Radar Bugs I'd Like To See

A couple of years back, when I believed it would make a difference, I fired up Radar once in a while and filed bugs regarding the Finder, Safari, and, of course (and most especially) Mail.app, adding crash reports and all when applicable.

It was all quite civilized, and I wasn’t the only one doing it. It was a nice back-channel to the people at Apple who could actually fix things, and it worked more often than not, since the underlying logic was that having bugs filed helped those folk justify priorities and effort towards fixing some of those issues.

These days, however, the bunch of whining idiots running popular Apple fan sites prefer to barf up their (often completely senseless and idiotic) complaints and speculations in the guise of “news”, and shout from the rooftops that Apple needs to fix this and that because it chafes them in some way.

Which is about as civilized as a streaker running through a Steve Jobs keynote yelling “we want unlocked iPhones!”, and may well be rubbing the powers-that-be at Apple in entirely the wrong way.

In short, these people have no sense of class, and keep spreading rumors, pseudo-news about device hacking and “FUD”:Wikipedia:FUD for the sake of getting pageviews and drawing moronic fanboy commenters to their sites.

And, more to the point, they stand about zero chance of providing credible feedback to Apple concerning what people feel about some of the product design decisions Cupertino has bestowed upon us this year. As I see it, a much better approach would be for ADC members to file the following bugs in Radar:

Problem Report Title: Developer Tools Cannot Target iPhone, iPod Touch
Product: Developer Tools
Version/Build Number: 2.4.1
Classification: Feature (New)
Is It Reproducible?: Always

Summary:
The Developer Tools lack an ARM build chain able to target the iPhone and iPod Touch CPUs, supporting frameworks and relevant documentation.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Launch Xcode
2. Hit Cmd-Shift-N to launch the New Project Assistant

Expected Results:

The Assistant should list the following project types:

• Mobile Widget
• Cocoa Mobile Application
• Mobile Dynamic Library
• Cocoa Mobile Framework
• Mobile Kernel Extension
• Mobile PreferencePane
• Cocoa Mobile Static Library

Actual Results:
There are no mobile platform options listed in the New Project Assistant.

Regression:
In the Newton era, there was an officially-supported SDK available from Apple, usable alongside (or despite) MPW.

Notes:
There should at least be a “Mobile Widget” option that would enable developers to develop HTML applications that could be stored locally and execute in a Safari sandbox.

Problem Report Title: iPod Touch Cannot Edit Events
Product: iPod
Version/Build Number: Touch 1G
Classification: Other Bug/Has Workaround
Is It Reproducible?: Always

Summary:
User is unable to edit events directly on the iPod Touch.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Unlock iPod, if locked
2. Launch Calendar
3. Tap existing event

Expected Results:
The Calendar application should allow the user to add, delete and modify events.

Actual Results:
There is no way to add, delete or modify events.

Regression:
This worked on the iPhone, therefore breaking the principle of least surprise.

Notes:
This is an utterly senseless and arbitrary limitation that borders on being an outright insult to the end user considering the device’s demonstrated ability to support complex data input (cf. browser input and the ability to edit contact information, which is incongruent with this limitation) and the profound hardware and software resemblances to the iPhone.

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I could probably go on and on, but I think people get the gist by now. And this is just regarding the iPhone and its siblings – a subject that, in my opinion, is getting far too much coverage when there are still far too many things to be fixed¹ in Mac OS X.

With luck, I’ll draft some more notes on what I think Apple is doing wrong in that regard soon – but then again, sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.

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¹ If you’re curious, I still have the following open: “#4567337”:Radar:4567337 regarding Apple’s VNC server, “#4290933”:Radar:4290933 regarding Flash export in Keynote 1.0 (which, interestingly, I no longer have privileges to view), “#4270821”:Radar:4270821 regarding the limitations in LDAP support in Address Book, and a couple of others regarding iTunes