91–100 of 252 posts
I think the $5.00 is to deter the average user from seeing a free App made by Apple and downloading it, eating up significant bandwidth
Wow, that's a long complaint-blog for $5! The cheapest new mac is $699 and the install DVD comes with XCode 3. Pretty sure new macs will come with XCode 4 preinstalled. I don't see how this is a problem. Even if you are building a Hackintosh, you're pirating OSX anyhow so pirating XCode too doesn't seem so far fetched. I have to use iPhoto'08 since that's what my Mac came with. But they just released iPhoto '11! Shou…
I disagree with all of the OP's points, except for one. Yes, Macs are incredibly popular with developers. 1) The reason I have always liked Macs since I was a kid is they basically come with what they need, and its easy to install extra stuff if you need it. Just because many developers like Macs doesn't mean that most Mac owners are developers. Most are just normal people who would wonder what is eating up extra spa…
As for the polish comment, it's really a matter of what you're used to and strictly a matter of opinion, but I find Xcode a nightmare to navigate compared to VS2010. Sure, Xcode is shinier and looks better, but the UX is far superior in VS2010 (again, just my opinion). I'm very much looking forward to a single window interface in Xcode 4.3.
As a developer, the killer aspect of OSX to me is the full blown *nix environment paired with high level commercial apps (like Xcode, photoshop, garage band, etc.). Not to mention I don't have to worry about my display card or wireless card working in OSX (like I still have to do with Linux).
I'm all for stating your opinion, but can we keep the hyperbole to a minimum on HN please? There's a reason I stopped reading Digg...
I disagree with all of the OP's points, except for one. Yes, Macs are incredibly popular with developers. 1) The reason I have always liked Macs since I was a kid is they basically come with what they need, and its easy to install extra stuff if you need it. Just because many developers like Macs doesn't mean that most Mac owners are developers. Most are just normal people who would wonder what is eating up extra spa…
1). Author doesn't claim that most Mac owners are developers. He attributes "a large part" of Apple's success to recommendations that began with developer mindshare.
2). It's not a burden to use the dev tools if you plan to use the dev tools, but it's a burden to install something on the scale of Xcode if some other tool you want to run just depends on the basic gcc toolchain.
3). For the author's points, you're not comparing Xcode installation to installing visual studio, you're comparing it to '[package manager] install gcc'.
4). Article author's preferred solution is not to stop charging, but to have a separate gcc package.
It boils down to the author thinking Macs would be more developer-friendly if more essential build tools (as opposed to developer tools, if you will) were bundled with the OS. It's an interesting point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming no other available build toolchain (e.g. Xcode 3), you won't have macports installed. How will you compile gcc, ruby if you don't already have a compiler?
Well, I'm pretty sure gcc can bootstrap and self-compile, but I don't know if macports is setup for that. edit: apparently it's not self-compiling, at least not in the way I was thinking.
Really? You think developers drove Mac OS X popularity ?
That's how Apple reaches consumers?
It's a ridiculous argument, first of all that $5 would deter anyone, secondly the clang/llvm binaries are available freely, which is the default compiler in Xcode. http://llvm.org/releases/download.html#2.8 GCC is freely available in source form.
But of course, source code is useless to you if your computer has no compiler.
I was pretty sure that at least part of Holman's argument was that Apple could easily do all of us a favor and just ship with gcc pre-built. ("All of us" meaning the devs who do all this for a living as well as the casual coders who might want to install a Ruby library with C extensions.) How would that possibly hurt Apple?
Wow, that's a long complaint-blog for $5! The cheapest new mac is $699 and the install DVD comes with XCode 3. Pretty sure new macs will come with XCode 4 preinstalled. I don't see how this is a problem. Even if you are building a Hackintosh, you're pirating OSX anyhow so pirating XCode too doesn't seem so far fetched. I have to use iPhoto'08 since that's what my Mac came with. But they just released iPhoto '11! Shou…
OP isn't complaining about the price, or at least not principally. He's complaining about the 4gb download, the 15gb of HDD and the time of installing Xcode just to get gcc. The price is just another barrier to entry to add to the list before you're up and running.
du -h -d 1 /Developer/Platforms/ 10M /Developer/Platforms//MacOSX.platform 4.4G /Developer/Platforms//iPhoneOS.platform 4.2G /Developer/Platforms//iPhoneSimulator.platform 8.5G /Developer/Platforms/
Of the 10GB the /Developer folder takes, about 8GB are the iOS stuff.
It seems normal they would bundle these since if you are downloading XCode, pretty sure you are doing Objective-C for iOS.
4GB is a big download and it does take space and it does take a while to install. But frankly, most people should be able to manage this quite nicely (and maybe even find a way to take back some of that space).
If anything, the whole thing deserves a tweet not a huge blog post.