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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

#131

Post by joenathan »

Terretta wrote: post #108
joenathan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have bought into the marketing, as an owner of a Nexus 4 I am unfamiliar with the "UX annoyances" that you are referring to. Could you be specific?

As an owner of a Galaxy Nexus (TMobile) running the latest Jellybean, I suspect you've forgotten what it's like to pick the device up for the first time, if you claim the user experience is as polished for "normal" (non-tech) people. You also would be alone among the crowd of Android journalists who love the OS and talk about how each release is more polished, closing the UX gap. Skim any honest pro Android site for…

From what you describe you have a defective phone, you should get it replaced, your experience with your phone freezing isn't typical at all. My Nexus 4 has never once froze on me.

Also the Play Store has a default option called "auto add widget"[1] that adds a shortcut to your home screen of any newly installed app, I personally hate that default behavior and always uncheck that option.

Is that all you could come up with for UX annoyances?

I personally think the experience on Android and Jellybean in particular is first class, if you just take things like the notification shade, the intents system and widgets, the UX on Android is unmatched.

[1]http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57471256-285/how-to-stop...

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

#132

Post by ianstallings »

coldtea wrote: post #65
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...

HTML5 and all the surrounding technology is very exciting IMHO. They have the best tools and are quicker to adapt new techniques because of they get to work with a net (the fact that they can rollback quickly if needed). I get a little jealous when I see how quickly they can get something up and running that would take me a few days.

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

#133

Post by smackfu »

dunham wrote: post #124
smackfu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

The backup, encrypted or otherwise, doesn't contain the actual keychain file itself, but rather a plist export of a subset of the keychain. Things that are marked as kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlockThisDeviceOnly are never included in this backup file. Google's GTMOAuth library uses this value for its keychain records.

Interesting.

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

#134

Post by ok_craig »

mayop100 wrote: post #90

(Shameless plug) Firebase is an alternative to iCloud for many apps. It's built as a database, rather than a file store, so it's ideal for storing structured data. Conflict resolution is something we've been thinking hard about from day 1, and we think we have a pretty solid story [1]. We launched native iOS support a few weeks ago [2]. You can also access your data from JavaScript or from a REST API. Android and oth…

Hey, I've been using Firebase for a web client I've been working on for a bit and I like it a lot! Would you consider updating your transactions page with an example of a text change? Such as adding a word in the middle of a paragraph. I'm not quite sure how that would work.

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

#135

Post by crag »

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'…

"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."

Let me tell you it's not exactly happy land for us consumers either. Apple's "cloud" is a mess. And don't even get me going about the "new" and "improved" iTunes. Frankly I pity developers, cause Apple's mess is giving them a bad name.

I can't think of 1 icloud enabled app (on Windows or Mac) that I've used that worked well. The apps themselves are fine, it's the cloud integration that fails. I mean just look at Apple's own forums.

After 10 years as a Mac user, I'm actually considering moving back to Windows. I'm just over it. It's like every new OS (or app) something goes missing. I'm tired of spending hours searching for replacements for features Apple has removed. And I'm tired of being force-fed services and apps (that Apple's PR states is "gonna change my life") still in beta.

Ok ok //end rant

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

#136

Post by skc »

jmathai wrote: post #112
JonnieCache wrote: post #47

Anyone care to speculate as to why apple can't seem to do web services with even a modicum of success? (Remember ping?)

For the same reasons Microsoft hasn't been terribly successful online? It's a different game played by different rules. Interestingly, I'd like to watch and see how Google does moving into the physical goods space.

Erm, excuse me?

For one, Windows Azure is a pretty big deal. Secondly, XBox Live is a pretty big deal. Third, Bing might be struggling to gain traction but it most certainly works.

So can you point me to a Microsoft web property or service that is as wonky as iCloud at all?

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

#137

Post by jchrisa »

oohaba wrote: post #80
jimbokun wrote: post #33

Anyone using TouchDB as an alternative to iCloud core data syncing? https://github.com/couchbaselabs/TouchDB-iOS Of course, you would need to support some form of CouchDB server for this to work, deal with authentication, etc.

In my last startup, I used TouchDB and found that 95% of the time, it worked great, and 5% of the time, the app would grind to a screeching halt. Reading documents from the local TouchDB store would block the main thread until the upstream CouchDB server would reply with the document's current revision, even if the local store already has an existing version of the document. Using GCD to wrap around these document tr…

Thanks for the heads-up. We are very responsive to issues filed via the Github issue trackers, or brought up on the mailing list. My guess is this has been fixed since then (we've rewritten a lot of that code path), but if it isn't fixed, you can find a link to all of the relevant bug trackers on our Google Group splash page: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/mobile-couchbase

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

#138

Post by vvhn »

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…

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

Not that it matters a whole lot, but, as the website says that's just the US number.

The total number of employees in retail according to Apple's last 10-K filing in October 2012

( http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/2393147114x0xS11... )

was 42,400.

" Employees As of September 29, 2012, the Company had approximately 72,800 full-time equivalent employees and an additional 3,300 full-time equivalent temporary employees and contractors. Approximately 42,400 of the total full-time equivalent employees worked in the Company’s Retail segment. "

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

#139

Post by mayop100 »

ok_craig wrote: post #134
mayop100 wrote: post #90

(Shameless plug) Firebase is an alternative to iCloud for many apps. It's built as a database, rather than a file store, so it's ideal for storing structured data. Conflict resolution is something we've been thinking hard about from day 1, and we think we have a pretty solid story [1]. We launched native iOS support a few weeks ago [2]. You can also access your data from JavaScript or from a REST API. Android and oth…

Hey, I've been using Firebase for a web client I've been working on for a bit and I like it a lot! Would you consider updating your transactions page with an example of a text change? Such as adding a word in the middle of a paragraph. I'm not quite sure how that would work.

Collaborative text editing generally requires a bit more than a simple transaction to work well (Operational Transforms are generally involved). You can use transactions as a basis for this though. We've got some examples coming out soon to show how to to do this. Stay tuned...

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

#140

Post by jmathai »

skc wrote: post #136
jmathai wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reasons Microsoft hasn't been terribly successful online? It's a different game played by different rules. Interestingly, I'd like to watch and see how Google does moving into the physical goods space.

Erm, excuse me? For one, Windows Azure is a pretty big deal. Secondly, XBox Live is a pretty big deal. Third, Bing might be struggling to gain traction but it most certainly works. So can you point me to a Microsoft web property or service that is as wonky as iCloud at all?

I'm not saying they've found zero success. XBox live is probably the biggest.

At Microsoft's size they aren't really looking for "pretty big deal" successes.

Bing is probably around 15% market share. A home run for most but not (yet) for MS.

I can't really comment on Windows Azure. I'll take your word for it but I think Amazon is eating Google and Microsoft's lunch here.

This isn't a fight for second place.....

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