Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 192 posts

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

#91

Post by visarga »

As an Apple user, I have often consulted discussions.apple.com to find fixes for problems. A lot of times there were thousand post long threads with no official answer. It is a wasteland. I know they don't answer questions, but they could make an exception for the most important common issues. It's as if they put their fingers in their ears and sing "la la la" while we try to communicate bugs.

How can the richest computing company not answer questions put by thousands of users who have banged their head in the same bug? It's insulting to have this circus happening on their doorstop.

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

#92

Post by tvon »

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…

Well, I don't really agree, but I will say that the iOS testing world has a lot of catch-up to do. Ruby developers (as an example) have much, much, much better testing tools. There is no doubt about that. The hoops you have to jump through to create acceptance tests are quite annoying, especially when you can't even test UIAlertViews, or basic things like Airplane Mode...

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

#93

Post by smackfu »

raverbashing wrote: post #67
melling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Practically speaking, for the problem in question, none of these employee counts matter much. 200 engineers is a large number to put on any project, but a tenth of a percent of their total employee count.

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

#94

Post by robomartin »

imissmyjuno wrote: post #84
robomartin wrote: post #31

I am one of those developers who don't jump on the bandwagon right away. Experience has taught me to be very cautious. It also comes from doing a ton of work on mission-critical systems where you don't do stuff like install the latest software updates without massive testing on off-line systems. Yes, sometimes I miss out on really neat developments. iCloud is one of those cases where I am glad for being a slow adopte…

The only thing I can think of is to set up contact, calendar etc. sync to Google (via ActiveSync or otherwise). Calendars won't magically transfer over since they're assigned to a particular calendar, on iCloud in your case, but contacts should get pushed to Google. That'll at least give you a backup of your contacts, and setting up the other devices the same way should sync them all up. Can anyone else chime in? Doe…

I might try that.

Frankly, I'm just thinking of writing an app to export everything to a MySQL database on one of my servers and do my own version controlled backup. Not sure Apple would ever approve such an app, but I can certainly write it and use it internally.

A long time ago I learned there is nothing more important than ensuring your data is safe. I learned this the hard way in college when a drive failure evaporated six months of hard coding...and I had zero backups. You don't do something like that twice.

With iCloud Apple has given us a tool that is so badly done it has the potential to evaporate our data. Amazing.

There's a reason Microsoft code runs the IT infrastructures of small, medium and massive corporations. They get it. They don't engage in making petulant adolescent choices for their users. Crap like removing "Save As" from applications and forcing duplication --and even storage-- of files on iCloud from your desktop.

I've been using Apple products since the first Mac. I could not see any way to trust Apple with enterprise data. No way.

I really don't know what Apple is about any more.

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

#95

Post by alayne »

imissmyjuno wrote: post #81
pifflesnort wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a good argument for it being broken: 1) Core Data objects are not NSObject objects. You can't treat them remotely like normal objects: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/... 2) Core Data requires making your model mutable, and spreading dependencies on Core Data's abnormal objects throughout your entire code base. 3) Since the abnormal objects are spread throughout your code,…

I don't know anything about Core Data so pardon my ignorance. How has Apple marketed Core Data? I'm asking because the issues you've mentioned are solved well by SQLite, but perhaps that's because Core Data wasn't designed to be used in anything but the simplest use cases? That tends to happen with solutions that are magical.

Core Data is essentially an ORM layer on top of SQLite.

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

#96

Post by melling »

raverbashing wrote: post #67
melling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That page says Apple has 80,000 employees, leaving them about the same size as Google. Google has people on the payroll buidling Google Glasses, The Google Car, Gmail, App Engine, Go, Macs, Docs, Chrome OS, and a lot more projects than we probably know. Remember this: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/

It's true that Apple is highly focused, and they probably have half, if not a quarter of the products that Google has.

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

#97

Post by smackfu »

ajanuary wrote: post #59
acdha wrote: post #42

My trust of iCloud disappeared when a restore from backup lost all important data (passwords, Google Authenticator keys, etc.) with no indication. The backup was listed as successful, the restore was listed as successful and yet the only data I needed it to restore was lost. This was also when I learned that Google's process for restoring lost two-factor credentials ultimately ends in an email form which sends to hig…

Google explicitly opted out of backing up authenticator keys. iCloud would be worse if apps /couldn't/ opt out.

I don't think that's right. Secure things in iOS are in the Keychain, and the Keychain is only backed up if you do an encrypted backup via iTunes. Other backup methods (iCloud and non-encrypted iTunes) just leave it out of the backup.

The scary thing is that you hope your apps can handle the case where they have local data but no authenticated user for it. Some of them just treat no authenticated user the same as a first start and reinit the local data.

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

#98

Post by smackfu »

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?

OTOH, the number of leaks via prematurely updated store pages that you see on other manufacturers indicate that it's not as easy as you would think.

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

#99

Post by zalambar »

saurik wrote: post #17

When ever this topic comes up, including at iPhone conferences I attend, no one seems to have ever heard about Simperium, which pretty much has as their mission statement to solve this problem and seems to have actually done so quite well (yet people are mentioning, quite often, only tangentially-related companies like Dropbox); I believe they are even a Y Combinator funded company... I would be fascinated by an expl…

I've talked to folks from Simperium before and think that they have a good idea but I remain skeptical of their approach . In particular their Core Data syncing strategy.

As I understand it Simperium observes changes to the Core Data models you specify, maps those changes to operation transforms, and distributes the transforms across whichever clients have subscribed to the service. That's great if all your app needs is simple data replication to multiple clients. Unfortunately operational transforms are not necessarily snapshots of database transactions and conflict resolution strategies do not guarantee a valid database.

Saving a Core Data transaction on one client may generate multiple operations which are replayed interleaved with operations from other clients. Conflict resolution is then performed between operations rather than transactions. Simperium can probably take steps to minimize that case but as long as I can construct transactions which cannot be expressed as a single operation this will happen.

Worse a client can apply operations without conflicts only to find that its models no longer pass its own validation rules. For example two clients can each add a child object to a "has one" association. Both "create" operations can be applied without conflict but the parent object no longer passes the application's validation rules.

This doesn't make operational transform based synchronization untenable but it does imply a new set of constraints on how applications should model their data in order to successfully apply operations from other clients. That may not be a popular sales pitch but I'm reluctant to feed structured data through a service that doesn't at least discuss the model and its constraints in some detail. Otherwise I fear such a service is another iCloud like trap which will eventually (though perhaps less frequently) hit catastrophic edge cases from which there is little hope of recovery.

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

#100

Post by saosebastiao »

r00fus wrote: post #89
saosebastiao wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it prompts you to log in, it will pull up your appleID for you, but it gets it wrong. It will pull up some random other appleID...sometimes an old one you created for iTunes using a hotmail account you haven't checked since 2004, but sometimes a completely random other person's appleID. The authentication is unpredictable too...my wife has successfully signed on to her current account using an old password and s…

Sign on to what? iCloud? Is there a forum thread or discussion somewhere that actually describes this in more details? I've never gotten this before.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4342193?start=0&tst...
Post reply on HN