macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess

macOS Golden Gate：一团糟的漏洞集合

In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have “no new features”. Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements throughout the system. 2008 年 6 月，苹果发布了 Mac OS X Snow Leopard，并自豪地宣称它将“没有任何新功能”。Snow Leopard 没有堆砌新特性，而是旨在巩固其前身 Leopard 的成功，选择专注于系统底层的性能和稳定性改进。

18 years later, Apple is taking a similar approach with macOS 27. Golden Gate aims to fix the missteps of last year’s Tahoe, promising an expansive set of improvements and “a more responsive and delightful experience”. Does it hold up? Here are just some of the bugs I’ve encountered in my daily use over the past couple of weeks. 18 年后，苹果在 macOS 27 上采取了类似的方法。Golden Gate 旨在修复去年 Tahoe 版本中的失误，承诺带来广泛的改进以及“更灵敏、更令人愉悦的体验”。它真的做到了吗？以下是我在过去几周的日常使用中遇到的一些漏洞。

Alignment is hard

对齐是个难题

Let’s start with some good old alignment bugs. Centring things is the hardest problem in computer science, after all. Take the QuickTime record button. Hey, at least it’s vertically centred. And here are the window tiling icons. These were centred at some point, I’m sure. Text is affected, too, but I’m not sure this is even attempting to look centred. And this is the first thing you see when you open System Settings. A little bit more padding under the heading wouldn’t hurt, no? 让我们从一些经典的对齐漏洞开始。毕竟，居中是计算机科学中最难的问题。看看 QuickTime 的录制按钮，嘿，至少它是垂直居中的。再看这些窗口平铺图标，我敢肯定它们曾经是居中的。文本也受到了影响，但我甚至不确定它是否试图看起来居中。这是你打开“系统设置”时看到的第一件事，标题下方多加一点间距应该没坏处吧？

Things they forgot

被遗忘的细节

Opening the Mac User Guide, I was quite surprised to find that it was for last year’s OS. This made me wonder: what else did they forget? We’re bound to find things Apple overlooked poking around the Touch Bar settings. Sure enough, here’s Siri’s old logo. The Network app, too, can’t make up its mind whether to use its new icon or not. And I know I’m nitpicking (I’ll indulge myself some more later), but the window controls now have a glossy sheen. Nobody seems to have told the Mission Control app. 打开 Mac 用户指南时，我惊讶地发现它竟然还是去年的版本。这让我不禁怀疑：他们还忘了什么？在 Touch Bar 设置里转转，肯定能发现苹果忽略的东西。果然，这里有 Siri 的旧图标。网络应用也无法决定是否要使用新图标。我知道我在吹毛求疵（稍后我会再放纵一下），但窗口控件现在有了光泽感，似乎没人告诉 Mission Control 应用这件事。

Bugs

漏洞

In this release, Apple changed the architecture of the menu bar, breaking a number of third-party menu bar management apps. It also introduced several bugs, and even the occasional crash. Let’s have a look! I know my machine’s getting old, but does it really need a second to load in the Profiles menu when I open a new Firefox window? And why does it keep highlighting the File menu for me? This is a fun one. Try moving the green camera icon. Oops! You’ve crashed the menu bar. 在这一版本中，苹果更改了菜单栏的架构，导致许多第三方菜单栏管理应用失效。它还引入了几个漏洞，甚至偶尔会导致崩溃。让我们来看看！我知道我的机器老了，但当我打开一个新的 Firefox 窗口时，它真的需要一秒钟来加载“配置文件”菜单吗？为什么它一直为我高亮显示“文件”菜单？这个很有趣，试着移动绿色的摄像头图标。哎呀！你把菜单栏弄崩溃了。

Bugs are elsewhere in the system, too. Sometimes the search bar in System Settings simply refuses to work. Not that it’s much use when it does function. Here’s me trying to move down the search results with the arrow keys. Also new in this release: links are only clickable for a split second. Miss it and it’s gone! I’m still not sure what this button is actually meant to do. I’ve been pressing it for over an hour now. About as much time as I’ve been waiting for this volume slider to auto-hide itself. It never took this long in the past. 系统其他地方也存在漏洞。有时“系统设置”中的搜索栏干脆无法工作。即便它能用，也没什么大用处。这是我尝试用方向键向下移动搜索结果的画面。此版本还有一个新特性：链接只有在极短的时间内可点击。错过了就没了！我到现在还不确定这个按钮到底是干什么用的。我已经按了一个多小时了。这和我等待音量滑块自动隐藏的时间差不多，过去从来没这么久过。

Now onto Mission Control. Here’s a fun fact: You can find references to NeXTSTEP, the ancestor of macOS, in its UI! You’re not supposed to, mind. I’m not sure this is supposed to happen, either. Capturing these bugs is hard work when you can’t even trust the tool you’re using to behave properly. Window sizes can also be miscalculated. And window controls can disappear altogether. Tiling has always been a struggle in macOS. If you want a challenge, try to recreate whatever’s going on here. Go on, give it a go. 现在来看看 Mission Control。有个有趣的事实：你可以在它的 UI 中找到关于 macOS 的祖先 NeXTSTEP 的引用！当然，你不应该看到这些。我也不确定这是否应该发生。当你甚至无法信任你正在使用的工具能正常工作时，捕捉这些漏洞是一项艰苦的工作。窗口大小也可能计算错误，窗口控件甚至会完全消失。平铺功能在 macOS 中一直是个难题。如果你想挑战一下，试着重现这里发生的一切。来吧，试试看。

Nitpicking

吹毛求疵

I can’t in good faith include these as regular bugs. I’d like to think there was a time when you could expect macOS to be obsessively polished, but I recognise no software is perfect, and you have to draw a line somewhere. But if I was promised refinements… Returning to the Touch Bar, why does this one icon not match the UI on screen? Another one for you fact fans: try using the screenshot app to capture an app window and you’ll discover the only straight corner in the entire OS. Don’t tell the Apple design team. This one just irks me. Show me one oval camera lens anywhere in the world. I’m waiting. And here, shouldn’t there be some sort of visual feedback when I click on this menu item? A hover effect? Anything? And lastly, something I find unintuitive. I have a folder open in the Dock. If I click on another folder, shouldn’t that then open? 我不能凭良心把这些归类为常规漏洞。我愿意相信曾经有一个时代，你可以期待 macOS 达到极致的打磨，但我承认没有完美的软件，你必须在某个地方划定界限。但如果我被承诺会有改进……回到 Touch Bar，为什么这个图标与屏幕上的 UI 不匹配？再给事实爱好者一个发现：尝试使用截图应用捕捉一个应用窗口，你会发现这是整个操作系统中唯一的直角。别告诉苹果设计团队。这一点让我很恼火。给我展示世界上任何一个椭圆形的相机镜头。我等着呢。还有这里，当我点击这个菜单项时，不应该有某种视觉反馈吗？悬停效果？什么都行？最后，我觉得有些不直观的地方：我在 Dock 中打开了一个文件夹。如果我点击另一个文件夹，难道不应该直接打开它吗？

Conclusion

结论

Okay, I admit it. Once I started to notice a few, I did purposely go looking for bugs. But not very hard, promise. And that’s the point. In a release where “nothing was off limits, no enhancement too small”, it shouldn’t be this easy to find bugs in daily use. Perhaps there’s hope yet. Snow Leopard had nearly two years of refinements to achieve the level of polish and stability its name has become synonymous with today. Maybe the annual release cycle has become a burden, and Golden Gate just needs more time. If AI has really sped up software development as much as we’re told, this shouldn’t be a problem. 好吧，我承认。一旦我开始注意到几个漏洞，我就确实故意去寻找它们了。但我保证并没有费多大劲。这就是重点所在。在一个“没有任何限制，没有太小的改进”的版本中，在日常使用中如此轻易地发现漏洞是不应该的。也许还有希望。Snow Leopard 经过了近两年的打磨，才达到了今天与其名字同义的精致和稳定水平。也许年度发布周期已经成为一种负担，而 Golden Gate 只是需要更多时间。如果人工智能真的像我们被告知的那样加速了软件开发，这不应该是个问题。

One final bug

最后一个漏洞

To finish, here’s my favourite bug. When using the Colours window, if you’re the sort of person who uses its built-in eyedropper tool to choose a colour from the wheel (rather than simply clicking on it directly), then congratulations: doing that hangs the entire system, and you’ve got no choice but to force a restart. And rightly so, you freak. 最后，这是我最喜欢的漏洞。在使用“颜色”窗口时，如果你是那种使用内置吸管工具从色轮中选择颜色（而不是直接点击）的人，那么恭喜你：这样做会导致整个系统挂起，你别无选择，只能强制重启。活该，你这个怪胎。