Erratic reception problems? An inconvenience, at most. Irrecoverably losing hundreds of gigabytes of your users' irreplaceable photos? That's way, way worse.
Erratic reception problems? An inconvenience, at most. Irrecoverably losing hundreds of gigabytes of your users' irreplaceable photos? That's way, way worse.
If Microsoft (or Adobe) released an update to the software which wiped out data as precious as your personal photos, I am sure he would not talk about backups, but thrash the company.
I am sure there are cases where upgrade didn't cause any issue. That doesn't mean all these other reports are invalid.
In fact, I was going to make another comment asking about how can bug like this happen. I am sure that Apple QA team tested the upgrade functionality and they didn't find it. I am really finding it hard to imagine what kind of corner case the code ran into, which caused deletion of precious data.
EDIT: Wow. This is interesting. So one person could upgrade w/o issues and that's why my comment which points out that there are other VALID, repeatable instances where upgrade did not go smooth gets downvotes. That's funny.
The immense majority will experience no issue, as it would be expected that any bug that creates data loss would be a release blocker and, had it been verified during development, it would have been hunted down implacably.
Chances are it didn't manifest itself before.
For what I know of Steve's reputation, I wouldn't like to be in the iPhoto team right now.
But then, I would always keep the photos as separate files on a directory tree with the metadata in a single file. This way, the chances of a catastrophic data loss would be very slim.
Seriously, you can't take a Mac advocate's casual blog post, post it here yourself, and then argue that it isn't fair and balanced enough. It is not Jon Gruber's job to shout from the rooftops when things go wrong with Apple products.
And chances are, if it is a real problem, there will be a starred long-form blog post forthcoming from Gruber describing it in more detail.
This is among the more tiresome recurring complaints on HN. "Gruber is biased". Shocking! Next you'll tell me John Nack really isn't critical enough about Adobe! Can we give this a rest?
It is not Jon Gruber's job to shout from the rooftops when things go wrong with Apple products.
No, it's not, but given the influence that his blog has, being widely read both inside and outside Apple, it's a real shame that he doesn't. It would be a wonderful thing if he held Apple to account more often.
This makes no sense to me. He practically started the blog to write glowing things about Apple. He has the influence has has because he is an extremely good writer; he's tight, pithy, is relentlessly creative, and has a unique voice; he's also very well-sourced, which sets up a virtuous cycle for him. He didn't get his donation as a line item grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and he doesn't owe us anything.
I actually don't agree with the narrative that Gruber is a shill, but even if we stipulate that he is to avoid an unproductive argument: so what?
I've read Gruber for years, and it used to be a mix of "interesting stuff in the Apple world", "Kubrick/Baseball/BBedit/Applescript/typography nits" and "criticisms of Apple" (usually centred around lack of attention to detail, interface annoyances or not being faithful to the pre-OS X way of doing things).
As an Apple owner and fan, I enjoyed reading those intelligent criticisms. Clearly this has changed, but lets not go rewriting history.
The last line of his first blog post:
"But if it’s the latter — that is, if pro users are giving the finger to Mac OS X — things could get ugly."
I wonder why he felt more able to criticize them when they were "beleaguered" than now, when they're on top of the world. Possibly it's no more than being a crotchety OS 9 user thrust into the strange and uncomfortable world of early OS X. Some evidence of that here:
On the other hand maybe he's checked his stats and found that trolling pays better.
And just for fun here's some claim chowder from one of his early posts:
"a vaporware Apple-branded mobile “iPhone” is getting a lot traction. Go ahead and read it, but remember that it’s all bullshit speculation at this point."
That was a merely an amusing-in-hindsight observation, I even telegraphed it with the introduction of "just for fun".
Maybe the tipsters were right and there was a skunkworks project working on the iPhone even then (Jobs says the iPhone grew out of iPad work that must have been going on for years before we saw the iPhone, never mind the iPad) or alternatively maybe Apple picked up the name for their product from the rumours. Either way I find it interesting, and it underscores the old adage that making predictions is a mug's game.
How can he downplay it when we don’t even know the full extent of the problem? That forum thread is not exactly ginormous and as you can see, many updated without a problem (myself included).
It’s an absolutely horrible bug but Gruber doesn’t say otherwise.
Oh, and also, this is no Antennagate. Nobody cares about iPhoto, at least if compared to the amount of people who care about the iPhone.
Heh, I'm a newbie submitter, request forgiveness. It just struck me that this is a much worse problem in terms of user impact than any problems with antenna, I suppose I overdid it with the headline. It won't let me edit it any more, otherwise I'd try to fix it.
Why would iPhoto keep the photos themselves in any other format than the original files and just point to them from the metadata store? The most I would to with the files would be to compress them using some lossless (obviously) algorithm, keeping the filenames and formats... This way, the worst that could happen would be metadata corruption for the new version's metadata with preservation of the original information.
I hardly think it's worse than antennagate. The iPhone's antenna issues caused so much of a stir because they impact the basic usage of the device. Is iPhoto such a core piece of MacOS functionality that this bug will make people stop buying Macs?
Then again, the timing along with the iPhone screen lock bug could have been better...
How is taking pictures and saving them on a computer not a core piece of how a lot of mac users use their computers? Not to mention losing precious data like personal photos that cannot be replaced is far worse than a dropped call.
I had no problems with iPhoto 11 but historically iPhoto upgrades have been hit or miss for some so it doesn't really surprise me. Hopefully people will learn to backup someday. You just can't trust any software with your data. I'm not sure Apple is any better or worse at this than others but you might as well assume they do zero testing and your data is just a big joke to them. If everything works you're pleasantly surprised. If it catches on fire you have nothing to worry about.
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[ 15.0 ms ] story [ 83.1 ms ] threadhttp://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/10/25/castro-iphone
If Microsoft (or Adobe) released an update to the software which wiped out data as precious as your personal photos, I am sure he would not talk about backups, but thrash the company.
In fact, I was going to make another comment asking about how can bug like this happen. I am sure that Apple QA team tested the upgrade functionality and they didn't find it. I am really finding it hard to imagine what kind of corner case the code ran into, which caused deletion of precious data.
EDIT: Wow. This is interesting. So one person could upgrade w/o issues and that's why my comment which points out that there are other VALID, repeatable instances where upgrade did not go smooth gets downvotes. That's funny.
Chances are it didn't manifest itself before.
For what I know of Steve's reputation, I wouldn't like to be in the iPhoto team right now.
But then, I would always keep the photos as separate files on a directory tree with the metadata in a single file. This way, the chances of a catastrophic data loss would be very slim.
And chances are, if it is a real problem, there will be a starred long-form blog post forthcoming from Gruber describing it in more detail.
This is among the more tiresome recurring complaints on HN. "Gruber is biased". Shocking! Next you'll tell me John Nack really isn't critical enough about Adobe! Can we give this a rest?
No, it's not, but given the influence that his blog has, being widely read both inside and outside Apple, it's a real shame that he doesn't. It would be a wonderful thing if he held Apple to account more often.
I actually don't agree with the narrative that Gruber is a shill, but even if we stipulate that he is to avoid an unproductive argument: so what?
As an Apple owner and fan, I enjoyed reading those intelligent criticisms. Clearly this has changed, but lets not go rewriting history.
The last line of his first blog post:
"But if it’s the latter — that is, if pro users are giving the finger to Mac OS X — things could get ugly."
I wonder why he felt more able to criticize them when they were "beleaguered" than now, when they're on top of the world. Possibly it's no more than being a crotchety OS 9 user thrust into the strange and uncomfortable world of early OS X. Some evidence of that here:
http://daringfireball.net/2002/09/welcome_indeed
On the other hand maybe he's checked his stats and found that trolling pays better.
And just for fun here's some claim chowder from one of his early posts:
"a vaporware Apple-branded mobile “iPhone” is getting a lot traction. Go ahead and read it, but remember that it’s all bullshit speculation at this point."
Maybe the tipsters were right and there was a skunkworks project working on the iPhone even then (Jobs says the iPhone grew out of iPad work that must have been going on for years before we saw the iPhone, never mind the iPad) or alternatively maybe Apple picked up the name for their product from the rumours. Either way I find it interesting, and it underscores the old adage that making predictions is a mug's game.
It’s an absolutely horrible bug but Gruber doesn’t say otherwise.
Oh, and also, this is no Antennagate. Nobody cares about iPhoto, at least if compared to the amount of people who care about the iPhone.
Then again, the timing along with the iPhone screen lock bug could have been better...
// what's with the very un-HN headline?