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Apple Developer Center still down

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Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#61

Post by berkut »

pbsdp wrote: post #42
berkut wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We "officially support" RHEL 5.4 and RHEL 6.0 (and thus corresponding CentOSes). But we've got customers running everything from RHEL 4.5 to the latest and greatest Ubuntus, Mints and Arch. All with the same binary installers. The only linux-related weirdness I can recall in the last two years distro-wise was Scientific Linux, which seemed to have some weird XOrg config issues.

> All with the same binary installers. So you integrate with the user's desktop environment, using standard local widgets, theming, integration with UX guidelines, local library dependencies, etc? Or are you shipping a Qt app with your own dependencies included? If so, Qt is pretty notoriously buggy on OS X (and rightfully disliked by most users as it stands outside all platform conventions), perhaps explaining some…

Local widgets & theming yes, although generally we ship with our own themes by default as we make VFX apps, and the last thing artists want is bright UI to distract them.

I don't believe there are general UX guidelines for Linuxes, but for things like notification popups, system tray stuff, yeah, we do all that natively to the distro through Qt (DBus handles all that transparently within Qt very nicely).

We ship Qt as shared libs with the binaries and all dependencies we need system-wise statically - i.e. zlib, libpng, libjpeg are statically linked. For things like embedded Python, we have to do the same on OS X anyway, due to different python and zlib versions per OS X version.

As for Qt and OS X regarding nativeness - I keep hearing this, but I never see any good examples. I agree it's possible to create Qt Apps on OS X that looks crap, but it's also possible to make them look native as far as I'm concerned. The only thing I can remember not being able to easily do in Qt regarding OS X widgets is the horizontal grouping of side-by-side buttons in radio-button fashion. But it's easy enough to knock up a QWidget subclass which replicates this. But admittedly I don't think I've tried to replicate every possible OS X control/widget...

I think what might be the most difficult part of making a Qt app on OS X look native is the layout and spacing stuff, which generally does seem to be a bit crap within Qt on OS X.

I can have the same code to do a side-panel with edit values in a panel, and it looks great on Linux and Windows: http://imgur.com/kUI90ry

on OS X: http://imgur.com/yqigBdw

and the spacing and padding is all over the place - so I have to add a manual style-sheet to get the padding and spacing right, which is crap (image above is without extra stylesheet). So I'm not saying it's perfect or easy, but I think it is possible.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#63

Post by maxharris »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #46
maxharris wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would wager more money is made via Linux than iOS by a fairly large margin. As an aggregate measure, spread across several million people? Perhaps. Resolving that is just a matter of looking up the data. But that's not the question that matters for an actual developer. What actually matters is: How much money are you making on one platform, and how much could you make on the other? That question has a lot more to d…

I'm not sure I completely follow you. I would calculate on the basis of developers building software that runs on top of Linux, so that would include a large proportion of all web applications as well as various embedded applications. You could probably include android in there also. Now it's true that this isn't quite apples to apples since Linux is more fungible than iOS in most regards, mostly thanks to it's open…

The biggest point is probably that the existence of an Open Source/Free operating system has probably enabled more profitable businesses to exist than iOS.

Maybe.

On the one hand, I know exactly how great it is to have development tools that are a free download away (I remember shelling out hundreds on a C++ compiler in the mid-90s). Open source definitely rocks in this respect.

On the other hand, I know that without the iPhone, iOS, and all of the associated things that came with it (including the industry's massive pivot to compete in its wake), things might look very different for an app developer today. (Or at the very least they'd be slower in getting to this point.) I think it's important to realize that there were no independent app developers in 2007 - writing, buying and using software for the Palm handhelds or Windows CE was radically different on nearly every level.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#64

Post by 14113 »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #41
jammi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more like if Ubuntu's package repository went down regarding accepting new packages for a few days.

You need the official repositories to install new software?

No, you can download a .deb file from somewhere else and install it manually, or even just a .tar.gz with the binaries, or (if the software is open source) even get the source! Alternatively, as I posted above, there are a load of mirrors (over 400 iirc) of the ubuntu software repository.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#65

Post by filleokus »

nwh wrote: post #3

My money is personally on massive, unrecoverable data loss. If you've ever poked around with the way that Apple's website works, you can see that the entire place is a huge mess. There's old servers running ancient (pre-2004) perl scripts alongside the brand new iCloud gear. I can't imagine how the authentication for AppleID is working as login details still work on the ancient pages (think pinstripes and glassy butt…

I work at an Apple Premium Reseller, and when we order stuff from Apple we use http://reseller.apple.com (which now seems to redirect to https://ecommerce.apple.com/) and all those systems feels hacked together just as you're saying.

The Reseller Store has been down the whole time the Developer Center has been down. Even more interesting perhaps, our company's "master apple id", which is used to place multi 100K USD orders from Apple, got some strange seemingly manual password reset from Apple about the same time as the Developer Portal went down.

Apple's hardware service portal (http://gsx.apple.com) has also been even more flakey this week than normal.

Something is broken over at Apple.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#66

Post by 14113 »

jammi wrote: post #13
NelsonMinar wrote: post #7

Could you imagine if the Linux Developer Center went down? It'd be nearly impossible to write Linux software, or download Linux development tools, or generate a Linux binary that a device was allowed to run. It'd be awful.

This is more like if Ubuntu's package repository went down regarding accepting new packages for a few days.

If all the mirrors of ubuntu's repository went down simultaneously, I'd be more worried about the internet itself than installing some new software

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#67

Post by colanderman »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #41
jammi wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more like if Ubuntu's package repository went down regarding accepting new packages for a few days.

You need the official repositories to install new software?

Dunno about Ubuntu, but Debian has dozens of "unofficial" mirrors, not to mention their main package server balances amongst a bunch of servers.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#68

Post by grey-area »

dkuntz2 wrote: post #43
grey-area wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I would guess a huge overhaul, and typical Apple, is taking care of that vs. arguing or commenting on theories. A design overhaul wouldn't require the dev centre to go down at all - they could just prepare all the assets etc on testing servers and switch them over when they are ready. Given the normal warning given on any maintenance, and the obvious negative consequences for Apple's business of any extended outag…

Perhaps they're also trying to pull together all the disparate things running on the dev servers? nwh's comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078854 ) says they've got a lot of different systems running, maybe they're trying to unify them to be on one system, making upgrading/changing easier in the future?

It's possible this is some sort of migration gone wrong I suppose, there are a lot of pieces involved in the dev centre, and I've seen a few changes popping up over the last few weeks. Seems odd that they'd just pull the whole thing though without warning, rather than just rolling back to the last state. With a migration they should have a good known state they can go back to quickly if necessary.

No planned migration or consolidation should take several days of interrupted service, it's just not necessary unless something goes horribly wrong.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#70

Post by alayne »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #7

Could you imagine if the Linux Developer Center went down? It'd be nearly impossible to write Linux software, or download Linux development tools, or generate a Linux binary that a device was allowed to run. It'd be awful.

The XCode IDE is downloaded from the Mac App store which is still running. Apps are submitted via iTunes Connect which is still running.
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