Apple Developer Center still down • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#101

Post by pbsdp » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:09 PM UTC

berkut wrote: post #86

pbsdp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. It used to use X11, I saw even more complaints then. There aren't any competitors, however, so people use Mathematica. I use high-end expensive that are Qt-only too, but I would gladly switch if there were other options, because Qt is buggy, uses non-intuitive non-standard UI, exhibits poor performance due to impedance mismatches between the Mac and Qt event/threading models, and ultimately decreases overall…

Can you give me an example of the "non-intuitive non-standard UI"? This may well be true, but it's quite possible it's just the developer was lazy and didn't do all the effort to make it look native. Edit: in fact, I'll give an example: VirtualBox - it does look crap on OS X, but that's because the developers obviously didn't make any effort to make it look native. They've got icons in tabs pane buttons and huge tool…

VirtualBox, IDA Pro, Google Earth (in fact, everything from Google that uses Qt), EAGLE (PCB software), OpenSCAD, QGIS ...

I've literally never been fooled by a Qt app -- a Mac user can spot that hot mess from a mile away. It's not just a matter of visual layout and UX, although that matters and always falls somewhere between subtly or completely wrong.

The controls also tend to lag at weird times, behave slightly strangely, demonstrate unusual font metrics, etc. The apps tend to exhibit bugs related to menu bar event handling, window management, on and on, and crash more than any other apps I use daily.

This isn't a huge surprise given that Cocoa is designed to be the first and only gatekeeper between events, the OS, UI controls, and Cocoa's main event loop, and most of what makes Mac apps a Mac app has to do with the APIs and integration that you lose first-class access to once you deploy Qt -- that includes 'simple' things like UI layout metrics, which Qt has to re-implement.

I abandoned almost all those Qt apps on my list above. I even dropped EAGLE, despite being "native", in favor of Altera on Windows, which I paid a hefty premium for in no small part because it wasn't a pile of broken UX, Windows or not.

I still use IDA Pro, but the minute http://www.hopperapp.com/ can replace my IDA Pro usage, I'll switch in a heartbeat.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#102

Post by deletes » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:14 PM UTC

jordanthoms wrote: post #98

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…

Keep in mind, this is the company which takes their whole store down when they need to add new products to it.

Did you mean when they have their WWDCs? In that case it might be a marketing reason.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#103

Post by thrush » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:17 PM UTC

maxharris wrote: post #52

ninguem2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android (Linux) has surpassed iOS in number of users worldwide.

True. But the reality is far more complicated than that. In order to compare the two objectively (this is from the perspective of a developer, but many of the same factors also apply for end users), you also have to take into account things like the number of users that buy apps, app store fragmentation, how your software will fare in each store, and a whole host of other technical and market factors that are frequen…

http://techland.time.com/2013/04/16/ios-vs-android/

Most notable point is that iOS users spend more than 3x on apps than android users. Also, the same exact app on the iTunes Store tends to make more then 3x in sales than the same app on Google Play.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#104

Post by drivebyacct2 » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:19 PM UTC

pbsdp wrote: post #15

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.

Can you imagine writing desktop software for Linux? Inconsistent APIs, API breakage, ABI breakage, sizable variances between distributions, multiple desktops UI implementations, and you may as well just forget about mobile. I'm not justifying Apple's ever increasing shift towards enacting strict constraints on their platform developers, but the comparison with Linux is pointless.

That's the biggest load of absurd shit I've ever heard.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#105

Post by dman » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:24 PM UTC

pbsdp wrote: post #47

berkut wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use Qt. Works brilliantly, great API and documentation, and gets you 95% of the way to Windows versions and 85% of the way on OS X too. On OS X you'll have issues with native painting within OpenGL drawing and maybe event throttling / reordering for mouse / pen tablet events that you have to install a manual event filter for to fix, as OS X doesn't always send input mouse/keyboard events in the correct order.

Nobody on OS X wants a Qt app. If you have any solid competition in the market from a company willing to produce a native app, you'll lose to them. No wonder you're having issues on OS X.

Yes because the UI toolkit is the ultimate differentiator when it comes to all products.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#106

Post by dirkgently » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:28 PM UTC

millerm wrote: post #82

ninguem2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android (Linux) has surpassed iOS in number of users worldwide.

More people drive Toyota than BMW. More people eat at McDonalds than Five Guys. More people stay at a Holiday Inn than The Ritz Carlton. The statement is worthless as it conveys no meaning, other than a factoid, as do my statements.

pukes

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#107

Post by jstsch » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:28 PM UTC

berkut wrote: post #61

pbsdp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

The dialog you've shown for OS X does not look native at all. Not just the spacing, but especially the second selector ('render') is quite odd. Also the font usage for the labels, the light-gray borders around the input fields and the tab focus is strange.

Does QT basically render a bitmap, or does it use the native controls and just has some odd default styling? If it's the first, then I would probably do the UI in native Objective C/Cocoa and keep a nice cross platform base for the VFX core of the app. Not sure if that's feasible for your application of course.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#108

Post by dman » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:30 PM UTC

spellboots wrote: post #85

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a massive amount of software that exists outside of note-taking apps where the customer will be more than happy to put up with different-looking buttons because the value the software provides is so high. There are many software categories where visual-design decisions are not the only competition advantage.

Design is far more than just visual, and your dismissal of design as "different looking buttons" suggests that you don't really understand design very well.

Implying that a well designed application cannot be made in any UI toolkit save one also doesnt show a good understanding of design.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#109

Post by rbritton » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:32 PM UTC

alayne wrote: post #70

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.

I managed to snag the iOS 7b3 SDK before it went down but not the documentation, unfortunately. Those downloads have been broken the whole time, so a download of Xcode is only as good as the documentation you still have.

Re: Apple Developer Center still down

#110

Post by zackmorris » Sun, Jul 21, 2013, 5:32 PM UTC

Apple's websites are among the worst corporate sites I've ever used. I don't say that just to be critical or cynical (ahem), I'm merely pointing out that they have tremendous room for improvement. As opposed to say php.net or stackoverflow.com which still give me that fresh air "why can't all sites be like this?" feeling every time I visit them.

Most of the time when I visit Apple's sites now, I just assume that what I need to find will either be buried in a convoluted maze, or simply won't exist, and I'll find myself on a "this has been deprecated" 404-style page which takes me someplace only loosely related to what I was looking for. So I end up back at google to try to find a copy of the information either cached somewhere or offsite.

Simply being an Apple developer is a chore. Keeping up with yearly certificate expirations is taxing when you are contracting for several clients. And they never really worked out an easy way to allow several developers to share certs. I just assume now that the other developers will invalidate whatever shared cert I made.

The situation is bad enough, and exacerbated by Apple stubbornly refusing to see the flaws, that I wish a startup would encapsulate the friction and just take care of all the minutia for me. I should never have to personally deal with provisioning. Anything short of a one click submission to iTunes Connect is reminiscent of all the TCP/IP details that we used to have to put in our modems in the dialup days, when all that should have been required was a phone number and passcode. I can't gently forgive them for it. So I think this downtime could be a wakeup call for them that the inefficiencies in their system are even costing them now.