OP is right about him not putting up with crap. Sure, not everything that came out of Cupertino was rock solid. But I think as much of an aesthete that he appears to be have been, it's also pretty evident that he was incredibly shrewd and knew he had to ship at some point.
The cruddy software might be coming from Apple repositioning itself from an innovation to a legacy brand. Acquiring Beats (can you imagine Steve championing this - lol), less of a focus on the high-end workstations for consumer electronics and watches, removing the grunt from high-end apps like Logic and FCP. Certainly no longer the underdog we root for, as the article points out.
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...
There are also many libraries available to decode and encode these files in various languages.
The reason why XML property lists look this way is that they were a direct translation of the older NeXT "property list" format, which was sort of like binary JSON. Dumping an alternating list of keys and values isn't pretty XML, but it ensured minimum translation headaches from the old format.
And five years is a long time when it comes to computers.
I agree with OP. There is no way Steve would have allowed some of the current stuff to see the light of day.
Same with iTunes (which has gotten a ton of criticism over the years), he was the one that kept cramming everything under the sun into it.
I don't know if he was as passionate about X Code, but he sure liked to brag about having the best development environment. Interface Builder in particular seems right out of Steve Jobs' brain (even if it sucks).
Here he is introducing X Code: https://youtu.be/Rh5spZrzu6c?t=59m3s
You clearly never used iTunes for Windows.
IME, every terrible thing about iTunes applies equally to both platforms.
via an All Things D event:
> What’s more, thanks to the popularity of iTunes on PCs, Apple has become a major Windows software developer. “We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people who say that iTunes is their favorite app on Windows,” noted Jobs. “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in Hell.”
That quip apparently caused Bill Gates to become quite angry:
https://books.google.com/books?id=6e4cDvhrKhgC&lpg=PA463&ots...
Mail is much better than it was even a year ago, XCode too, the OS is stable...
And FCPX didn't deteriorate over 7 -- it was a written-from-scratch reboot of the platform that just happened to cut some features people used (most got back with a vengeance).
