att real devs, posting feedback on apple forum

[winterquilt]

Are there any real devs here who can post feedback on the Apple forums, I have a number of pieces of feedback I'd like to give and think that they would stand a better chance of being viewed if they were submitted there.

Of course it would be proxy submissions, but I don't expect anybody to post the feedback without actually agreeing with it as well. Some of it is just praise, this I find is severely lacking when people give feedback and devs do not know when they've done something right!

 

[amorya]

You can actually register a developer account for free, which gives you access to the bug tracker. Look here (link in the bottom right). I don't think there's anything wrong with registering for the purpose of posting bug reports. ("Bug report" here means any feature request, suggested improvement or reported problem, not just software bugs.)

There isn't really a category for just praise — I suppose you could file it under "Other bug". They probably only want issues though.

If you do use the bug reporter, you should be sure to follow the standard bug reporting template (which it gives you by default), with sections for things like "Steps to reproduce", "Expected result" etc. They make it much much easier for the Apple engineers to replicate what you're doing. The steps to reproduce should be stupidly detailed, explaining where to click or what keys to press at each point in the process. For some examples, to get a feel for the style, look at http://openradar.appspot.com/.

 

[winterquilt]

I don't know, I think that this is for bugs only. As I am not a developer how did I then get initial access to Lion? Exactly. I'd rather it was posted on the forums by someone who wouldn't immediately be flagged for that.

 

[mrblack927]

I don't know, I think that this is for bugs only. As I am not a developer how did I then get initial access to Lion? Exactly. I'd rather it was posted on the forums by someone who wouldn't immediately be flagged for that.

What? I don't follow. Do you have Lion or not?

 

[Cougarcat]

What? I don't follow. Do you have Lion or not?

I think he's saying that he doesn't have a legal copy of Lion, so it might look suspicious if he's posting bugs without having a dev account.

To answer his question, I don't think Apple would care enough to "flag" you. They want to fix their OS, not play police cop. And yes, you can add feedback via the bug tracker.

 

[amorya]

I don't know, I think that this is for bugs only. As I am not a developer how did I then get initial access to Lion? Exactly. I'd rather it was posted on the forums by someone who wouldn't immediately be flagged for that.

It's definitely not for bugs only. I've had confirmation in person from Apple staff at WWDC, as well as in the developer documentation. It's for any bugs, enhancement requests, feature requests, opinions or anything else related to their software. On the developer forums, they beg us to file more bugs, for absolutely everything. The number that get filed about a certain issue is how they know how important something is.

I doubt they'd know or care about how you get Lion either. Maybe you're using it at work (if your company's an Apple dev shop). Maybe you just saw a blog post about it and wanted to offer your opinion. The people who see the bug reports are the engineers who make the software, not the lawyers.

Of course, if you did want to encourage me or other developers to post bugs for you, just post your thoughts in threads here. If there's anything I agree with, I may well file something. You could even make it easy for us by using the bug reporting format (in sections: summary, steps to reproduce, expected result, actual result, regression (i.e. did it work previously?), and notes). That way we could just copy and paste.

Amorya

 

[winterquilt]

Slider for plane switching

Well, one thing I would like to get more info on is how feverish people were against the slider feature in the second release where the subplane was selected in preference menus. This influence from iOS I thought was so clever, very cool, I wish they hadn't of removed it and I'm guessing a lot of people complained.

What's the likelihood of getting it back, I never got confused over it once?

ref: http://www.razorianfly.com/wp-content/uploads/162642-lion_subpane_slider_old_500.jpg