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Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

arstechnica.com

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Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#61

Post by melling »

raverbashing wrote: post #49
dpratt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right? I know it's fashionable to hate on Java, for a lot of good reasons, but I think it's naive to dismiss the power of the platform itself. We may all have (completely valid) complaints about the outdated and verbose syntax of the language, but the actual JVM itself is fantastic. There are more scalable, fault-tolerant, high performance Java system…

"You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right?" Yes, I know. The problem is not Java directly. Reread what I wrote Google has the infrastructure and resources to make Java work for them at their size. Because they have whole teams dedicated to build their infrastructure (FS, storage, etc) Apple has to optimize their resources. They're not going to rebuild what Google did and I'm not seeing…

Apple has 72,000 employees while Google only has 54,000 employees. Apple is over 30% bigger than Google. I would guess that Apple has lots of infrastructure people too.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#62

Post by vor_ »

ianstallings wrote: post #38

Frustrated with just iCloud? No I'd go further. I'm frustrated with the whole iOS platform. It's like writing an app in the 1990s. Sure it works. But it's painful as hell. So much so that I've decided this latest project on iOS was probably my last unless something big changes. And just for the record I have a few flagship apps in the app store with millions of active users and I've worked quite extensively with the…

I haven't yet shipped an iOS app, but I do have a couple of Cocoa apps, one of which I'm porting to iOS. I have to say that I'm happy with AppKit and UIKit development. Even Objective-C feels like a jewel ahead of its time, in spite of its verbosity.

You don't specify what it is that makes iOS development painful or what it is about the toolsets of your peers that sets them apart. Claiming that it's like "writing an app in the 1990s" comes off like hyperbole.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#63

Post by blub »

aidos wrote: post #18
potatolicious wrote: post #5

I've worked with iCloud in conjunction with Core Data. It's as broken as the article describes, and in fact has gotten worse over time. No one really fully knows WTF is going with iCloud - documentation is basically nonexistent, support unavailable, implementation broken in trivial ways, and error messages inscrutable. I was at an Mac/iOS conference recently where the Core Data iCloud talk morphed from a standard tal…

Good lord, that sounds like a complete mess. I haven't been anywhere near it as a developer so I can't really speak on how bad it is from that point of view. As a user though I have absolutely no idea what is going in with Apple syncing. My wife has an iphone / mac syncing explosion that I simply can't fix. I just don't have any idea where the data is or why everything is duplicated in her iphoto collection. Or what'…

You mean all iPhoto photos, al photos in the photos folder on the mac or something else?

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#64

Post by lake_rogue »

potatolicious wrote: post #11
ericcholis wrote: post #7

If I'm not mistaken, there seem to be better cross platform options in Parse and Dropbox. A case can be made for the "walled garden", iCloud doesn't seem to be one of them.

There is indeed an opportunity here for other cloud providers - but "better" is fuzzy. The nice thing about iCloud is that once you set it up on a device, there is no need to configure it or authenticate ever again. It "just works" (if it actually worked). With Dropbox, either you are storing everything for all of your users (and paying for it), or you integrate into the user's Dropbox account - which would necessita…

The biggest reason we wanted to use iCloud is: background syncing (i.e. not just when the app is in the background, when the app isn't even running).

For apps that get a fair bit of off-line data creation this is a nice feature.

There's no way for a third party library to do this (at least not through iOS 6.1.3 SDK).

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#65

Post by coldtea »

ianstallings wrote: post #38

Frustrated with just iCloud? No I'd go further. I'm frustrated with the whole iOS platform. It's like writing an app in the 1990s. Sure it works. But it's painful as hell. So much so that I've decided this latest project on iOS was probably my last unless something big changes. And just for the record I have a few flagship apps in the app store with millions of active users and I've worked quite extensively with the…

>It's more like watching your peers blow past you because your toolset is from yesterday and their's is from tomorrow.

And what would that "toolset of tomorrow" be? Surely not Android's joke offerings, or Windows 8 same old...

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#66

Post by pooriaazimi »

pifflesnort wrote: post #48
potatolicious wrote: post #5

I've worked with iCloud in conjunction with Core Data. It's as broken as the article describes, and in fact has gotten worse over time. No one really fully knows WTF is going with iCloud - documentation is basically nonexistent, support unavailable, implementation broken in trivial ways, and error messages inscrutable. I was at an Mac/iOS conference recently where the Core Data iCloud talk morphed from a standard tal…

Core Data is barely functional locally, requiring an enormous amount of invasive runtime hooks to create the appearance of a "transparent" (it's anything but) object store on top of Objective-C objects. The fact that anyone, anywhere (including Apple), actually expected Core Data to work as a distributed object store is totally beyond my comprehension.

vor_: unfortunately, you're hellbanned.

> I have no experience with iCloud, but I'm pleased with Core Data for managing a persistent object graph. It automatically handles version migrations, undo, and faulting, and some interfaces can be populating with almost no code via bindings. I'm happy with it. Still, I'll be very interested to watch the Core Data presentations at WWDC.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#67

Post by raverbashing »

melling wrote: post #61
raverbashing wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You realize that a plurality of Google's backend is built in Java, right?" Yes, I know. The problem is not Java directly. Reread what I wrote Google has the infrastructure and resources to make Java work for them at their size. Because they have whole teams dedicated to build their infrastructure (FS, storage, etc) Apple has to optimize their resources. They're not going to rebuild what Google did and I'm not seeing…

Apple has 72,000 employees while Google only has 54,000 employees. Apple is over 30% bigger than Google. I would guess that Apple has lots of infrastructure people too.

Apple has 26k employees in retail: http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/

Apart from that, in Google most (core) jobs are software related, in Apple not so much (there's hardware, design, logistics, manufacturing specialists - even if the bulk is @ Foxconn and similar contractors).

Even if we consider software jobs only, I believe the bulk @ Apple is working in OSX/iOS, not to mention iWork, Final Cut, etc and not directly in Cloud infrastructure.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#69

Post by vor_ »

outside1234 wrote: post #51

I don't mean to be flip but how could you think a company that has to take down their store to change the product inventory would be a good bet to build solid web services?

To my knowledge, that only occurs during a keynote that introduces new products. I suspect it's intended to generate excitement.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#70

Post by DeepDuh »

daleharvey wrote: post #39

I have been surprised at the relative lack of interest from developers about first class syncing support, when mobile blew up I expected a flurry if libraries and tools that I could use to have my app work offline and sync data wherever I am. Sometime last year I gave up waiting and started working on PouchDB ( http://pouchdb.com/ ), its based on CouchDB's syncing model (and syncs with CouchDB) and works anywhere tha…

I'm very interested in this, in fact I'm planning on rolling an iOS based couchDB solution for a company sometime this summer. Could you comment on some key differences between pouchDB and touchDB? Did you also try to simply run ARM compiled couchDB on iOS? If yes, how was the performance there? I've read that initializing takes about 10 seconds - I'd be willing to swallow that if the subsequent interactions are smooth.

How about the initial replication of larger databases? Do you roll out an initial version directly in your app or do you have some file based download of a snapshot?

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