Low-Hanging Fruit

I got email from my Dad where he describes a bug in Mail on El Capitan and how he solved it by going back to Yosemite.

I was never able to get Mail to work. In the end, it was a resource hog. Somehow between Yosemite on September 28 and yesterday, my available storage space went from 71GB to 3GB (on a 320GB hard drive). For the last week and a half, I could not even open mail with El Capitan. Even in “safe” mode, I could not get Mail to work.

…So, I am living with Yosemite, and it works fine.

* * *

Last night I edited the Safari bookmarks on my development machine. The changes didn’t sync to my laptop.

I gave it overnight — they still haven’t synced. I tried turning Safari syncing on and off, on both machines, and that didn’t help. I ended up making the changes manually on my laptop to match my development machine.

* * *

A week ago I wanted to stream the latest Doctor Who to my laptop. I launched iTunes and started watching. It got about a minute in — and then it stopped. I clicked some buttons, but nothing helped. It was stuck.

Finally it occurred to me that perhaps something was using my bandwidth and preventing streaming from working. I was right: it was iTunes — the same app on the same computer — downloading a bunch of podcasts. I paused the downloads, and then streaming worked.

Why wouldn’t iTunes prioritize streaming? Surely it could notice that someone is watching a thing, and notice that it’s stuck, and then just pause other downloads. Not everybody is going to figure out how to deal with this manually.

* * *

Every day, on multiple computers, in Notification Center, I have to click to allow Weather to use my location. Why would it forget that I already said yes?

There’s a reason, I’m sure, and I bet there’s an easy fix.

My point is that this shouldn’t be allowed to get into a state where it’s annoying.

* * *

So we have Apple Watch and Apple TV now. What I’m hoping for — what I’m nearly begging for, more as a user than as developer — is that Apple spend a year making things better. Nothing new. Just make things work better.