Apple is set to report their earnings on Tuesday, July 23rd. If this isn't back up by Tuesday evening, it's going to be a very interesting earnings conference call.
Apple Developer Center still down
151–160 of 204 posts
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not totally true. The reason most people stay with Windows is because the hardware ships with it. In my experience Linux usage has about 50% retention rate among those I installed the OS for. If you'd install OSX or Windows on a non techie who grew up using just Linux, I'd think the retention rates would be much lower.
a 50% retention rate? That's not very good. That means that after you've installed Linux, half of the people switch back.
No, that is actually stunningly good, considering the alleged state of the Linux desktop and considering the audience that the Linux desktop has traditionally been targeting. It is so good, that I suspect he has a strong selection bias (he is probably only installing Linux for users he thinks may be able to use it fulltime. This selection is probably unconscious.)
(And because it always seems to be necessary to add this disclaimer: I've been using Linux fulltime for over a decade; I'm not a critic, just a realist.)
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some web applications are more platform specific than others. Since Linux is the most popular OS for running web applications it seems reasonable to assume it was chosen for a reason and therefor web developers would be worse off if it were not available.
> Some web applications are more platform specific than others. Rarely. As I said before, you're not developing for Linux when you make a web application. You're developing for Rails/PHP/whathaveyou. These are all OS-agnostic and can be run on any OS. I can run my PHP app on my Macbook, my Linux server, or my friend's Windows desktop. They all work. Because it's not meant to be built for a particular OS. I don't unde…
I mean that a very large share of these applications are in practise deployed to Linux. If you total the $ revenue of these applications you would no doubt come to a very large figure.
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Some web applications are more platform specific than others. Rarely. As I said before, you're not developing for Linux when you make a web application. You're developing for Rails/PHP/whathaveyou. These are all OS-agnostic and can be run on any OS. I can run my PHP app on my Macbook, my Linux server, or my friend's Windows desktop. They all work. Because it's not meant to be built for a particular OS. I don't unde…
I mean that a very large share of these applications are in practise deployed to Linux. If you total the $ revenue of these applications you would no doubt come to a very large figure.
So? That's not the discussion at stake here. We're talking about apps being written for Linux vs OSX. By definition, a web app is not written for a particular platform (with certain exceptions like ASP.net). If anything, it'd fall into its own category.
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#155Apple'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…
Have you spent any time on the Verizon or Sirius XM sites? How about the average multinational insurance company? "Among the worst corporate sites" is a huge leap, considering the profound amount of crap. Spending 5 minutes using the average electronic medical records (EMR) web application would be enough to make your hair fall out. Forget about interoperability of EMR formats. It's a mess. I'm not defending Apple at all, I've spent many nights throwing iPhones over the provisioning and certificate process, but to me, the outcome of surviving that process is that I'm making money from the apps, so it's not ideal, but at least my iOS users are actually paying me money, as opposed to Android users that, as a group tend to expect something for nothing.
We ought to also look at the inefficiencies of the Android system while we're here. 35% of users are still on Gingerbread! You can't really expect to earn money as a developer if you ignore 35% of your target market, with iOS we have over 90% running iOS 6 and only about 6% running Android 4.2, which means that developers can't take advantage of a new Android feature without leaving behind the majority of their market, or creating multiple versions and then on top of that, having to test on a myriad of different hardware configurations. The fact also remains that Android users are generally cheap -- they don't like to pay for apps. So you have a highly fragmented OS environment, coupled with a user base that, in generally spends much less that iOS users and, on top of that, you have a royal mess in the copy-protection scheme used in Android -- which had to be disabled in Jelly Bean due to it breaking apps.
Of course, the security in Android is top notch! Great job on that Google.
If we want to talk inefficiencies with Apple, we certainly can, but to ignore the Google mess is disingenuous.
As far as the effect of Apple's "inefficiencies," is it really affecting them? Are people still buying apps and computers?
My last point is that the assertion of Apple "stubbornly refusing to see the flaws.." That's interesting, because unless one works for Apple at a level high enough to be involved in the conversation, that suggestion is merely conjecture. That's right up there with the pundits being disappointed that iWatch has been delayed, despite having no proof or any acknowledgment from Apple that even such a product exists.
There's an easy solution to not having to deal with Apple's "inefficiencies" -- don't deal with Apple and go make your money with all of the people paying money for Android apps. Or, respond to one of the hundreds of job listings at Apple and do something about it.
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#156Amazon bas been down for as much as a half day in recent memory — and not dev stuff but their customer-facing money-making site, and mid-week too.
How many times has AWS gone down taking with it half the web? That to me is a bigger issue than not being able to download iOS beta 3 for a few days.
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean that a very large share of these applications are in practise deployed to Linux. If you total the $ revenue of these applications you would no doubt come to a very large figure.
So? That's not the discussion at stake here. We're talking about apps being written for Linux vs OSX. By definition, a web app is not written for a particular platform (with certain exceptions like ASP.net). If anything, it'd fall into its own category.
By that definition you can only count applications that rely on proprietary OS features, which you generally don't have with an open source OS (that's sort of the point).
I don't think it's invalid to describe a web app deployed to Linux or an embedded system running Linux as a "Linux app" but I guess that is really semantics.
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours kind of funny and relevant. Yeah, one has to admit that Mac users are a more receptive audience for the high-brow humor of sophisticated fart apps.
Now now, don't be mad because what he says is true. It's unbecoming. If you really care, put your effort into making it false.
It is false. I and my coworkers make plenty of money developing for Linux.
Also, we're hiring: http://aws.amazon.com/sdejobs/
Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#159Apple'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…
Have you spent any time on the Verizon or Sirius XM sites? How about the average multinational insurance company? "Among the worst corporate sites" is a huge leap, considering the profound amount of crap. Spending 5 minutes using the average electronic medical records (EMR) web application would be enough to make your hair fall out. Forget about interoperability of EMR formats. It's a mess. I'm not defending Apple at…
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Re: Apple Developer Center still down
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Why would you include Web Applications as part of that? Web applications are almost completely OS-agnostic. I can run my PHP application on Linux, on OSX, or on Windows. It shouldn't count for any of the three operating systems because it wasn't built for any of them. It was built to run on a software stack which runs on all three.
Theoretically, you're correct. In practice, you look at a company like Amazon (where I work) and our software, while mostly it is written in Java and other high level languages, there are many bits and pieces written in C and C++, and even the high-level bits are likely to fail spectacularly if you try to run them on anything other than a close relative of the Linux distribution they were built for. This is just a fact of software development. Write-once run-everywhere is a virtual myth.
Unless of course you're talking about building a single Linux virtual machine image and deploying it to thousands of servers. That actually works phenomenally. Doesn't work as well with Apple's software. Or Microsoft's for that matter (though this is largely a question of licensing cost.)