Marco Arment is well known for working at Tumblr, creating Instapaper and Overcast, and for being a fairly prolific podcaster. Needless to say, he’s dabbled his toes in lot of different areas. One area that has remained virtually untouched by Arment is, oddly enough, the Mac.
As someone whose name is so synonymous with iOS development, it’s surprising that Quitter, a brand new app based around auto-quitting distracting apps after a set period of inactivity, is Arment’s first app release for the Mac. Expand Expanding Close
Apple is now so focused on marketing-driven goals that its software quality has “taken a nosedive” in the last few years, argues a blog post by Instapaper creator and former Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment.
[OS X is] riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions [and] I fear that Apple’s leadership doesn’t realize quite how badly and deeply their software flaws have damaged their reputation
People are sticking with OS X not because they love it, he suggests, but because Windows is worse and desktop Linux is too much hassle.
The issue, believes Arment, is that Apple is so focused on releasing a major new version of OS X each year that it is making it impossible for engineering teams to maintain quality.
We don’t need major OS releases every year. We don’t need each OS release to have a huge list of new features. We need our computers, phones, and tablets to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.
Twitter commentators seem largely in agreement. What are your views? Would you like to see a slower pace of development in order to have greater reliability? Or do the new features make any glitches worthwhile? Take our poll, and let us know your views in the comments.
“We had a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded. It affected only a small number of users.
“The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again,” Apple said. Those who have an affected app can re-download it from the App Store.
