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Dear Apple

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Re: Dear Apple

#91

Post by xenadu02 »

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.

You can't run multiple versions of Xcode concurrently due to CoreSimulator fighting over which version gets to run. This is a limitation we are aware of. We are also very aware of the problems it causes.

As for other problems, please file radars and respond to requests for additional information. I have been on the external side of radar, I know it can be frustrating, but we do read them and we do take direct action based on them. Even duplicates are very useful.

Re: Dear Apple

#92

Post by 0xFFFF0000 »

Normalization of Deviance - this is a not uncommon problem with organization that grow as big and are successful. I'm curious on ideas on how a company as big as Apple and it's somewhat unfocused relation with the developer community can fix this? Maybe their CEO needs to call out to Developers.

Re: Dear Apple

#93

Post by stuckagain »

maxxxxx wrote: post #83
IBM wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

50 people would just have a lot of meetings. I bet 6 people could make a real difference though.

Re: Dear Apple

#94

Post by j2kun »

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…

So... they just don't know it's bad?

Re: Dear Apple

#95

Post by matt2000 »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #55
matt2000 wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

This is the other thing that people say when we talk about Swift stability. "It's a work in progress." Apple certainly isn't giving this impression anymore.

1) Apple now has most code examples in Swift. 2) Most talks at WWDC are either in Swift only, or with ObjC as the alternative examples. 3) Swift was made available almost 3 years ago. 1.0 was released in Sept 2014. The Swift team was working on it for several years before that. This is now roughly 6 years that the team has been working on it. So when should we consider it stable? 10 years? Longer?

To release a new language, call it the future of iOS development, but also call it "unstable and beta" is a really poor way to treat your developers. I am then stuck between possibly starting a project with an entire deprecated development environment (ObjC), or one that's going to be changing every year forcing me to spend significant time upgrading and possibly introducing bugs.

It seems possible to have a language change and mature in a more sensible way than this, it's just harder and takes more work by the language maintainers. The easy way is just to break everything, which is what Swift is doing.

Re: Dear Apple

#96

Post by bionsuba »

maxxxxx wrote: post #83
IBM wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mythical man month.

Re: Dear Apple

#98

Post by [deleted] »

ryanSrich wrote: post #73
wool_gather wrote: post #21

Can we give this HN post a better title? This is atrociously clickbaiting. Granted it just goes to GitHub, but I would like to have at least an _inkling_ of what I'm about to read.

Especially given the length as well. It's a small, short list of issues that users of XCode/Apple Developer tools have. Why is this #1 on the front page?

[deleted]

Re: Dear Apple

#99

Post by pjmlp »

bpodgursky wrote: post #49
pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Making it a legal requirement, as they already do with so many others for OEMs to access Google services and the Play Store, would be the solution.

No need for smoke and mirrors games regarding decoupling Android.

Re: Dear Apple

#100

Post by hd4 »

nurettin wrote: post #53
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.

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.

Which is why I feel for a lot of us who don't own Macbooks, it's a major sticking point, and you get a lot of people trying out "Hackintoshes" (which I don't really have much of an opinion on).

I just wish Apple had taken the Google route and made development a lot more open, not sure what they stand to gain by keeping even iOS development a walled garden but hey it's their platform to do with as they please.

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