Live data from Hacker News

Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

technicallychallenged.substack.com

531–533 of 533 posts

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#532
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 different commercial applications The horror! Somebody paid money for something!? If it works, and it costs a reasonable amount of money, it's nice to support the developer. Not all of us have to be cheapskates.

the point is that the workflow was previously achieved with a single application whose design/feature set, pricing, and support policy are rarely changed or changed 5 times less often.

previously? it's only with today's "there an app for that" UX that things are so easy and not buried away in some menu somewhere.

Re: Buying an iPad Pro for coding was a mistake

#533
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t have an Apple developer account and you give a program you wrote to someone else, their computer will refuse to open it unless they go into System Preferences and whitelist the program.

This is intentionally misleading. Running any unsigned package requires the end user to open the program through system preferences for the first time, as a “did you really mean to run this potentially pwning software”. It’s a good security practice, and less intrusive than windows UAC by far.

With Windows UAC, when you run a program it opens a pop-up saying "do you want to run this program" and you can click "yes" to continue. With a Mac, if you run an unsigned program it opens a pop-up saying "program cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified" and your options are "Move to Trash" or "Cancel". It doesn't mention anything about letting you open the program anyway. This means that if you want to develop software targeted at anyone who doesn't know to go to the security section in System Preferences when they're not prompted to do so, you have to pony up $100 for a developer license. A lot of open-source projects don't offer Mac builds for this reason, and you have to build from source instead.
Post reply on HN