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     As Hardware Becomes Ever More Impressive, Software Suffers Rough Edges

   Adam Engst

   Back in the early days of the Mac, the hardware was relatively crude
   compared to what we have today. That's not meant as a criticism, merely
   a statement of fact'industrial design and manufacturing capabilities
   have come a long way since the mid-1980s. But while the software of the
   time may have had fewer features and could be weighed down by the slow
   disks and chips of the time, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines helped
   ensure a high level of overall quality. Violations of the HIG or
   failure to abide by interface conventions were reported as bugs and
   noted in reviews, even down to little things like keyboard shortcuts in
   dialogs. Attention to detail mattered. Craft mattered.

   That's the backdrop to Craig Mod's essay, '[1]Brilliant Hardware in the
   Valley of the Software Slump,' which points out a few of the ways that
   a lack of software quality and reliability is now hanging around the
   neck of top-notch hardware. So many little things are wrong in modern
   software that would never have been tolerated in the past. Examples
   from the last few hours include the inability of Messages to remember
   its window position between launches on a secondary display and the
   choppy scrolling and the lack of support for the Home and End keys in
   Apple News. Let's hope Mod's call for a return to craft rattles some
   windows in Cupertino and among Apple developers in general.

   [2]Read original article

References

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   1. https://craigmod.com/essays/software_slump/
   2. https://craigmod.com/essays/software_slump/

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