Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad • Hacker News Board

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#221

Post by eosrei » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:09 AM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #169

api wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back: If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure. Windows 10 is looking good.…

Absolutely! I usually buy windows machines because of price/performance, and, to be honest, because I know how to make windows work for me and don't want to learn mac idioms. However, the first thing I do is install git for windows, which gives me bash to navigate the filesystem, and then vagrant/virtualbox/ubuntu for development.

I highly recommend http://babun.github.io/ for Windows based development. It's a well configured cygwin install with many standard addons included. Helps me keep my sanity while switching between Linux, Windows and OSX.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#222

Post by Zarel » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:11 AM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them. I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a…

> Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer.

Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like:

- International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or something, or change your keyboard layout and relearn how to type apostrophes. Everything else related to international text input is also much nicer in OS X.

- Trackpad quality: I've yet to find a trackpad as nice as the ones that come on Mac laptops

- emacs keybindings in every text box! Anyone? ...Anyone? Maybe it's just me.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#223

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:11 AM UTC

eridius wrote: post #57

jnem wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Vogel was saying the platform was too popular for users, but rather too popular for developers, resulting in too much competition. Besides, if you've ever read his blog, you know hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade, and has a charming way of not caring.

I didn't say "popular for users", I just said "popular". And I strongly expect that "popular for users" and "popular for developers" are extremely closely correlated anyway, at least when it comes to consumer-targeted platforms (i.e. not Linux, where every user is also a developer). > hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade There's a difference between "haha I'm not good at marketing, I'm…

Is the App Store really the fastest-growing, though? It's a ridiculously-dubious claim (in addition to being pretty meaningless without context).

It reminds me of a particular XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1102/

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#224

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:17 AM UTC

untog wrote: post #4

I'm interested to know what changed in 8.3 that broke their game engine. It's supposed to be a minor update, after all.

If you're looking for a company to be the poster child of semantic versioning, Apple ain't it :)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#225

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:25 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#226

Post by wodenokoto » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:27 AM UTC

Zarel wrote: post #222

mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them. I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a…

> Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like: - International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or s…

I have never even heard of the emacs things. Can you explain further?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#227

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:27 AM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #51

justinpaulson wrote: post #40

> My brain no longer has the time and energy to deal with Apple forcing me to relearn how to program every few years. Is this just kind of how developing software works on every platform?

Not at all. Most platforms are slow to add new features, and even slower to remove them. This is why we can still play videogames from 10+ years ago on modern Windows systems. Has this held Windows back? Yes, a bit. But I for one appreciate that I don't have to buy all new software every year for it.

And even in cases where compatibility is broken, there's still the possibility on Windows or GNU/Linux or even OS X to fire up something along the lines of DOSBox or VirtualBox or somesuch and be able to recreate the necessary environment to play 15, 20, even 30-year-old games. Last I checked (which was admittedly a long time ago, seeing as my ship-jump from iOS to Android was a few years ago), you have to jailbreak an iOS device in order to achieve similar functionality thanks to Apple's rather-draconian restrictions on such things.

Apple's attitude toward iOS - move fast and break things - is in stark contrast to even OS X, where a lot of software made for OS X versions as old as 10.5 will still run relatively happily (though apparently Yosemite broke quite a few things).

That said, there's a time and a place. On my servers, for example (which are typically running OpenBSD or some GNU/Linux distro), I'm at least somewhat-okay with backwards-compatibility breaking (within reason) if it means having better performance or security. In that context, I'm relying far less on closed-source software (if I'm using closed-source software at all, which is incredibly rare for me when it comes to servers), which means that most of the software I actually rely on will at the very least usually have community-supported patches up the wazoo to support those backwards-compatibility-breaking changes (like OpenBSD's switch to a 64-bit time_t, which basically just amounted to recompiling a bunch of stuff - most of which was already done by the ports tree maintainers when creating binary packages).

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#228

Post by chadzawistowski » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:32 AM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #226

Zarel wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like: - International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or s…

I have never even heard of the emacs things. Can you explain further?

Many OS X keyboard shortcuts are Emacs-inspired, though they aren't extensible in the way that Emacs is.

http://www.cultofmac.com/247681/use-these-emacs-legacy-keybo...

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#229

Post by eridius » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:32 AM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #182

serve_yay wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah yeah. But none of that has anything to do with typing an app's entire name in the search bar and getting a ton of garbage unrelated results. Discovery being broken is not really a "commoditize the complements" play, it's just bad UX.

Dark patterns ("bad UX") and broken discovery are a means to the end of "commoditizing the complements".

Bad UX in an Apple component is not a "dark pattern". It's just, well, bad UX.

Knowing Apple, knowing its history and people that work there and the things they care about, I think Apple is incapable of deliberately producing a bad UX. When it happens, it's caused by other factors rather than being an explicit decision. In the case of App Store discovery being broken, I think it's caused by the fact that the App Store seems to be run largely the way the Music Store is run (with the addition of app review), and nobody complains about search / discovery in the Music Store, but it just so happens that the infrastructure and design around the music store doesn't work quite so well when applied to apps.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#230

Post by Steko » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

Mithaldu wrote: post #210

Steko wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear the substantial difference between Clash of Clans selling you gems that make your building finish faster and LOL selling you XP boosts?

Gladly. First off, i need to clarify how the two work, since they work substantially different to one another: LOL boosts come in two variants, but the net effect is the same: XP income per time unit played is doubled. You can spend more money to have them apply to more time units played, but you can't increase the effects of the boosts. They do nothing else. (I assume rising in level also pushes one into higher leve…

That sure is a lot of words trying to disguise the fundamental truth that there is basically no difference between the effects of LoL boosts and gems. Both advance your summoner/base in exchange for money. They are both time "cheats"that you pay for to avoid a grind in each game.

You say flatly that 'LOL boosts do not increase competitiveness' but this is frankly completely false. An identical clone of myself playing on an account after $300 worth of xp and IP boosts will simply be much stronger than I am with f2p account. Eventually I may catch up but 'eventually' happens in clash of clans too.