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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

#141

Post by joelreymont »

Aloisius wrote: post #128
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…

IMO, from having studied this for many, many hours over many moons, is that what Apple is trying to do is fundamentally hard, if not entirely unfeasible. They're trying to replace a smart server with one that's dumb as a doorstop. More specifically, they're trying to emulate a CRUD web service with a file sync engine. Having dug through iCloud's underlying structure, I can tell you what they're doing is very close to…

How do you know that the iCloud server is hosted on Microsoft Azure?

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

#142

Post by skc »

jmathai wrote: post #140
skc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.....

Apologies, I was assuming we were talking about the technical chops of the two companies when it comes to building web scale services.

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

#143

Post by raverbashing »

mbell wrote: post #130
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…

> They're not going to rebuild what Google did and I'm not seeing them using, I don't know: Cassandra, Hadoop, etc There is a non-zero amount of irony in your bashing of Java then picking out two projects that apple isn't using, but you apparently think they should but using, which are both written in Java.

I am not bashing Java and I know what these are built on, but apparently no one read what I wrote and stopped reading at 'Java'

I am saying is that probably Apple has a NIH mentality with regards to infrastructure and thus are trying to reinvent things like that. And of course, reinventing these in pure Java takes more time than using Go, for example.

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

#144

Post by mahyarm »

ianstallings wrote: post #86
JonnieCache wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this toolset of tomorrow your peers are using to blow past you, if you don't mind me asking?

I mainly mean my web-developer peers. Their toolsets are moving so rapidly that I see them surpassing us in the next 2-3 years unless we make some huge improvements. Just my opinion.

Which toolsets do you feel are the most exemplary of this?

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

#145

Post by Philadelphia »

Tuesday's article on The Verge [1] was a lot clearer about the distinction between the various components that fall under the iCloud brand and what the problems are with the Core Data synchronization piece.

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/26/4148628/why-doesnt-icloud-...

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

#146

Post by shurcooL »

The document storage of iCloud is broken from a design viewpoint: I don't want to store/find things based on app, but rather by date/time created, content type, name, etc.

If I have many apps that do the same thing, I'd have to go through each one to remember where I saved something. No, just no.

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

#147

Post by coolsunglasses »

smackfu wrote: post #98
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.

It's called staging and scripts.

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

#148

Post by coldtea »

ianstallings wrote: post #132
coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Compared to Cocoa Touch?

I've worked with both and I can say this is just a case of "the grass is greener".

Nothing "exciting" about HTML5 and the Web for people well versed in a mobile framework. The most interesting things are re-inventions of the wheel, only more hacky and less performant.

Plus, since you can use web views in your native mobile app, there's literary nothing (technologically-wise) you can achieve with HTML5 that you cannot achieve with a native framework. The inverse is not true. Anything that requires extensive collaboration with the underlying machine, low latency, ad-hoc connections to interfaces etc is not possible (you cannot write Garageband with HTML for example. And Flipboard or even Clear would have been noticeably slower).

(Except the distribution method of course -- but then again, nowadays people still debate if it's all about native or it's all about the web, so that's like 50-50.)

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

#149

Post by gte910h »

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…

iCloud + CoreData = Pain and Tears and Blood

I just change the topic to a different backing store when the client wants "cloud persistance" and says "iCloud" without understanding the pain they're asking for.

I agree, completely non-functional

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

#150

Post by killerpopiller »

crag wrote: post #135
aidos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iclou…

I switched from linux (after 9years) to an iMac and iCloud was one of the first things I couldn't believe how poorly it works. Ubuntu One sets a standards it seems. Right click your desired folder click ubuntu one and it gets synced. with iCloud (and box, dropbox) I have to duplicate the folders, weird.

I spare you the finder, sftp-integration and the keyboard-layout bitching.

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