As for Apple, it was really Jony Ive.
Form over function for him, every single time.
Yep. Back when he was alive, Jobs was able to rein in Ive. (Yes, Jobs absolutely cared about form, but he really did understand usability, and pushed back when Ive went too far. Even so, there were numerous cases where form won out, but rarely on the software side, where Ive historically was not in charge.)
I mean, I don’t want to sound like I’m bashing Ive, since I really do respect his work and think he’s made an immeasurable contribution towards giving us the sleek, precision-made doodads we have today. (I think that without him (and Jobs, for giving him the corporate platform to actually implement it), we’d still be contenting ourselves with electronics built to 1990s tolerances, not the literally Swiss watch level tolerances now common among midrange electronics and up.)
Anyway, regarding the topic of LTSpice on Mac: that LT/Analog had to publish a list of Mac OS X Shortcuts (pdf) pretty much says it all.
Huh? What does that say to you?
It’s perfectly normal for software companies to publish lists of shortcuts. They’re found in almost any app’s manual and/or help files. Back in the days of printed manuals, programs would commonly include a printed card with the shortcuts. And that despite the fact that, other than pure modifiers, all the shortcuts are shown in the menus.
On iOS (where of course there is no menu bar) when using a hardware keyboard, holding down the ⌘ (command) key summons a list of an app’s shortcuts.
(Disclaimer: in a former life, I worked as a technical writer/translator at a software company. So I have probably spent far more time looking at software documentation than normal people.
)
Also, the program has a built-in update feature which has never worked.
That’s very irritating. Did it never work, or did it just never work on macOS 10.12? I speculate because countless apps used the open-source Sparkle framework for auto updating, and it’s great, except that the default code signing on 10.12 apparently castrates Sparkle.
So I wonder if they used Sparkle and that’s why it’s not working.
Of course, they could just release on the Mac App Store and let it handle updates.
(This reminds me that it bugs me that the Arduino IDE doesn’t have an auto-updater at all. It just nags you that an update is available, but you have to download and install it manually from the website. It’s super fun on my work computer where I don’t have admin rights and thus can’t update it...)
I kinda wish more apps would follow the model used by Chrome and Firefox, where the installed app ultimately only acts as a launcher, running a (signed) executable actually stored in the user data, so that it can be updated automatically without admin rights. I know it’s wasteful with storage, but in the end I think it’s a great compromise.
<tangent>
Another elegant solution (albeit one that’s not really relevant for or compatible with modern multi-user OSes where normal users do not have admin rights) is what Microsoft did for Office 98 on the Mac: drag and drop install
even thought it needs support files outside of the application folder. What they did was to make the core apps (i.e. Word/Excel/Powerpoint) capable of launching even if support files were missing, and then simply installing
or repairing the support files if needed. So it gave the user the benefit of a simple drag-and-drop installation, while also allowing them to use a more complex install with shared support files for all users, including things like fonts that had to go in the System folder. I can’t emphasize enough how important the “repair” part was, since it was common in those days for support files to get borked. I forget if they kept this system around in Office 2001, but for sure it was gone in Office v.X, the concurrent version for Mac OS X.
Nowadays, of course, the apps are essentially self-contained, since that’s an absolute requirement on the iOS and Mac App Stores.</tangent>
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