As a developer who moved from Java and JavaScript (IntelliJ IDEA) to Swift and Xcode about a year ago, the experience has been horrendous. How is it okay for a company as big and serious as Apple to have an IDE and tooling as bad as Xcode? The IDE frequently crashes, there is no refactoring support at all, practically non-existant code completion, syntax highlightning frequently stops working, etc etc.
Dear Apple
131–140 of 211 posts
Re: Dear Apple
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're joking, right?
No, I am completely serious. This is how things work in big organizations.
As far as I've been able to tell, Apple engineers use "file a radar" to mean "I'd rather let someone else triage that, or even better yet I'd rather you get lost in the system, so here's a quest for you to go on so I can get back to work", particularly as we all know that at the end of that quest the result will be "marked as duplicate", past which point Apple refuses to give you any more information or even a follow-up. I would honestly rather there just be an e-mail address bugs@apple.com to which I could shoot off random issues I run into, from which I know I'd get no response, than Radar.
Re: Dear Apple
#133These 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.
I guess you're lucky, because I fight SourceKit crashes every couple of minutes.
Re: Dear Apple
#134The 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.
Yeah :/... I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist upon using Xcode even though we all know how bad it is... there are so many alternative toolsets you can use, including just vim+git+make, that are just so much more stable and easier to customize to get the optimal testing workflow, that to sit around and smash your head against Xcode over and over again while constantly complaining to Apple, as if that is really going to help, makes no sense at all :/.
Re: Dear Apple
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
As a mobile developer, I can confirm this. They mostly just install all their social networks and a couple of games, but there's still demand from businesses who want their own apps.
Re: Dear Apple
#136Wow, 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 the grandparent, but I can share one example: Our team deploys OpenStack and is developing a custom dashboard in Rails. I'm more of a backend guy, although I also do my fair share of frontend development. But I had a ticket in my sprint, just a tiny UI bug, but I was busy in the backend, so I asked a junior dev to take care of it. He cloned the repo, then proceeded to fight with rbenv and postgres and what not on his Mac for a full 2 days, until he gave up and spun up a Linux VM on OpenStack to work on the Rails app in there. Sure enough, he got up and running in there in under an hour.
Shit like this is why I do all my development in a VirtualBox with Arch Linux. While my co-workers argue about the best way to install Docker on their Macs, I just `pacman -S docker && systemctl start docker` and get on with my life.
Re: Dear Apple
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Docker is, in fact, impossible to get going on Mac OS. When you see "Docker for Mac", it's launching a Linux VM under the hood, and patching you through to that VM's Docker daemon.
Re: Dear Apple
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you seriously just try to convince me that a 50k employee (by your logic) company is not a big company?
This ( https://www.quora.com/How-many-software-engineers-does-Apple... ) says that Apple employs ~16k software engineers. Let's break that down across everything those 16k software engineers are responsible for: • The OS kernels, drivers, and frameworks of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS • The base-system software on all of those OSes, including rather involved apps like: iBooks, Safari, Mail.app, iTunes, Photos.app •…
This looks like a reasonable list, however I think the overarching view is that with all of Apple resources (money, etc.) they should be able to point some of them at XCode. This may involve hiring developers or shifting priorities from other projects. Either way, it's something that most developers feel is necessary and good.
Then again, maybe this is another way of saying that Apple really doesn't care about professional programmers and their needs. Similar to the feedback around the latest MacBook Pro specifications and the lack of movement in the Mac Pro and Mac Mini machines.
Re: Dear Apple
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 politic…
Absolutely this, the most recent example is the Dash fiasco. It turned out OK for the developer, but had he been only on iOS for example, Apple would've ended his source of income. They also add more and more hoops to install non Mac App Store apps with each macOS release, I mean you can no longer install apps from "Anywhere" for example, like you used to.
What I recommend doing is to learn how to develop solid, cross platform APIs and you then have the flexibility to develop as many clients as you like, web, iOS, Android etc. with no single point of failure.
Re: Dear Apple
#140As a developer who moved from Java and JavaScript (IntelliJ IDEA) to Swift and Xcode about a year ago, the experience has been horrendous. How is it okay for a company as big and serious as Apple to have an IDE and tooling as bad as Xcode? The IDE frequently crashes, there is no refactoring support at all, practically non-existant code completion, syntax highlightning frequently stops working, etc etc.
What's worse... the refactor functionality for renaming used to be great, but when swift came along it stopped working for Objective-C as well...