On “Improvement”

1988 photograph of John Cage by Rob Croes (from the Dutch National Archives, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

I have many memories of my past experiences with John Cage, but the one I remember best was the cautionary approach he took to change. The way he put was that those that try to “change the world” end up by only making matters worse. I was reminded of this precept while waiting for the latest upgrade of the MacOS Tahoe release. To be fair, things tend not to get worse; but I usually come away feeling that change usually tends to be “on the surface,” with subtle differences in layout. I never seem to feel that the change actually mattered, since there was little impact on either my activities or the software responses to those activities. This has left me questioning what constitutes “improvement” in the Software Development division of Apple. I doubt that there is any way I can pose this question to Apple; and, even if Apple provided me with a means to do so, would I get a satisfactory response?

Prior to filing this article, I happened to look at my Finder window. It turns out that the slider bars along the bottom and right side of the frame are now “translucent.” There is still an opaque region that accounts for what is displayed in the window, but the space along which that region can be moved has changed. This is progress?