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Dear Apple

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Re: Dear Apple

#41

Post by na85 »

fleshweasel wrote: post #7

It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.

Sooner or later people will wake up to the fact that this is their own fault for leveraging a proprietary ecosystem.

You want to play in Apple's walled garden, you take the scraps they give you.

They have no financial incentive to make the experience better for you if you're already a captive developer.

Re: Dear Apple

#42

Post by wool_gather »

orbitur wrote: post #33
wool_gather wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one that's been getting me lately is the split between Xcode 7/Swift 2.2 and 8/3. We have an older project in Swift 2 (yes, it's slated to get changed over, just not yet), and new work on a project in 3. If I try to open one while the other is already open, one of the Xcodes invariably freezes or crashes. I will say, though, that I've always liked IB (though not storyboards). But then there's the wonderful "Oh, y…

Can you still submit apps with Xcode 7? In response to your problem, having done the Xcode Old/Xcode New dance every year since 2012, I got into the habit of making sure they are never running concurrently. Things get even worse if you run xcodebuild on the command line while a different UI version is running.

> Can you still submit apps with Xcode 7?

...yes. You can. 6 is the minimum.

> having done the Xcode Old/Xcode New dance every year

There didn't used to be this hard division between Xcode versions because of the compiler. If you were willing to do some reconfiguring, you could use newer GCC or "Apple LLVM" with the older Xcode.

Re: Dear Apple

#44

Post by pjmlp »

yourapostasy wrote: post #36
M_Grey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That very wealth is what's insulating them from the long-term reality of the choices they're making. It's a trap!

Indeed, Apple has the high-tech equivalent of "dragon sickness", in a nod to Tolkien. Google has a long road ahead of it, but it looks like they have the right pieces in place where I see small, incremental improvements each year, so maybe they're the tortoise. Milestones on that long road are like migrate away from Dalvik, fix business model / monetization issues with the Android marketplace, switch to vector-based…

All of that has zero meaning given Google's reluctance to fix Android updates.

The majority of the Android users is yet to experience any of those improvements.

Re: Dear Apple

#45

Post by concinds »

fleshweasel wrote: post #7

It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.

I remember a few years ago, at a WWDC session on Xcode, the presenter was talking about version control improvements.

He said something to the extent of "Xcode has a robust version control system" and the crowd laughed. And the presenter got offended, said it "wasn't nice" of the audience to laugh considering how hard-working the Xcode team was.

My recollection is blurry so it would be nice if someone else remembers this too.

But if that's really the attitude within Apple or the Xcode team, don't hold your breath for improvements.

Edit: changed my paraphrase of the presenter. since I remember it a little better now.

Re: Dear Apple

#46

Post by tlrobinson »

meesterdude wrote: post #37

Wow, it's that bad for developers of their own platform? I do rails development and left OSX for linux a few years ago after finding all the custom song & dance to do things on apple was painful. Not a day goes by I am not grateful for doing that, i am much happier doing web dev on a linux box. But I was under the impression Apple at least took care of the devs who work on their platforms. As someone else has noted:…

Can you give some examples of advantages of doing ROR development on Linux vs Mac?

Re: Dear Apple

#47

Post by hd4 »

I made a conscious decision a while back to simply use a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with easily/cheaply-available commodity hardware for programming. Correct me if I'm wrong but other than iOS development, there isn't anything I can't do on Ubuntu with a 2010-ish laptop that I can do with a 2016-ish Macbook.

Re: Dear Apple

#48

Post by IBM »

fleshweasel wrote: post #7

It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.

Apple is not a big company. Out of the 116k employees they have 60k are in retail [1]. Another 6k are in AppleCare call centers [2]. So about 50k of them are at corporate. Contrast that with Google which has 72k employees [3] and Microsoft which has 120k employees [4].

Apple's organizational culture is meant to be about small teams. Steve Jobs once said "we're the biggest startup on the planet" [5]. This leads to complaints about various neglected features or products and calls for Apple to hire more employees or spin off divisions so it can have dedicated resources. Just like people will always complain about the quality of service at airlines, Apple watchers will always complain about whatever pet issue they feel isn't getting enough attention. That there are complaints doesn't in and of itself mean that Apple needs to change their organizational culture. These complaints always miss the opportunity cost of the changes they suggest: that Apple is Apple because they are resource constrained.

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/01/28/apple-retail-ahrendts-employee...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/how-apple-empo...

[3] https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20161231_alphabet_10K.pdf

[4] https://news.microsoft.com/facts-about-microsoft/

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg

Re: Dear Apple

#49

Post by bpodgursky »

pjmlp wrote: post #44
yourapostasy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, Apple has the high-tech equivalent of "dragon sickness", in a nod to Tolkien. Google has a long road ahead of it, but it looks like they have the right pieces in place where I see small, incremental improvements each year, so maybe they're the tortoise. Milestones on that long road are like migrate away from Dalvik, fix business model / monetization issues with the Android marketplace, switch to vector-based…

All of that has zero meaning given Google's reluctance to fix Android updates. The majority of the Android users is yet to experience any of those improvements.

Um, Google has actually worked very hard to de-couple parts of Android into separate apps, so that those apps can update without a carrier-managed total OS upgrade.

This has arguably negative impacts on Android's utility as a non-Google OS, but there's no question that this strategy was to help push updates to users faster.

Re: Dear Apple

#50

Post by sandworm101 »

hd4 wrote: post #47

I made a conscious decision a while back to simply use a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with easily/cheaply-available commodity hardware for programming. Correct me if I'm wrong but other than iOS development, there isn't anything I can't do on Ubuntu with a 2010-ish laptop that I can do with a 2016-ish Macbook.

iTunes.

Subnautica.

That's about it.

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