Bad Shovel
There comes a point where one has to acknowledge that they’re working with software that has become very old. Workflows stay fixed for years, coming to depend on tools that have not been updated for a couple of operating system UI generations. Dark mode is shunned. The corners make you feel like you’re in some sort of museum. The tool works fine, just as intended, and nobody has to care.
I have a few of these on my Mac. I encode in xACT, which hasn’t seen an update in a very long time. My music library is in Swinsian, and I run a cron job every hour to detect, and swiftly delete, any time Apple tries to sideload its very bad music-playing software. Swinsian sees updates, but what it needs is a complete rewrite. I use Waltr to push music to my iPhone; it has been rewritten, but in a way that changes its fundamental use, and so I have not bothered to upgrade it. iStat Menus has been calmly humming along since the Pleistocene.
They all remind me of the housewarming gift that my parents got me when I bought this house, which is a shovel that my great-grandfather used for 30 years. It is made of homicidally effective iron and solid oak, weighing four times any other gardening implement in the garage. There is no brand name. It digs. One takes it for granted, noticing it on the wall, looking like any other shovel until you choose to work with it.
Eventually, the shovel will fail and xACT will stop loading, at which point I’ll snort, google for some alternatives, find something, and use it for the next 10 years, not really thinking much about it. In this case, the time limit is constrained by the brittleness of the parent platform. Maybe I hit something hard in the ground and finally break the shovel. Maybe xACT doesn’t support Apple Silicon, and a new macOS comes out that won’t support xACT. In either case, time claims it.
I’ve been thinking about this after Apple decided to email a bunch of developers that their apps were old, and Apple was going to remove them from the App Store. Developers got frustrated, Apple backpedaled, people were satisfied. Apparently Apple does this every so often, and this cycle just got picked up by the press. Apparently Apple also lets people use their old software if they already bought it from the App Store.
I get it. Apple doesn’t want new customers to download old stuff, thinking it works consistently, and notice that it looks like it came out in 2008, for a screen size that stopped existing in 2014. It is theoretically pro-consumer to weed the garden every so often.
But it raises questions. What if tools like xACT are on the chopping block, which have no real substitute and work just fine? What if apps can’t be updated for whatever reason, or if updating them is too complex of an undertaking? (Think of rewriting now-deprecated API calls.) Is there a way to designate apps that haven’t been updated in more than two years on the App Store, such that people can be suitably warned before downloading or purchasing them?
Throw a badge on them, provide an intermediary step to confirm after someone hits “buy,” and say that the product isn’t guaranteed to work for a long time. Let us deal with the consequences. Because sometimes you just want to run a hundred-year-old shovel straight into the ground.