While we're at it, maybe we can put pbxproj out of its misery and get a modern project file format and module system
Dear Apple
101–110 of 211 posts
Re: Dear Apple
#102Can we give this HN post a better title? This is atrociously clickbaiting. Granted it just goes to GitHub, but I would like to have at least an _inkling_ of what I'm about to read.
Especially given the length as well. It's a small, short list of issues that users of XCode/Apple Developer tools have. Why is this #1 on the front page?
Because it's by far one of the most annoying issues every developer has with Apple now. It's so frustrating to see the syntax highlighting and auto completion engine crash continuously as you try to figure out what line causes it just so you can rewrite it the more verbose way for the engine not to choke. You may think this has to be a beta version or a newly introduced bug, but no, these issues have been there in the official release for at least 1 1/2 years now. It got better over time, yes, but it's still far from being where it should be.
Re: Dear Apple
#103Can we give this HN post a better title? This is atrociously clickbaiting. Granted it just goes to GitHub, but I would like to have at least an _inkling_ of what I'm about to read.
I wish Hacker News would display both the original title and an editorialised subtitle. The first is important to capture the linked author's intent but the second is necessary for actually knowing what the link is about.
You can see how it works on the Economist where there are two "titles" for each article, a catchy one and a useful one.
e.g. From http://www.economist.com/printedition/2017-02-18:
Catchy / Useful
- Taking the low road / Scotland's economy
- Back to the desert / Britain in the Gulf
- Still cleaning up the Co-op / Ethical banking
- Errant Flynn / Turmoil in the administration
- etc
Re: Dear Apple
#104Oof. This isn't good for Apple, and I say this as a fairly big Apple fan.
From my perspective as a programmer, Apple's success has hinged entirely on the quality and innovation of their OS and dev tools. For a long time, both of these have been ahead of the game (since NeXT came to Apple).
They lose this advantage, they crumble. Mark my words! Go on, mark them.
Re: Dear Apple
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is not a big company. Out of the 116k employees they have 60k are in retail [1]. Another 6k are in AppleCare call centers [2]. So about 50k of them are at corporate. Contrast that with Google which has 72k employees [3] and Microsoft which has 120k employees [4]. Apple's organizational culture is meant to be about small teams. Steve Jobs once said "we're the biggest startup on the planet" [5]. This leads to com…
It seems like what was once their strength is now becoming a liability. They seem to be spreading themselves too thin and more and more people are complaining about more and more things. Since more customers are unhappy it seems like they either need to hire more people or cut products.
I thought they were already cutting products. Apple displays: gone. Airport: gone. Mac Mini and Mac Pro haven't had updates in so long they should be gone.
Re: Dear Apple
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my personal experience, with everything else being equal, iOS development yields on average 6x more income than Android development. I haven't found a decent alternative, yet.
Which is why I feel for a lot of us who don't own Macbooks, it's a major sticking point, and you get a lot of people trying out "Hackintoshes" (which I don't really have much of an opinion on). I just wish Apple had taken the Google route and made development a lot more open, not sure what they stand to gain by keeping even iOS development a walled garden but hey it's their platform to do with as they please.
And they have every right to build a paywall and make the developers pay for it.
The only redeeming Apple product I found is the mac mini which gives low-budget developers an easy access to their expensive platform.
Re: Dear Apple
#107It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.
I've noticed this effect recently - I call it "too big to try." Once a given institution reaches a certain scale, the apparent limitations on human attention at the top of the hierarchy make it impossible for the organization to contemplate small ventures. Like the parable of Bill Gates finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk, it's no longer worth the time to stoop to pick up the small stuff. (Intuitively, this…
Definitely. To me, it's a symptom of control-oriented organizations, where too much information processing has to take place at the top. As a contrast, support-oriented organizations work to keep most decisions happening lower down.
It's especially frustrating here because the business case here seems pretty simple: go make these developers happy and effective. It's a known audience, they're easy to reach, they're not shy about telling you what they want. I don't think a lot of information needs to get to the top of the hierarchy.
Re: Dear Apple
#108Apple works with their bug reporting system; instead of encouraging people to "sign" "letters" (on Google forms no less) - open a bug report at https://bugreport.apple.com , post the bug number and encourage people to duplicate it. This is the only way to move something at Apple.
You're joking, right?
Re: Dear Apple
#109Can we give this HN post a better title? This is atrociously clickbaiting. Granted it just goes to GitHub, but I would like to have at least an _inkling_ of what I'm about to read.
I wish Hacker News would display both the original title and an editorialised subtitle. The first is important to capture the linked author's intent but the second is necessary for actually knowing what the link is about. You can see how it works on the Economist where there are two "titles" for each article, a catchy one and a useful one. e.g. From http://www.economist.com/printedition/2017-02-18 : Catchy / Useful -…
I've always found HN's policy of no editorializing of titles, and their insistence on original titles to be counterproductive.
Quite often an excellent article will have a really generic or vague title that few people will ever read, and a judiciously edited title will interest people enough to read it.
At that point, upvotes should determine whether the article lives or dies, as usual. If readers don't think the article is worthwhile, they don't have to upvote it.
I like your subtitle idea too. It's definitely better than insisting on keeping just the original title. Unfortunately, it will make for some practical difficulties with the layout of HN pages, which will be able to fit fewer articles in the same space, and it will also be problematic with RSS feeds and the like, which will often still display just one title, not a title and subtitle.
Re: Dear Apple
#110I made a conscious decision a while back to simply use a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with easily/cheaply-available commodity hardware for programming. Correct me if I'm wrong but other than iOS development, there isn't anything I can't do on Ubuntu with a 2010-ish laptop that I can do with a 2016-ish Macbook.
For programming yes, but there are some pretty neat tools for web designers such as sketch.app and tons of prototyping software.