Someone asking for money in exchange for a good or service? How horrifying.
Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
291–300 of 401 posts
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#292I'm an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn't work on the Mac (at least last time I looked…
Are you really saying that you can't afford to pay $5 from your own pocket for XCode 4? What price, other than $0, would be acceptable for a tool that took years of effort by a team of programmers and cost Apple tens of millions in programmer's salaries to develop?
The point is not that it's $4, or $10,000 or $0.25. The point is that now that money has to come from somewhere. This throws up a sizeable obstacle for anyone looking to do development on the platform and will especially hurt FOSS.
If you can't see this, I don't really know what to say. Apple literally makes billions of dollars on software, you'd think they'd throw the developers that literally helped build their ecosystem a freaking bone. I suppose that's too much to ask from Apple.
Cue the "vote with your wallet", "no one is forcing you to use it" rabble...
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this supposed to be satire? Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers. They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5 . That's not a death blow to hobbyists, th…
It was free, so I don't how you can call it anything but erecting a barrier to entry to developing POSIX apps on the Mac. You don't just need $5, you need a credit card number. Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why. It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
> When it gets more expensive we should ask why.
They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why.
I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#294I'm an academic who develops Free / Open Source software and distributes libraries and binaries for the Windows, x86 and x86_64 Linux and Mac platforms along with the source. One important library generates C code based on a domain specific language, links a shared object and uses that; on Windows and Linux, we ship a cut back gcc and libtools to do that; libtools doesn't work on the Mac (at least last time I looked…
Are you really saying that you can't afford to pay $5 from your own pocket for XCode 4? What price, other than $0, would be acceptable for a tool that took years of effort by a team of programmers and cost Apple tens of millions in programmer's salaries to develop?
I think it sounds little sharp here BUT I have to admit I paid several bucks to save me from headaches at work. I bought software which made me a lot more productive and it sometimes cost me more than 60 bucks AND I'm really using those software at work not at home cause I don't need them at home.
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE You can start from here: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/DeveloperTools.html
Not so much if you want to do any iOS work.
If doing iOS work isn't worth five dollars to you, than how much you can be said to "want" to do it is up for debate.
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#296If there are any younger hackers out who don't have any other way of purchasing this and can't (or don't want to) ask their parents, email me at sqs at cs dot stanford dot edu with your HN username and a link to something you're working on, and I'll gift it to you.
It sounds like you might have to first verify your Mac App Store account, though, and if you have no CC, that requires you to email Apple (I just Googled around, and that's what some sites said). So, you'll have to do that first. Just search for "mac app store gift card no credit card" and you'll see what's up.
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can compile, but you can't link with the standard GNU toolchain to get a usable library (at least last I heard), because binutils simply doesn't support the Mach-O format (see http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2009-09/msg00121.html ).
I believe Apple's version of binutils is cctools, which is at http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-782/ . It includes ld and as. As you mention, the standard GNU source for binutils won't build, as it doesn't understand Mach-O, but MacPorts would seem to be free to use cctools for linking/assembling. If this turns into a "real issue", such that XCode 3 was rescinded and XCode 4 remained paid only -…
While it's not really useful for regular building, it seems like Joe Damato has made some progress on getting some of the binutils code working.
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
And while, $5 is still well within the average teenagers reach, it's still a lot more friction than free. Smalltalk companies did this to themselves, but with a smaller userbase and bigger fees. (Which is worse in both dimensions!) With $5000 seats, the friction was hella high. Then Java came along with tools that weren't 100th as cool, but which were frictionless and free. It's kinda the playbook for being a superio…
Great, so all someone needs to do is make a decent Cocoa IDE (don't forget Instruments and an iOS simulator!) and give it away for free. Problem solved.
JetBrains is working on an IDE for Cocoa developer and guess what it wont cost 5 bucks thats for sure.
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#299The caption says that pg "discovered [a] spam filtering algorithm." I find it interesting that while this is probably the result of a staff member's ignorance with technology jargon, the word "discovers" actually expresses my interpretation (call it "philosophy" if you want) of the interaction between algorithms and "intellectual property."
Re: Xcode now costs US$ 4.99
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xcode 3. You can grab it from http://developer.apple.com/
I do wonder: for how long will Xcode 3 remain available on Apple's site? I also wonder what they may attempt to do to effectively break Xcode 3, or make it where Xcode 4 is necessary for future development? I wouldn't put it past them.
IIRC, you can download earlier versions of Xcode for earlier releases of OSX.