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Dear Apple

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51–60 of 211 posts

Re: Dear Apple

#51

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?

I'm not the original commentor but a better package manager has got to be in that list.

Re: Dear Apple

#52
The best way to build native iOS applications is in Visual Studio with Xamarin IMHO.

It pulls in the UI designer from XCode, and you get all of the advantages of Visual Studio which is hands-down just a better IDE than XCode.

Re: Dear Apple

#53
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.

In my personal experience, with everything else being equal, iOS development yields on average 6x more income than Android development. I haven't found a decent alternative, yet.

Re: Dear Apple

#54
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.

Ableton Live.

Re: Dear Apple

#55
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift 3 had a purposeful effort to prioritize syntax-impacting changes and API changes as possible with the idea that Swift 4 and beyond would have backward compatibility for Swift 3 code. Swift 4/5 will establish ABI compatibility, so that binary swift libraries will work across compiler versions

Yes I know that's what Swift 3 was trying to do, that's what I don't agree with. In my opinion the tradeoffs are just not worth it. Whatever happened to graceful deprecation of older language features an APIs? They invalidated all the related example code online and created a ton of mandatory work for all iOS developers within a 1 year timeframe, that's nuts. In my opinion :)

Why are you using a work in progress and unstable language? You should have known from the start that, implicitly, that would require a lot of rewrites. Developing a language, especially as all-encompassing one such as Swift, is a very demanding task; what is the added benefit of having to support deprecated language constructs and APIs? Tools are lacking as it is.

Re: Dear Apple

#56

These letters always come off as sounding immature. The open letter, the why I quit, the why I switch letters all do. It is as if you need validation for something.

That's a losing mindset.

I don't think the letter goes far enough.

If Apple is doing something you don't like, put pressure on them. A better strategy than OP's would be to go to greater lengths, like labeling Apple "anti-developer" (the same way Trump uses labels against his opponents), but too many here are too scrupulous and rationally-minded to do this. The basic fact is, the tactics you need to use in a philosophical debate and the tactics you need to use to effect change are different, and, to be effective, you need to be a bit radical and a loose-cannon. Activists who insist on being factual, moderate or respectful, lose. That includes political activists, union leaders, as well as anybody that wants to change corporate behavior or policy as is the case here.

Re: Dear Apple

#57
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are you not using the Swift 2.3 option in Xcode 8? It is going away in Xcode 8.3, but still, you can use more modern and stable dev tools.

Re: Dear Apple

#58
post #10

Just stop pushing apps for iProducts. When all the major apps stop adding features for a while Apple will focus on getting developers back or customers switch to Android.

Unpopular advice here in HN but I honestly advice people to think twice about devoting all their career to technologies made and developed for a single company, there are some big risks there, you never know what Apple will do in the future.

Re: Dear Apple

#60

These letters always come off as sounding immature. The open letter, the why I quit, the why I switch letters all do. It is as if you need validation for something.

That's a losing mindset. I don't think the letter goes far enough. If Apple is doing something you don't like, put pressure on them. A better strategy than OP's would be to go to greater lengths, like labeling Apple "anti-developer" (the same way Trump uses labels against his opponents), but too many here are too scrupulous and rationally-minded to do this. The basic fact is, the tactics you need to use in a philosop…

To expand on this:

Unions are an old-school idea. But unions won't work to protect iOS developers from Apple.

So why doesn't someone build up a brand, blog, or platform as a "developer's advocate"? A Twitter account, speaking on behalf of 100k followers, has leverage influence, and power. They can represent people, organize communities discussing developers' issues, and speak out with a single voice. Why does nobody do this? It's easier for Apple to ignore 100k individuals than for them to ignore 1 organization with 100k followers. The latter will get much wider media coverage.

Social media empowered mobs, why not use that for good?

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