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

Why I Develop For The Mac

evanmiller.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 184 posts

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#51

Post by chmars »

sreitshamer wrote: post #31
imechura wrote: post #14

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below.... "Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “…

But what if the app stored the data in your own AWS account, encrypted with a key only you know? (That's what we're building at Filosync)

That's usually fine as long as you don't have committed yourself to specific such as using local servers only.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#52

Post by WalterBright »

imechura wrote: post #14

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below.... "Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “…

I won't use cloud storage because:

1. even in Seattle, internet response time is erratic. Delays anywhere from a second to a couple minutes is commonplace. Using an app requiring constant traffic over the internet is quite unpleasant.

2. The backup problem. If my cloud account "goes dark" for whatever reason, I'm dead in the water, and I'm helpless to fix it.

3. I simply won't use a cloud solution that doesn't encrypt the data on my machine before sending it to the cloud server. Encrypting it after it gets to the cloud server is unacceptable. I currently use Jungledisk for backups on Amazon's cloud service because it does encryption locally.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#53

Post by claudius »

zenocon wrote: post #18
imechura wrote: post #14

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below.... "Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “…

This is a great point, but also orthogonal to the tech/platform choice. One can still develop a front-end using web tech which connects to a localhost server (see for example Google Refine -- which runs a localhost web server). It may make packaging and distribution it tad more annoying, but there are tools that can do this, and then you get the benefit of cross-platform adoption -- as well as the option to make it a…

> a front-end using web tech which connects to a localhost server

But what advantage does that offer over a native application? You’d then need a ‘native’ web server and would still rely on the local browser in a way that opens you up to more incompatibilities than just using the native interface framework?

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#54

Post by rubyrescue »

This is written by someone who actually writes a popular web framework for Erlang - the exact opposite of throwing a static site on S3. That gives this piece more credibility - he knows how to build active server-side software as well.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#55

Post by chenglou »

herdrick wrote: post #15
tannerc wrote: post #3

All good thoughts, and similar to why I develop native apps for iOS vs web apps. I think John Gruber summarized it nicely when he said: "Facebook, bless them, has it right. What's great about the web is ubiquitous network availability, not running within a browser tab. Websites are just services, and what you see in a browser tab is merely one possible interface to that service. The best possible interface to that se…

Everyone I've talked to about it gave up on the iOS Facebook app and just started using the web version.

Apparently Facebook's iOS engineers weren't that excellent (I mean, really relatively speaking), so comparing their old Facebook effort to a well-made web app's is not telling.

http://www.tuaw.com/2013/03/05/whys-facebooks-app-so-much-be...

Plus, the Facebook app is way different now. I don't see how it'd be possible for them to implement web-based chat heads without killing the performance (even on my iPad 3 it isn't 100% smooth). Lots of times these clever design concepts cannot be implemented on the web because of its relative performance drawback.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#56

Post by WayneDB »

jgrahamc wrote: post #19
imechura wrote: post #14

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below.... "Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “…

I'm very much in the camp of not wanting my data in the cloud. I don't autoupload photos, for example, because I want control over them. What I would like is a home cloud server which would handle all the services I could get from the cloud with explicit sharing with chosen people (e.g. my family).

Synology is doing good things in this area. They offer a "private cloud" backup and file-sharing solution, served from a (linux based) NAS, with client programs for Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. I have a home/small office model and I love it.

http://www.synology.com/dsm/home_file_sharing_cloud_station....

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#57

Post by bmalicoat »

potatolicious wrote: post #26
herdrick wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I've talked to about it gave up on the iOS Facebook app and just started using the web version.

Ask everyone again. This was true a long time ago (long time being, like, 1.5-2 years), where the Facebook app was so slow and so crashy (and the API down so often) that it was mostly useless. Facebook is, IMO, one of the gold standards now for large-scale iOS app building. I had the pleasure of hearing one of their people speak about this a few weeks ago and they're very much at the forefront of iOS engineering.

I've been using the FB app since it arrived on iOS. At one point it was a decent app, but it is far from being the gold standard. The last few updates have just introduced more bugs and lag to the experience. Lately I don't even know if I clicked the 'comments and likes' text reliably. You can't tell if you missed the ridiculously small hit target or if it is just taking the usual 3-5 seconds to give you any kind of indication it is doing anything. That's just one example of a frustrating experience, but I consistently have others—zooming and panning pictures randomly closes them, likes sometimes never show up, my own posts won't be visible on the phone, only on the web, etc.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#59

Post by gdubs »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #39
rimantas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I guess you lack in the understanding of both. Yeah, app caching looks nice in theory. Now implement it reliably in practice. What will you use in the place of Core Data? Local storage? IndexedDB(with no support in default browser both on iOS and Android)? How will your replacement for UITableView with reusable cells look like? How about the same combined with UIFetchedResultController? I am not even talki…

I'm well aware of what native SDKs offer. I don't know why you assumed I'm unfamiliar with native development. As for the last statement, and much of the others, I'm not even sure what you're asking. If you want a nice syntax for it, then yeah, wait for the spec to be finished. Otherwise, you're probably implementing that logic yourself. The same as if you want a native app to pull in different assets (unless we're t…

FWIW Facebook's HTML5 app was terrible. They recently made a switch back to native.[1]

1: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#60

Post by glhaynes »

WalterBright wrote: post #52
imechura wrote: post #14

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below.... "Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “…

I won't use cloud storage because: 1. even in Seattle, internet response time is erratic. Delays anywhere from a second to a couple minutes is commonplace. Using an app requiring constant traffic over the internet is quite unpleasant. 2. The backup problem. If my cloud account "goes dark" for whatever reason, I'm dead in the water, and I'm helpless to fix it. 3. I simply won't use a cloud solution that doesn't encryp…

I also wouldn't want to use a cloud storage system that didn't at least have the option to keep a local cache of my data so that I could access it offline and with local speed. But that's how most of the "cloud storage" services I'm familiar with work, so it's not really much of a problem.
Post reply on HN