then pair from scratch. There is another BT bug I won't go into.
My original query about the Finder crash loop never received a helpful reply.
Now, also today, I tried to use two browsers on my phone that have a file transfer functionality using WiFi and a web browser on a PC. Both Firefox and Safari now spit the dummy at the URL which is mostly a Mac address. This used to work fine in Mavericks. El Capitan has broken lots of things that used to work, including Microsoft's own Windows Phone app, which has been removed from the App store while I hope and presume they attempt to fix it.
I am simply amazed at people who say they never encounter faults with El Capitan when I can encounter several in a day.
I upgraded three macs (a 2009 iMac, 2013 rMBP, and just did a clean re-install on my new 2015 5K iMac. Each upgrade/clean install went flawlessly. Because I was bored (and a long weekend), I decided to then do a clean-install on my 2009 iMac and 2013 rMBP. Again, zero problem whatsoever.
So I'm curious what makes your setup so special that nothing works? Have you considered doing a clean-install instead of an upgrade? To me, I just wanted to flush out all the old. All my data either exists in Dropbox, or on an external NAS. I only backed-up a few items in OS X like my email (once) and iMessages. Other than that.. it was smooth sailing.
Have you tried doing that?
btw... I do my line-breaks on this forum by pressing the Shift+Enter. It's a habit of mine from how I have Facebook set up. Seems to handle the line breaks just fine.
Dick gets very excited about that database company.
The actual story here is that only one team in Apple is using swift and there's no talk about rewriting the Appkit. Want a job in Apple, keep your objective C handy.
Thats understanable. The language isn't even pinned down yet and won't be for another year.
I'm on the swift evolution list and it's quite busy but if they take every suggestion into account they will end up with a committee built language, with vastly over complicated design loved by language nerds.
Yeah, I do get excited about FoundationDB... Too bad all the site demos, documentation and downloads are not available.
However, there some videos available on YT -- this shore non-techie version discuses what it does:
"It wasn't too long ago that the Netflix engineering team made waves by showing Cassandra running more than 1M random writes per second in the cloud," said Dave Rosenthal, CEO of FoundationDB. "We recently ran more than 14M random writes per second on a 32-machine cluster in EC2 using Key Value Store 3.0. When we started FoundationDB, many expertsthought it was impossible to build a distributed database with ACID transactions, but after years of work we proved that it could be done. Then, they said that it would never scale. Today, version 3.0 has eliminated single-machine bottlenecks and delivers a scalable, transactional database at industry-leading performance levels that the competition can't even achieve without transactional guarantees.
It appears that FoundationDB is capable of providing the functionality of most popular NoSQL offerings as well as SQL DBs (MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite, etc.) while adding scalability, performance, transactions ...
IMO, today's Apple is poised for mondo growth in the enterprise as all the pieces are being put into place -- Swift, FoundationDB, IBM Partnership, iPad Pro ...
I think you underestimate the number of Apple Engineers who are writing code in Swift -- new modules of existing Obj-C code, New Swift Apps, rewritten APIs/Libraries.
I also don't think Apple will let Swift devolve into a design-by-committee bloat!
Bloat? Far from it. Apple is already planning on removing stuff from the language in the next version. The increment/decrement operator is going , along with the currying syntax.
I'm sure Swift is great and all, but what do you expect him to say?
The proof of the pudding is in the eating—let's see if it makes iCloud syncing more reliable and more speedy. Apple has serious work to do in this regard in my opinion.
Will Apple rewrite iTunes in Swift? Will Apple rewrite all their apps in Swift? Will they've rewrite the OS X kernel in Swift? These are some of the more important unknowns right now.
iTunes in particular has long needed a FCPX type rewrite, and in Swift, to completely clean up what they app has become and how people will use it in 2016 and on. I'd like to see them split the app in two: Music—jukebox, music storage + optional Apple Music functionality. iTunes—Store, device management, video. And for the love of God, remove the iOS App Store from the iTunes Store and put it into the App Store on OS X, making it the single repository for all your device app downloads when using that system.
How about a new Aperture in Swift too while they are at it?
You mean that application Apple has officially not developing for anymore? That one?
How about fixing El Capitan first before you talk of doing anything else.
Did you actually listen to the interview? There was basically a PR interview around Swift going open source. There was very little discussion around how Apple is using it inside the company.
No, I just read the article and saw red at the mention of integrating El Crapitan features.
How about fixing El Capitan first before you talk of doing anything else.
I love these types of comments... OS X El Cap has been the best OS X that I believe Apple has ever released, especially with 11.2, and more than 100 users I support whom have upgraded to it agree with me...
Well that's just peachy for you, but El Capitan is no Snow Leopard. It might get there eventually but it's nowhere close yet. Someone else mentioned a couple days ago that there are innumerable threads on the Apple Users forums concerning people having serious problems with many aspects of El Capitan. When I moved - I won't say 'upgraded' - from Mavericks, I tried to migrate from a Time Machine backup. What I ended up with was El Capitan with no Finder, with it stuck in a loop saying the Finder had quit and is attempting to restart, several times a second. I spent a lot of time and several approaches but migration was impossible. In the whole process I think I ended up downloading EC about 6 times over a fairly slow broadband connection. I eventually had to resort to a clean install and then had to manually transfer everything from the backup.
Try this. In Finder, go to a folder with some Epubs listed sequentially. Select one and press the space bar to do a Quick View. See the cover image? Now press the down arrow on the keyboard. The text will change to reflect the next books details, as it should, but the cover image will not change from the original one displayed. That's just a minor niggle.
The Finder can't even handle utterly basic tasks like managing connected devices gracefully. Just today I was doing some stuff with files on micro SD cards. I kept getting a Finder error when attempting to eject the cards with it reporting an application was still using a file. I couldn't find any culprit and so closed all apps except the Finder. Still it insisted a file was in use so I had to force eject the cards. It did the same with the next card, even though no apps were ever opened, so I rebooted the computer. That seemed to fix the file in use problem but then when I went to eject the card nothing appeared to happen - no Finder warning, nothing appearing to have changed, the card still sitting there listed in the favourites panel of the Finder window. I even tried just highlighting the drive in the panel and on the desktop and doing a command E with no apparent effect. I then launched Disk Utility and the card wasn't listed so the card had actually been ejected at some point but the Finder hadn't updated to reflect the fact.
I have also had a couple OS crashes and there are other things, particularly with syncing devices via Bluetooth. I have Bluetooth earphones I mostly use with my Nokia phone. Turn Bluetooth on in the phone, turn the BT receiver on and and hey presto they connect and are good to go in about 3 seconds - every single time without fail and hundreds of iterations. Every single time I try to use the same earphones with my Macbook and I turn on BT, the earphones fail to show up in the BT menu as an available device and I have to then turn them off and turn then back on again and engaige pairing mode. Do they then appear in the BT menu list - oh no - you have to open the Bluetooth control panel to find them and then pair from scratch. There is another BT bug I won't go into.
My original query about the Finder crash loop never received a helpful reply.
Now, also today, I tried to use two browsers on my phone that have a file transfer functionality using WiFi and a web browser on a PC. Both Firefox and Safari now spit the dummy at the URL which is mostly a Mac address. This used to work fine in Mavericks. El Capitan has broken lots of things that used to work, including Microsoft's own Windows Phone app, which has been removed from the App store while I hope and presume they attempt to fix it.
I am simply amazed at people who say they never encounter faults with El Capitan when I can encounter several in a day.
I upgraded three macs (a 2009 iMac, 2013 rMBP, and just did a clean re-install on my new 2015 5K iMac. Each upgrade/clean install went flawlessly. Because I was bored (and a long weekend), I decided to then do a clean-install on my 2009 iMac and 2013 rMBP. Again, zero problem whatsoever.
So I'm curious what makes your setup so special that nothing works? Have you considered doing a clean-install instead of an upgrade? To me, I just wanted to flush out all the old. All my data either exists in Dropbox, or on an external NAS. I only backed-up a few items in OS X like my email (once) and iMessages. Other than that.. it was smooth sailing.
Have you tried doing that?
btw... I do my line-breaks on this forum by pressing the Shift+Enter. It's a habit of mine from how I have Facebook set up. Seems to handle the line breaks just fine.
I'm sorry about the appearance of it being a single paragraph, but buried in that I did mention that upgrading didn't work so I did have to do a clean install in the end. I did both shift-enter and enter linebreaks, belive it or not. Perhaps it's my 'special' version of El Capitan at work - again. I'm using a 2012 RMBP.
How about fixing El Capitan first before you talk of doing anything else.
For the most part El Capitan has been a huge improvement over previous releases. More importantly you mis the point of the comments, that is Swift allows Apple to write better software faster. If they are rewriting El Capitan in Swift then by default they are fixing El Capitan.
Only case I've seen so far of someone having major problems with El Cap was someone who had CleanMyMac installed. My guess is that it "cleaned" some stuff that it really shouldn't have; uninstalling it and reinstalling El Cap fixed the problems.
So, maybe check to see if you have CleanMyMac (or MacKeeper or similar crapware) installed, and get rid of it if you do.
Myself, I've had absolutely zero problems with El Cap so far. Nice solid update, best in a long time.
One major reason for Open-Sourcing Swift was to make it available for writing Server apps -- including the Server side of client-server apps. Most servers, today, run Linux (Apple's servers too, purportedly).
1) Where does Mac OS X Server fit into the picture?
Apple acquired FoundationDB earlier this year. It is a high performance, reliable, transactional, distributed NoSQL DB at its base layer. It also has the ability to implement other DBs as layers above the base layer -- including various other NoSQL DB types, hierarchical DBs, traditional SQL DBs, File Systems, etc. FoundationDB (before acquisition) showed various Recipies that demonstrated how to access FoundationDB DBs with Python, Ruby, etc. I assume that Swift support will be added, and that Apple cloud/server Services (iCloud, iTunes, Apple Online Store, iTunes Store/iOS App Store, Mac App Store ... will use FoundationDB.
2) Will Apple make FoundationDB DBs available to developers?
3) Will Apple make FoundationDB available as a Product or as a Service.
The current Swift 2 implementation includes the ability to intermingle Swift code and Markdown code. Markdown is just a limited/simplified implementation of HTML Markup. Many server-side scripting languages such as ColdFusion, PHP, Perl, Python, etc. intermingle their code and HTML Markup to provide logic, and DB access to dynamically generate and serve web pages. No reason Swift couldn't do this too ...
4) Will Swift be offered as (or evolve to be) an alternative current web server programming languages.
Circa 2010, Apple offered a very popular service called iWeb that allowed non-techie users to easily publish a web site. When it worked, it worked quite well ... But it was before its time ... Later it was discontinued. With todays capabilities (iCloud, Swift, FoundationDB, improved WiFi, AppleTV, iDevices) -- all the pieces seem to be available to do iWeb, again, right!
5) Will Apple offer consumer-oriented web hosting similar to iWeb?
The iPad Pro, purportedly, was designed for/with IBM mobile services in mind. Apple says IBM has provided lots of input (influence?) to Swift development. IBM offers a web site where you can interactively develop Swift programs through a web browser -- an online Swift Playground, so to speak. It works quite well on computers and acceptably on iDevices. One big limitation is that it is cumbersome to get code into and out of the site because an iDevice user has limited access to its underlying file system,
6) Will Apple offer more access to the iOS File system to facilitate programming?
The IBM web site is fine for interactive Swift programming for non-Apple implementations of Swift. It does not provide the underlying libraries and APIs for Apple Swift development.
7) Will Apple provide an Apple Interactive Swift Programming web site with full support for Apple libraries and APIs?
8) Will Apple supply Xcode for the iPad Pro?
While iOS includes many constructs from OS X, it does not include some of the more-complex capabilities because of limitations (RAM, Storage, Power, Display Size, lack of precise touch capability, etc.) of iDevices. The iPad Pro mitigates these limitations. One construct that is not included in iOS is multi-column tables -- where each column is: rearrangeable, resizable, sortable, filterable, [un]hideable.
9) Will Apple port advanced OS X capabilities to iOS for iPad Pro class devices?
1. The same place it always has. 2. That is a good question. At this point Apple doesn't have the infrastructure in place to service the types of customers that would use the data base. 3. Probably neither. 4. I'm not sure I even understand why you would ask this. Swift is a programming language you can do whatever you want with it. As for the Web some people build their Web apps in C++ so anything is possible. The bigger question would be is it wise. 5. I really doubt it. They went that route once before. 6. That is a million dollar question!!! My guess is no. At the most they might provide a common files storage area but even that is of limited value in improving iOS for more advanced users. In the end I don't see Apple acting intelligently here. 7. Why would they do that? 8. Another interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is that it might not be XCode per say. It might be Swift as a scripting language for apps. Frankly as an iPad user the ability to script apps like Numbers would be a huge win. The other problem is that my current needs for custom programming is intertwined with I/O. IOS sucks at I/O for a single low to no distribution product. Apple would need to abandon MiFi ( a program that stinks like a chicken coop) and provide for a way for vendors to install their drivers on iOS devices. 9. Sure! Apple has been cross pollinating since day one. At this point no one should be surprised at this.
One major reason for Open-Sourcing Swift was to make it available for writing Server apps -- including the Server side of client-server apps. Most servers, today, run Linux (Apple's servers too, purportedly).
1) Where does Mac OS X Server fit into the picture?
Apple acquired FoundationDB earlier this year. It is a high performance, reliable, transactional, distributed NoSQL DB at its base layer. It also has the ability to implement other DBs as layers above the base layer -- including various other NoSQL DB types, hierarchical DBs, traditional SQL DBs, File Systems, etc. FoundationDB (before acquisition) showed various Recipies that demonstrated how to access FoundationDB DBs with Python, Ruby, etc. I assume that Swift support will be added, and that Apple cloud/server Services (iCloud, iTunes, Apple Online Store, iTunes Store/iOS App Store, Mac App Store ... will use FoundationDB.
2) Will Apple make FoundationDB DBs available to developers?
3) Will Apple make FoundationDB available as a Product or as a Service.
The current Swift 2 implementation includes the ability to intermingle Swift code and Markdown code. Markdown is just a limited/simplified implementation of HTML Markup. Many server-side scripting languages such as ColdFusion, PHP, Perl, Python, etc. intermingle their code and HTML Markup to provide logic, and DB access to dynamically generate and serve web pages. No reason Swift couldn't do this too ...
4) Will Swift be offered as (or evolve to be) an alternative current web server programming languages.
Circa 2010, Apple offered a very popular service called iWeb that allowed non-techie users to easily publish a web site. When it worked, it worked quite well ... But it was before its time ... Later it was discontinued. With todays capabilities (iCloud, Swift, FoundationDB, improved WiFi, AppleTV, iDevices) -- all the pieces seem to be available to do iWeb, again, right!
5) Will Apple offer consumer-oriented web hosting similar to iWeb?
The iPad Pro, purportedly, was designed for/with IBM mobile services in mind. Apple says IBM has provided lots of input (influence?) to Swift development. IBM offers a web site where you can interactively develop Swift programs through a web browser -- an online Swift Playground, so to speak. It works quite well on computers and acceptably on iDevices. One big limitation is that it is cumbersome to get code into and out of the site because an iDevice user has limited access to its underlying file system,
6) Will Apple offer more access to the iOS File system to facilitate programming?
The IBM web site is fine for interactive Swift programming for non-Apple implementations of Swift. It does not provide the underlying libraries and APIs for Apple Swift development.
7) Will Apple provide an Apple Interactive Swift Programming web site with full support for Apple libraries and APIs?
8) Will Apple supply Xcode for the iPad Pro?
While iOS includes many constructs from OS X, it does not include some of the more-complex capabilities because of limitations (RAM, Storage, Power, Display Size, lack of precise touch capability, etc.) of iDevices. The iPad Pro mitigates these limitations. One construct that is not included in iOS is multi-column tables -- where each column is: rearrangeable, resizable, sortable, filterable, [un]hideable.
9) Will Apple port advanced OS X capabilities to iOS for iPad Pro class devices?
All great questions. Might want to read this for extra insight / perspective:
Comments
So I'm curious what makes your setup so special that nothing works? Have you considered doing a clean-install instead of an upgrade? To me, I just wanted to flush out all the old. All my data either exists in Dropbox, or on an external NAS. I only backed-up a few items in OS X like my email (once) and iMessages. Other than that.. it was smooth sailing.
Bloat? Far from it. Apple is already planning on removing stuff from the language in the next version. The increment/decrement operator is going , along with the currying syntax.
So, maybe check to see if you have CleanMyMac (or MacKeeper or similar crapware) installed, and get rid of it if you do.
Myself, I've had absolutely zero problems with El Cap so far. Nice solid update, best in a long time.
2. That is a good question. At this point Apple doesn't have the infrastructure in place to service the types of customers that would use the data base.
3. Probably neither.
4. I'm not sure I even understand why you would ask this. Swift is a programming language you can do whatever you want with it. As for the Web some people build their Web apps in C++ so anything is possible. The bigger question would be is it wise.
5. I really doubt it. They went that route once before.
6. That is a million dollar question!!! My guess is no. At the most they might provide a common files storage area but even that is of limited value in improving iOS for more advanced users. In the end I don't see Apple acting intelligently here.
7. Why would they do that?
8. Another interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is that it might not be XCode per say. It might be Swift as a scripting language for apps. Frankly as an iPad user the ability to script apps like Numbers would be a huge win. The other problem is that my current needs for custom programming is intertwined with I/O. IOS sucks at I/O for a single low to no distribution product. Apple would need to abandon MiFi ( a program that stinks like a chicken coop) and provide for a way for vendors to install their drivers on iOS devices.
9. Sure! Apple has been cross pollinating since day one. At this point no one should be surprised at this.
http://loumiranda.com/2015/12/15/apple-has-hugely-ambitious-plans-for-open-sourced-swift-and-hints-on-whats-coming-to-ios/