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Dear Apple

github.com

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Re: Dear Apple

#61

Post by crowbahr »

concinds wrote: post #45
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…

Well gee they are working so hard so we shouldn't criticize obviously. Golly all that hard work, so nice that it exempts them from derision for their substandard product.

Re: Dear Apple

#62

Post by meesterdude »

tlrobinson wrote: post #46
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?

doing dev in linux, the commands you run locally are the same ones you run in production. You install the same packages and control them in the same manner. I'm more comfortable in production because production is very similar to my local machine.

my dev machine is a VM, which gives me a ton of other benefits, like portability, resizability, backups, versioning, and overall stability. I can (and have) given devs my VM to get up and running immediately on a complex project, without having to do a lot of setup.

With each OSX update, usually stuff broke, needed to be reinstalled, or performed differently. With Linux, that is not the case. And with a linux VM, I can ride out host upgrades and keep plugging away with a machine i know works - or attempt an upgrade on a cloned VM and have a trivial way to backtrack if it fails.

Re: Dear Apple

#63

Post by fleshweasel »

wool_gather wrote: post #28
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.

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…

The file changing just from being looked at is one of the basic reasons that IB is bad. Apple made a grievous mistake in designing UI markup that is intended to be hidden from developers. Un-organizable, un-diffable toxic sludge.

Re: Dear Apple

#64

Post by ben_jones »

tlrobinson wrote: post #46
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?

Not a RoR dev but I imagine his deployment environment is also linux, and many of the tools he uses likely run better on Linux (as OSS usually targets linux first). Correct me if I'm wrong but Docker for example, although I think they brought parity recently, was always easier to get going on Linux then Mac.

Re: Dear Apple

#65

Post by jaxondu »

snackai wrote: 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.

I guess you can only do this when you're not dependent on App Store income or you're big. Tencent has a top hit mobile game 皇者荣耀 that is only Android. They can afford due to China market. Both Facebook Messenger & WeChat has no integration to iOS 10 CallKit and Siri.

Re: Dear Apple

#66

Post by eddieroger »

orbitur wrote: post #35
eddieroger wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, that. Vote with your keyboards. Apple writes software with the same tools and languages - if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now. Besides, Apple has mechanisms for feedback, and it's not open letters on GitHub.

> if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now It's not good but it's workable. Which Apple accepts as a reason to focus very few resources on dev tools.

Sure. My point is more if it's good enough for Apple at their scale - I mean, Xcode itself is written in Objective-C with Xcode - and they're willing to work around it, then 25 developers (at time of viewing) in a GDocs sheet and a readme file will probably not be the straw that breaks this camel's back.

Re: Dear Apple

#67

Post by valuearb »

na85 wrote: post #41
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.

Yea, but iOS developers make twice as much as Android developers. Lots of customers love the walled garden and those customers spend a lot more on apps than Android customers do (Android installed base is multiples of iOS, yet revenues are double on iOS).

And one of the reason the bigger spending customers are with Apple is the benefits of the walled garden. It's more secure, and it's updated far faster (or at all). For developers it's a better environment to develop for, consistent screen sizes and hardware features and I know I can write my latest app for the latest iOS and within months of it's release the vast majority of revenue producing customers will be on it. That's a big reason why better apps are written on iOS first, it's easier.

Re: Dear Apple

#68

Post by jes5199 »

cwyers wrote: post #40
dwightgunning wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only unrealistic if you aren't willing to adapt to changing market conditions.

This may not be what HN readers want to hear, but users, not developers, have the primary influence over what the market is.

is the market still apps? I don't work on mobile, so I guess I wouldn't know, but my feeling was that people install way fewer apps than they used to

Re: Dear Apple

#69

Post by valuearb »

realusername wrote: post #58
snackai wrote: 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.

You know Apple will sell a ton of iOS devices to people who have enough money to actually buy apps, which isn't yet true of Android.

Re: Dear Apple

#70

Post by valuearb »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #25

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.

I develop in Xcode every day, and it's usually the least of my problems. Everything this letter asked for is an I don't care for me.
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