[Ukfreebsd] Notes from Monday's meeting

[David Chisnall]

On 24 May 2017, at 16:39, David Chisnall <theraven at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> 
>> Interestingly, neither myself or the other person made the Sierra upgrade.
> 
> I haven’t yet either.  No compelling new features and 10.11 works fine.  Maybe 10.13 will add something I care about instead of more cruft that I have to disable…

Prompted by this, I decided to try updating last night.  So far:

 - The intermittent bug in Mail.app where it forgets how to find the flag icons and so just writes ‘red’ in the flag column is still there.

 - The issue with TextEdit that caused it to spontaneously terminate appears to be fixed.  I think something was a bit too aggressive with the sudden termination stuff - I never lost data, but it was annoying that it would exit after about 30 seconds.  Now it’s actually useable again.

 - Clipboard sharing with my iPad sounds really useful… if only I could figure out how to get it to work.

 - Killing off ObjC GC made me happy.  I should probably do the same thing for the GNUstep runtime - it was a terrible idea from the start.

 - Removing 'time remaining’ from the battery indicator is annoying.  It wasn’t 100% accurate, but it was a pretty good hint.

 - iTunes ability to talk to an iPad via WiFi (no cable) seems a lot more reliable (i.e. actually works at all).  I just ran a backup via WiFi and it actually worked, for the first time ever.

 - Turning off all of the iCloud / Siri nonsense is nice and easy.

 - Apple’s new FS is still experimental (though it is now the default for iOS).

Other things I’ve learned recently:

 - It turns out IMAP notes still work on both macOS and iOS notes, you just need to enable them via the accounts setting for the mail account (not exactly intuitive, but it works).

All in all, a pretty underwhelming update.  I’ve not really noticed any difference (and I’d already updated GitX,  the one app formerly using ObjC GC).  The last update that had as little by way of user-visible improvement was 10.6, and that at least improved performance noticeably.  On the plus side, nothing is noticeably worse either...

David