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Comment by madeofpalk

10 months ago

The entire settings app rewrite is the canary of how Apple's software development process is broken, especially for the mac.

55 comments

madeofpalk

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kingds  10 months ago

it's comically bad. the UI is a mess, the search functionality is broken, you can't resize the window horizontally. it's feels like a hello world first project in a new language type of app.

also - it's such a bummer that they have decided to shit the bed so hard on software at a moment when their hardware lineup is arguably at its pinnacle. like, the hardware has been firing on all cylinders since M1 but the software degradation is making it less and less pleasant to use.

progmetaldev  10 months ago

To be fair, Windows really had the same type of issues going from the old Control Panel to Settings. I still get large delays for some of the screens in Windows Settings.

  • rqtwteye  10 months ago

    I think it's pretty crazy how slow a lot of the newer things in Windows 11 are. Explorer is super slow, Settings are slow. Sometimes I think even if I wanted to make things that slow (without using sleep statements), I wouldn't know how do it.

    • _carbyau_  10 months ago

      Make opening a settings page require multiple queries to Microsoft servers. That way you get lag with a bonus of variability and in the case of broken wifi, extreme lag as it waits for the connections to time out.

      I'm not saying this is what happens. But it's scarily plausible and it really shouldn't be.

      3 replies →

    • runevault  10 months ago

      Windows 11 is insane to me now. Latest update pressing the button to bring up the power options (power off sleep etc) takes like 1-1.5 seconds from button press for the menu options to come up.

      11 replies →

    • card_zero  10 months ago

      I fix this by going into task manager and viciously force quitting any system process that has an enigmatic name or isn't plainly doing something I want to happen. Often it's updating Edge, or it might be indexing temp files for searching with the shitty search function that I don't use. Sometimes it's "Windows Problem Reporting" that's making things glitch and lag. Oh, sometimes there's a whole second copy of Explorer running invisibly, quitting that can help.

      2 replies →

    • pjmlp  10 months ago

      The answer to that is relatively easy, WinUI 3.0 being shoved into Windows, even though UWP has failed to get adoption, after so many reboots even those of us that were deep into it got pissed off and moved elsewhere, leaving the Windows team as the only group of folks still trying to push it.

      Go have a tour on Github for the endless collection of issues, some of them 5 years old, when Project Reunion was announced.

    • taneq  10 months ago

      The login screen and start menu both require a key press to start the process (enter pin or start typing search term) and both then drop all subsequent keystrokes for an indefinite period until they’ve finished initialising, displaying, and maybe phoning home and loading ads. It’s infuriating. It turns a simple open-loop “press win key, type search term, enter” into “press win key, wait for visual confirmation, type” which adds both computer latency and your own reaction time to the overall time taken.

  • liamwestray  10 months ago

    To be actually fair, Mac Preferences has worked fine for decades.

    Control panel has sucked since windows 2.0

  • nottorp  10 months ago

    But that's considered normal in the Windows world.

    Unfortunately, to stay on top Apple doesn't have to do well for the customer. They only have to do better than wintel/android machines.

tacker2000  10 months ago

I mean ok, the old one was already a bit overloaded and unwieldy, so a redesign was probably overdue and Ill give them the benefit of the doubt here but WTF is with the 1-2 second delay when switching between the menus in there? Are they doing web requests upon opening every settings page or what? This is real amateur hour.

  • brailsafe  10 months ago

    They appear to be launching each settings screen as a separate app and retaining it until Settings is quit. How many resources this requires, or how much this contributes to the lag, I don't know, but...

    Open Activity Monitor, and type in System Settings into the search. Then open the Settings app and press the down arrow key through all of the menus. You'll notice that each one of them appears as their own line item in Activity Monitor until you quit Settings, and if you keep going up and down through the menus, it'll (probably) get slower and slower; it seems like there's a memory leak or something going on there, and my hunch is that each old settings menu was thinly wrapped in a SwiftUI view and gets launched as soon as you click its nav item.

    • wpm  10 months ago

      That’s not too different than the old app, but instead of .app bundles, the UIs and stuff were bundled in .prefPane bundles.

      1 reply →

    • tacker2000  10 months ago

      Yea some other commenter mentioned that they most likely re-wrote the whole thing Swift.

      So is Swift just too crappy for this kind of UI, that accesses low level system stuff? or are the devs just incompetent? Who knows…

      2 replies →