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.
Everything posted on the internet is like that.
Dear Apple
81–90 of 211 posts
Re: Dear Apple
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm not sure why it hasn't been done yet; I've only been on the team for two months now. That would indeed be lovely. But the plan is to have one of our contractors move the entire project up to Swift 3. I don't know exactly when, though...
Re: Dear Apple
#83It'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 com…
You don't need many people to improve xcode. I bet 50 people could do miracles if anybody cares.
Re: Dear Apple
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The OP mentioned Swift 2, not Swift 2.2 - even that upgrade can be non-trivial (2->2.2).
Eh, it is indeed 2.2, sorry for the imprecision. But yes, the concern is the time for the transition. Planned. We just have to fit it in.
Re: Dear Apple
#8574 signatures is hardly a blip. I would've waited for at least 5000 signatures before publishing this.
Re: Dear Apple
#86Earlier 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…
> Imagine if you could hook up your own Docker container that Google's build infrastructure then taps to build your Android app...but all the open source your app depends upon are in their build infrastructure, with near-instant feedback on build and CI problems of the open source bits operating at a massive scale.
But... why? Gradle already does a good job eliminating works-on-my-machine-isms, that sounds like cloud-for-the-sake-of-cloud.
> I also wonder if Google and Microsoft could find benefits to team up to replace Dalvik with CLR, and then Microsoft Visual Studio becomes a first-class citizen on Linux for building CLR-based apps on Android.
But... why?
Re: Dear Apple
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not advocating for Android instead, I'm personally not a fan of mobile apps myself.
What I'm saying is you never know what's going to happen on a single heavily controlled platform. In 2 years time, Apple can create a competitor to your app and ban you (happened), create new guidelines so you can't publish your app anymore (happened), change search algorithms and your app drops (happened?), remove you for political disagreements (happened), remove your app because of API deprecations and non-backward compatibility (happened).
Developing on a platform like this in inherently risky, this is probably fine for (most) companies but I would advice developers to avoid devoting all their careers to a single platform and try to diversify a bit in case something happens in the future.
Re: Dear Apple
#88It'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 com…
It seems like what was once their strength is now becoming a liability. They seem to be spreading themselves too thin and more and more people are complaining about more and more things. Since more customers are unhappy it seems like they either need to hire more people or cut products.
Re: Dear Apple
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agreed, but just anecdotally: I was job hunting over the last year, and I saw very few posts that said "We're sticking with ObjC for now because Swift is a huge technical risk" although I would have been happy to hear that.
There just seems to be a lot of momentum; everybody's excited about it, everybody wants to be on the bus.
Re: Dear Apple
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Agreed, but just anecdotally: I was job hunting over the last year, and I saw very few posts that said "We're sticking with ObjC for now because Swift is a huge technical risk" although I would have been happy to hear that. There just seems to be a lot of momentum; everybody's excited about it, everybody wants to be on the bus.
That bus entails both good and bad, and everyone should be familiar with the risks of developing in a language in this state.
Personally, I wouldn't take any job application that only lists "Swift developer" seriously. Anyone serious enough about iOS development should know that you always need both. Also, not a big fan of telling people what technology to use forcefully.