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Bug reporting

496 words

With a new OS release having come, there's probably a lot of work for Apple's Bug reporter. I definitely have a love-hate relationship with that thing. On the one hand it is sometimes nice to see that Apple are aware of the bugs you know and told them about and they're doing something about it. In particular, for bad bugs like (reproducible) kernel panics or things involving data loss you see fixes relatively soon.

On the other hand, their communication is quite poor. They hardly ever acknowledge problems, they'll just fix them. Even problems that have been solved a while ago will still show up in my bug reporter page as 'Open/Analyse' – even today when I received a couple of e-mails asking me whether I still see those problems I reported, i.e. at a time when Apple think they have analysed and fixed the problem.

And then there are the problems which just never seem to be worked at. Like the problem that the comma key on the numeric keypad won't generate the decimal separator as set in the international system preferences but is fixed by the keyboard layout. Meaning that with a German keyboard layout it will always generate a comma – which is pretty inconvenient when it comes to entering dates, IP addresses or numbers in carelessly coded (read: most) Unix programs or web sites. I just sent them a reminder – the second in 18 months.

You can see a number of fun bugs in the new Mail application when you enter the first bit of an address and press tab immediately. The name won't be completed as the discerning pine user would expect, but Mail will try to send the message with the incomplete address. OK, that's an old one in fact, but this time around you can't press Shift-tab anymore to return to the 'To' field. Pressing those keys will insert an invisible character that is swiftly mistaken for an address by Mail and will confuse your mail server upon sending the message.

Other problems are as usual keyboard equivalents. They're inconsistent sill and we see strong use of umlauts, which I consider a bad idea. Customising them seems to do nothing but set the good old NSUserKeyEquivalents default and strangely fails for arrow keys where it will display accented characters instead. An encoding problem, I guess. Apple uses →, i.e. Ux2192 now, which seems correct. However, before they used , i.e. UxF703 which looks Thai to me but is actually marked 'private use'. Don't know why things are so strange, but they are.

Now the remaining question is how to politely submit the bug reports that should be entitled 'Finder still is a pile of shit' and 'SMB/CIFS support is improved but still sucks'. Has anyone managed to connect to an SMB server in a zone other than his own on a WINS managed network? Or did anyone see mounted SMB volumes appear on their desktop or Finder 'sidebar' thingy?

October 25, 2003, 17:28

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Trackback “2003/10/26 12:22” from 2lmc spool:

Bug reporting

October 26, 2003, 13:30

Comments

Comment by Buzz Andersen: User icon

So, in what respect is the Finder a pile of shit? Just curious…

October 26, 2003, 21:51

Comment by ssp: User icon

Be my guest…

To begin with there are the points mentioned in my previous post. I’ll try to keep my blood pressure low and not yell:

October 27, 2003, 18:49

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