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An appeal to Apple from Anukari

anukari.com

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Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#71
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surely not perfect, and so much is quite horrible, but at least try to keep the facts in check. AppKit and auto layout are still working fine, they aren't going anywhere any time soon, there is no need to rewrite all the UI code. Core Data threading? Well, it has got its pitfalls, but those are known, and anyway, nothing is forcing you to use it. Xcode is so slim these days, it a ~3 GB download, it doesn't take…

Let's also keep in mind that the Linux desktop commits most of these offenses, but worse. Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going? Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption. As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major…

[flagged]

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#72
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's also keep in mind that the Linux desktop commits most of these offenses, but worse. Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going? Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption. As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major…

[flagged]

Even Wikipedia says Whataboutism can be completely deserved in some cases.

It is absolutely deserved here - Apple built a 100 foot tower, and it's grown hairy over the last few decades. Linux built 7 30 foot towers without stairs in the same timeframe; but yelling about the overgrowth on the 100 foot tower is still somehow defensible.

If they can't build their own towers correctly, they have no right to act like the main tower was built worse than their own.

(Edit, posting too fast: For the complaint that Apple has money, Linux does too. 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship, and has since 2004 when it was first counted. They are fully capable of doing better.)

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#73

This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is. Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but stil…

I think people forget how horrible embedded (including mobile) programming was before the iPhone SDK came along. I just posted about this[1], so I won't repeat myself here, but TLDR: developing for the iPhone is a breath of fresh air compared to how unnecessarily difficult embedded and mobile development was (and in many cases still is) on other platforms.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657086

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#74
post #59

This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is. Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but stil…

It's surely not perfect, and so much is quite horrible, but at least try to keep the facts in check. AppKit and auto layout are still working fine, they aren't going anywhere any time soon, there is no need to rewrite all the UI code. Core Data threading? Well, it has got its pitfalls, but those are known, and anyway, nothing is forcing you to use it. Xcode is so slim these days, it a ~3 GB download, it doesn't take…

I wouldn't call Xcode slim. It currently sits at 13GB+ as installed on my drive, and that does not include the simulators which are, what, 10GB each or something? Xcode is by far the largest application I have installed on my "daily driver" Mac.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#75
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. One of the worst things about Apple is how much time and effort they spend trying to lock you into their platform if you want to support it. There's no excuse for it. Even once they have you on their system, they're doing everything in their power to lock you in to their workflows and development environments. It's actually insane…

This is "don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower" territory imo. I don't think Apple is actively hostile to 3P developers or tries to lock them in. I think they simply don't care - or lack the institutional capacity to care even if individual developers in the organization want to care. The Apple developer experience is an abject horror because they believe everyone who is capable of developing high value applications f…

I'd argue you can see the hostility if you compare shipping to Windows vs shipping to Apple. Microsoft doesn't care if you copy over your MSVC suite into a Wine environment to build your software for their platform. Even SignTool just works. It's not necessarily trivial to do, but that's simply because the MSVC suite is a horrible mess like everything else Microsoft.

Apple explicitly disallows cross compilation in their Terms of Service. Even if you managed to get clang compiling for Mac on another Unix, even if you figure out how to get your app bundles signed outside of OSX, they'll revoke your developer license and invalidate your certs because you're in violation of their ToS. You're right they don't care about third party devs, but the amount of hoops you have to jump through for devops on Mac is almost certainly designed as a gluetrap.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. One of the worst things about Apple is how much time and effort they spend trying to lock you into their platform if you want to support it. There's no excuse for it. Even once they have you on their system, they're doing everything in their power to lock you in to their workflows and development environments. It's actually insane…

There is an excuse: shareholders. The more lock in there is, the more the champagne flows.

Trillion dollar market caps don't come for free. The Apple Tree must be watered with the blood of third party developers so our gracious overlords can Do Computing Different.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#77
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found some of that older documentation one day while being beyond frustrated with understanding some underdocumented iOS library APIs and it is incredible. What they have now is a joke in comparison. WWDC as a documentation strategy is terrible for people that learn from text. And it’s just a bad medium to begin with for information transfer. By its nature it’s bad at information density, and is often distracting a…

Yes, some of it survives on the archives, who knows for how long, always save copies of them. I wonder if it is a generation gap, as many apparently learn coding via videos, however that it is not enough to go deep. By the way, Microsoft suffers from the same diseas, they reduced their team size, ans unless one is coding since the 16 bit days, there are many things no one will find. Some of it is gone forever, as the…

Articles get removed from Apple's documentation archive seemingly randomly. However, on a good note, there are backups of the entire ADC Leopard Reference Library (available at several places online). That covers that vast majority of all the documentation Apple's ever produced. There's also the Apple II FTP archives, which have older but often less applicable documentation, but are definitely still valuable troves of information.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#78
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's also keep in mind that the Linux desktop commits most of these offenses, but worse. Core Data threading? Does Linux even attempt something like Core Data? How well is that going? Swift? I remember when Linux diehards invented Vala. The Swift of Linux, but with none of the adoption. As for UI code, Linux is finally starting to get a little more stable there. GTK 2 to 3 was a disaster; Qt wasn't fun between major…

[flagged]

People complaining about whataboutism are more obstinately committed to avoiding decent conversation than the people who commit it. This ain’t a formal debate.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#79
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Even Wikipedia says Whataboutism can be completely deserved in some cases. It is absolutely deserved here - Apple built a 100 foot tower, and it's grown hairy over the last few decades. Linux built 7 30 foot towers without stairs in the same timeframe; but yelling about the overgrowth on the 100 foot tower is still somehow defensible. If they can't build their own towers correctly, they have no right to act like the…

Apple has money… like coming out of their ears.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#80

This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is. Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but stil…

lol and people wonder why devs like using electron front ends for their back end code, despite the memory cost. I only have so much time in the day, so I'm doing a lot of calling of c++ backend code to display my data analysis output and configuration on Electron front end. I may look into wasm someday, when that mythical "extra time" comes around
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