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Dear Apple

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Re: Dear Apple

#181

Post by 36bydesign »

infinisil wrote: post #102
ryanSrich wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because it's by far one of the most annoying issues every developer has with Apple now. It's so frustrating to see the syntax highlighting and auto completion engine crash continuously as you try to figure out what line causes it just so you can rewrite it the more verbose way for the engine not to choke. You may think this has to be a beta version or a newly introduced bug, but no, these issues have been there in th…

1 1/2 years? Uh since day 1 of swift at least. Granted it was beta then but you couldn't go 45 seconds without losing syntax highlighting.

Re: Dear Apple

#182

Post by mileycyrusXOXO »

sebleon wrote: post #163

As someone that has dabbled in Android development, I have to say that Xcode is light years ahead of its competitors re: developer friendliness. It's realistic from a complete novice to setup their environment and create a full app in a few hours. Just getting your environment setup for Android can take a whole day or more. I'm surprised by how few of these comments actually touch on the suggestions in this letter. O…

This is an exageration. Setting up a clean install for Android development takes all of two minutes.

Re: Dear Apple

#183

Post by Mandatum »

majewsky wrote: post #137
ben_jones wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that still the case? If so, that's crazy - as bad as the old Windows installs with vbox. However that being said, if that is still the case, they must have a wrapper on top of it since I didn't notice much of a difference at all between OSX docker usage and Ubuntu.

Re: Dear Apple

#184

Post by landryraccoon »

stuckagain wrote: post #122
maxxxxx wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually picked a small number. With documentation, testing and everything you get pretty quickly to large teams. I bet less than 10 would be devs.

I was all-in with six. Three people to write the code. Two people to write the documentation and otherwise interface with the public. One person to answer all of the emails and attend all of the meetings and make sure nobody interrupts the other five people. If you have headcount for "testing" then I don't want to use your software. Tests are integral to coding and should be written first.

Do you use Apple software? I understand they are pretty big on manual testing.

Your process description doesn't sound anything like how I understand products are developed at Apple. Where's the headcount for the designers / UI specialists? Are you counting them as engineers?

Re: Dear Apple

#185

Post by mahyarm »

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:…

The tooling is a lot worse in swift land than objective-c land. In Obj-C land compiles are fast, the debugger works and is stable and the indexer works just fine.

The entire pbxproj format is horrible, but at least you have stuff like BUCK (https://buckbuild.com/) that can mitigate some of that.

Another thing I would add to that letter are good build boxes. Bring back xserve, so we have CI that is not based on mac pros or mac minis.

Android devs, even though they have build tooling options with java, have other problems that make developing on their platform painful. Their simulators are bad compared to iOS, the fragmentation / lack of updates is pretty annoying and overall it's harder to deliver good equivalent android apps than it is for iOS. iOS as a software platform is actually pretty solid.

What do you use to develop on? Any specific laptop or is it a desktop?

Re: Dear Apple

#186

Post by richardwhiuk »

bsder wrote: post #171
valuearb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

> Yea, but iOS developers make twice as much as Android developers. 1) 2x mouse nuts is still mouse nuts. 2) Do they really make 2x? Especially after you deduct $100 a year?

$100 is peanuts to anyone actually earning money, and it's definitely peanuts compared to developer cost.

Re: Dear Apple

#187

Post by CamperBob2 »

stuckagain wrote: post #122
maxxxxx wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually picked a small number. With documentation, testing and everything you get pretty quickly to large teams. I bet less than 10 would be devs.

I was all-in with six. Three people to write the code. Two people to write the documentation and otherwise interface with the public. One person to answer all of the emails and attend all of the meetings and make sure nobody interrupts the other five people. If you have headcount for "testing" then I don't want to use your software. Tests are integral to coding and should be written first.

If you have headcount for "testing" then I don't want to use your software. Tests are integral to coding and should be written first.

Yeah, if everything were synchronous, deterministic, linear, and non-interactive, life would be so much easier, and test-driven development might actually work.

Re: Dear Apple

#188

Post by ajdlinux »

Mandatum wrote: post #183
majewsky wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that still the case? If so, that's crazy - as bad as the old Windows installs with vbox. However that being said, if that is still the case, they must have a wrapper on top of it since I didn't notice much of a difference at all between OSX docker usage and Ubuntu.

It's not crazy, it's kinda hard to implement containerisation yourself in a proprietary OS kernel that you don't control...

However, as of fairly recently, IIUC Docker for Mac uses macOS's native hypervisor framework rather than relying on VirtualBox as it used to.

Re: Dear Apple

#189

Post by eridius »

jvz wrote: post #180
eridius wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rather insulting comment, and it's completely wrong. Apple engineers tell you to file a radar because if it's not in radar, it won't get done . Period. Radar is the way Apple engineers track work that needs to get done, and if nobody files a radar, it can't be tracked, prioritized, assigned, and completed.

The problem is that none of that is apparent to an outsider . You can tell developers that filing radars is important until you're blue in the face, but as long as dealing with Radar from the outside is functionally identical to talking to a wall, you shouldn't be surprised when you get pushback like the parent's. If you find that "insulting", consider how it feels to be told to go through the work of filing dozens o…

> The problem is that none of that is apparent to an outsider.

What exactly isn't apparent? How Radar is the way things get done and you need to file a Radar if you want anything fixed? I'd think that's crystal clear given that every single Apple engineer you talk to will explain this to you.

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