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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

#161

Post by stevenwei »

potatolicious wrote: post #122
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'm not OP, but one key complaint I have is that there isn't much in the way of testing. Unit tests are somewhat well-developed, integration testing is a complete mess. Much of the iOS community still creates software by the seat-of-your-pants model (i.e., write code, boot it up, does it look like it works? ship it). Engineering rigor is still a concept relatively foreign to iOS, and it shows. Apple has little-to-no…

I feel like this has less to do with iOS and more with the challenges of testing client-side code vs server-side code. Even Android projects are quite tricky to test despite Java having a strong heritage when it comes to unit testing.

Part of it just comes down to the way the GUI framework (whether it's Cocoa or Android) cuts across all aspects of the application, making it difficult to isolate individual components to test. Add to that a bunch of asynchronous code (which is almost always necessary when you start dealing with the database/network/filesystem) and you have something quite tricky to automate testing for.

Most of the server-side code I've dealt with has been an order of magnitude easier to test, but I think a lot of that comes down to the nature of their respective domains.

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

#162

Post by ianstallings »

druiid wrote: post #160
ianstallings wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh okay so because I think the toolset is crap you want to call me out. No problem. Here's two that have over a million users below. Oprah Magazine (1M+ subscribers): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/o-oprah-magazine-archive-dec... Esquire Magazine (1M+ subscribers): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/esquire-magazine/id433020707... Those are just two that I have built. I have an enterprise platform that I architected fr…

Hey man, not sure how worried about your info getting out there, but generally when people troll for 'proof' here I ignore it. Essentially it's just one more avenue for people to use against you, especially in regards to linking a name/identity to work and I generally (personally) try to keep them separate. Your choice, just something to think about... also, don't feed the trolls etc ;)

A valid point I'll have to keep in mind next time. I do use my real name here. I should probably think about changing that.

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

#163

Post by smackfu »

coolsunglasses wrote: post #147
smackfu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just wonder what the practical effect of Apple's online store being down is... it looks bad, but does it actually cost them any sales?

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

#164

Post by vacri »

larrik wrote: post #35
vacri wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that even possible? What could be the possible rationale for keeping old passwords stored? Crazy.

Normally it would to be prevent users from reusing their most recent N passwords, for security. I don't believe Apple does that anywhere, though.

I suppose thinking about it, as long as they're hashed and salted, it's less of a problem... but it's still crazy that the system could fail that way.

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

#165

Post by gurkendoktor »

potatolicious wrote: post #117
seivan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never had any issues. I guess what I build is not complex enough.

I work on a fairly complex Core Data implementation in a heavily multi-threaded app. It requires a lot of discipline, and we rely on a lot of learning-through-pain since the documentation beyond the most basic implementation is mostly non-existent. Core Data is pretty simple if you do all of your work on the main thread, but then your'e also blocking your main execution loop for operations that can take a long time.…

> A large save will easily reach into >200ms land on an iOS device, and your app will feel like crap.

Can you give an order of magnitude at this would happen? I usually only have 50-200 entities in my database in total, saving maybe half of them at the same time. Yet libraries like RestKit insist on a two-context setup to avoid the saving delay you mention. I'm not sure if I should fight the libraries and go back to a single-threaded setup (that I understand) or just go with the parent/child context flow.

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

#166

Post by cwp »

stevenwei wrote: post #159
tvon wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Testing GUI code has always been a lot trickier than testing backend code, and iOS apps tend to be GUI-oriented while Ruby projects tend to be backend-oriented. That's not to say that the iOS testing tools are great, but I've never had a particularly pleasant time testing GUI code on any platform.

True, Ruby doesn't usually get used for GUIs. But take a look at the Javascript and browser testing tools that are available. Is there anything like Sauce Labs for iOS?

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

#167

Post by gurkendoktor »

potatolicious wrote: post #122
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'm not OP, but one key complaint I have is that there isn't much in the way of testing. Unit tests are somewhat well-developed, integration testing is a complete mess. Much of the iOS community still creates software by the seat-of-your-pants model (i.e., write code, boot it up, does it look like it works? ship it). Engineering rigor is still a concept relatively foreign to iOS, and it shows. Apple has little-to-no…

I was a test zealot all my academic life (it's perfect for building compilers). But in my experience as an iOS contractor, most apps are polished Thin Clients for a remote backend. Which incidentally is the only thing that Objective C is really awesome for. As soon as I write any interesting logic, it is actually a bug, because it should be pushed into the backend. After all, it must behave the same on Android and on the web client.

That leaves us with bug classes like: multithreaded Core Data misuse, "UI can be broken by using three fingers exactly like this", popping a navigation controller as a reaction to a network operation while it is currently being pushed (based on network latency), networking code that does not properly handle session extensions while multiple concurrent threads are in progress, labels use the wrong font, code uses UIKit on the main thread, ...

Good luck writing tests for that and being more cost-effective than code reviews & manual testing.

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

#168

Post by gurkendoktor »

tvon wrote: post #92
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...

Why not jump into RubyMotion and use these testing tools?

And Apple's WWDC session about acceptance tests using Instruments UI Automation specifically handles UIAlertView.

I think the problem is that iOS apps are getting dumber and dumber while their UI bling gets more complicated/asynchronous. The value of tests is too low for The One Widely Accepted Testing Framework to emerge.

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

#169

Post by IheartApplesDix »

grandinj wrote: post #152
robomartin wrote: post #107

I went to disabled iCloud on one of my Macs and I got this warning: "If you turn off Documents and Data, all documents stored in iCloud will be deleted from this Mac" Let's get past the jaw-to-the-floor, how-dare-you, !!!$$%#$## moment. They are morons and don't respect your data. So, how do you figure out just what is in iCloud? I don't see an easy iCloud viewing option in Finder. Doing some digging this is what I f…

You are not parsing the message correctly. It says nothing about deleting data from your other devices.

Yeah, that's just a hidden surprise for you to discover next time you sync, as I unfortunately discovered when it deleted my entire schedule from a corporate Exchange Account. So not only does it apply to your iDevice, it also applies to any accounts that you've linked to the device and conform to the latest generation of CYA extensions for the Enterprise.

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

#170

Post by kbatten »

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'…

Were you using timemachine, and if so did the photographs get removed from there as well? No matter what, that sounds like an incredibly poor user experience.
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