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

Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 509 posts

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#251

Post by smrtinsert »

api wrote: post #161
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…

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.…

That being said, I just returned a surface pro 3 for a tablet. The display is nice, the feel is great, but the omg the resolution and font issues. Forget it, you consistently feel how much you have to deal with the OS itself to get it out of your way. Until tablet pcs are ready I still have a desktop win box and a mac mini and my tablet.

I'm also spoiled by the App Store concept. Windows needs to force it on developers. One tap installs on Android and great dependency tools like homebrew or Leiningen have made me never want to download stuff manually ever again.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#252

Post by cwyers »

grimgrin wrote: post #184
pedalpete wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software are you using that is only on Mac? I'm surprised by this, as it seems most development software is available for all platforms these days.

This is from a dev standpoint but at my job we're using MySQL and I develop from Linux. When I want to browse or modify data with a GUI nothing quite matches OS X's Sequel Pro. The best I've found is DBeaver (or SQuirrel). IntelliJ is working on a thing called 0xDBE, but it feels even worse. I could easily rattle off a handful of other applications that just feel better, even if slightly, on OS X. DaisyDisk and Trans…

I've never used Sequel Pro so I can't compare them, but I've been very happy with SQLyog, when I was working with MySQL.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#253

Post by kazagistar »

saidajigumi wrote: post #157
olefoo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't necessarily want to solve that problem. Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]; namely the software, games and media that make their hardware useful. Software in the app store is a viciously competitive low-margin market; just like most other commodity markets. Which is why you need to treat it skeptically and work on building a name outside the app store before you a…

> Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0] I've heard this argument before, and if it's true, it's suicidal. Apple will have failed to learn a critical lesson from Microsoft's dominance of the early PC era: it's the apps that matter. Even once there was a significant potential market of would-be platform "switchers" who wanted something beyond what Windows was offering, these switche…

What makes it hard to compete is the competition.

If some app makers start to be unable to compete, competition will drop, and profits will increase, right?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#254

Post by sjm »

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…

Not just you — love the Emacs bindings everywhere. It always throws me off on Windows when I'm trying to C-n and C-p around, getting hit with new document and printing dialogs all over the place :)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#255

Post by ryanSrich »

pedalpete wrote: post #162
ryanSrich wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until an OS comes along that rivals OSX, I'll stick with Apple. I'm one of the few people I know that really doesn't put a whole lot of thought into hardware. Yes I need my machine to run properly but as long as there's a baseline achievement of performance I'm good. Obviously I'd never be able to give up OSX for work purposes. Pretty much every piece of software I use is tied to OSX only.

What software are you using that is only on Mac? I'm surprised by this, as it seems most development software is available for all platforms these days.

- Xcode

- Sketch

- Pixate

- Framer Studio

- iTerm

- Fluid

- Keynote

- Pages

- Quick cast

- Cloud App

Granted I haven't looked into a lot of these to see if they've picked up Linux or Window's support. However I doubt any of the one's I've listed are all on Linux, which I'd for sure need to do any development work.

Some of these I'm sure have alternatives but the one app I just can't do without is Sketch. Gimp doesn't compare and wine + photoshop hackery on Linux is a nightmare.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#256

Post by ghuntley »

dade_ wrote: post #216
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…

My Surface 3 Pro is my go to, take with me device. I always know I have everything I need, whereas I obviously don't with my iPad. Hopefully the next Surface Pro will have a longer battery life, it is still a few hours short. I recently started using the Windows Chocolately package manager, strange name, but works great and makes setting up a new machine and maintaining utilities much more simple.

Chocolately + Boxstarter = ./build.sh

To build my work environment on a brand new install all I have to do is Start -> Run -> https://boxstarter.org/package/nr/url?https://raw.githubuser... as administrator.

See the following repo for more information https://github.com/ghuntley/dotfiles-windows/blob/master/des...

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#257

Post by Mikeb85 »

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…

> - 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)

With Linux and Gnome, you can have several keyboard layouts, which are very easy to switch between (much like multiple languages on a phone keyboard). Usually I use the English International layout, one quick change (accessible from the global bar) and I've got all my accents (also speak and write in French) easily accessible. A bonus is that there's different international layouts if one doesn't suit you. é is simply ' + e. ç is alt , + c. And so on... Éïôàç

I'm sure OSX is a nice operating system, but Linux has very usable desktop options these days too. Windows, not so sure...

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

I think this one is only you...

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#258

Post by Mikeb85 »

octaveguin wrote: post #147
rinon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supercell is in Finland, an EU country. From my understanding Supercell actually pays much higher than prevailing wages.

Software developers are generally paid quite a bit less in Finland than in the valley (e.g. 5k euros is quite high for a dev there) with a comparable cost of living. It's expensive in Helsinki and you won't find better paid developers anywhere in the world outside of the states. Not to say the above is correct - it's no sweat shop and the few outliers like supercell and rovio cannot possibly be there because they thr…

> Software developers are generally paid quite a bit less in Finland than in the valley

Pretty sure Silicon Valley is an outlier when it comes to wages for software developers...

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#259

Post by ChristianGeek »

grimgrin wrote: post #184
pedalpete wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software are you using that is only on Mac? I'm surprised by this, as it seems most development software is available for all platforms these days.

This is from a dev standpoint but at my job we're using MySQL and I develop from Linux. When I want to browse or modify data with a GUI nothing quite matches OS X's Sequel Pro. The best I've found is DBeaver (or SQuirrel). IntelliJ is working on a thing called 0xDBE, but it feels even worse. I could easily rattle off a handful of other applications that just feel better, even if slightly, on OS X. DaisyDisk and Trans…

I'm a dev that uses Windows at work for development and the Mac at home for development and at work for general use. I've been a Mac devotee since 1984.

For an IDE nothing beats the sheer joy of Visual Studio and ReSharper. I use NetBeans for Java (I prefer it over Eclipse and IntelliJ). For MySQL I use Sequel Pro on the Mac but prefer HeidiSQL on Windows. For Linux dev work I'll spin up a VM on Fusion on the Mac or VirtualBox on either.

My point? There's nothing you listed that requires you to use a Mac. I completely understand if you choose to, but there's no need to discount Windows in the process...it's a great development environment for anything but Swift and Objective-C.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#260

Post by Mikeb85 »

eridius wrote: post #62
jblow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are massive differences. For example, in the Windows world you are allowed to find out who likes your stuff and build relationships with them.

Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform. The only way I can meaningfully interpret your claim is by replacing "build relationships with them" to "and market directly to them", i.e. being able to email your customers with marketing messages. And I'm glad Apple doesn't give my email address to everyone I buy an a…

> I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform.

It was common many years ago. And some indie developers still engage their fans, solicit advice, etc...

Post reply on HN