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Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

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Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#131

Post by ddevault »

twicetwice wrote: post #128
ddevault wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every comment refers to VSCode, which is... bizzare. VSCode has abysmal performance. I'm a Vim user and every time I've encountered VSCode it's just been awful, awful, awful. There's some kind of brainwashing going on here. Probably something along the lines of "I write webshit, and if webshit is bad, I might be bad by association, so webshit is definitely not bad".

VSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop. And while I love the word "webshit" in itself -- it's a very pleasing word to say -- I object to it. The web is not universally shit. It has advantages: primarily almost truly "write once, run anywhere." I run Ubuntu. I almost certainly would not be able to use VSCode on my laptop if it were not an Electron app. I am better off having an Electron version of VSCode than…

>VSCode runs amazingly on my 2.5 year old laptop.

Is this some kind of great achievement? Vim runs ten times as fast on a 28 year old PDP-11.

>The web is not universally shit.

[citation needed]

To quote the old Java saying, saying "write once, run everywhere" is a selling point of Java is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders. Like... maybe, but it's not really the point.

You couldn't use VSCode on Linux, but you could use any of several much better editors, and effectively double your RAM to boot.

>(Also, isn't Visual Studio a native app, and hot garbage compared to VSCode? I've never used it, but that's what I hear.)

Back when I used Windows as a dev platform, years and years ago, Visual Studio was quite pleasant. The experience of that back in the day is much better than the experiences I had with VSCode more recently.

But both of them are terrible compared to the native development environment of Linux.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#132

Post by thunderrabbit »

sixothree wrote: post #12
gonehome wrote: post #2

Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely obnoxious. Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam). It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people…

I'm sick of this. I'm so, so sick of this. I swear every time this happens, I think "oh, there is no app by that name" and then I have to double check make sure I really used the right search term and that the result is actually a first party app. If I were searching for a genre such as "podcast" or "camera" app, I understand seeing paid ads. But when I search for a specific name, I see absolutely no reason whatsoeve…

Especially when names are globally unique!

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#133

Post by akira2501 »

gonehome wrote: post #2

Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely obnoxious. Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam). It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people…

> It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people.

It's an old-school protection racket, particularly because they own both sides of the deal.

"It'd be a shame if anything happened to your app store listing. But, you know, if you just pay us $5/mo we can make sure that doesn't happen to _you_."

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#134

Post by [deleted] »

jdxcode wrote: post #126
mantap wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the iPhone was first released there was no App Store. Many people asked for one. Eventually Apple relented and told developers to... make web apps for the iPhone instead. This wasn't enough, so eventually eventually they released the App Store. Somewhere alone the line the iPhone was also jailbroken and users with the jailbreak could install their own software. The point is that a general purpose computing devic…

I don't think they released the App Store because people asked for it. It just wasn't ready on launch day (or would've had any apps in it)

[deleted]

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#135

Post by saagarjha »

jdxcode wrote: post #126
mantap wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the iPhone was first released there was no App Store. Many people asked for one. Eventually Apple relented and told developers to... make web apps for the iPhone instead. This wasn't enough, so eventually eventually they released the App Store. Somewhere alone the line the iPhone was also jailbroken and users with the jailbreak could install their own software. The point is that a general purpose computing devic…

I don't think they released the App Store because people asked for it. It just wasn't ready on launch day (or would've had any apps in it)

No, there were jailbreaks that got native code execution and everyone wanted those kinds of apps.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#137

Post by thrwaway69 »

gonehome wrote: post #36
kortilla wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible. Coming from the android world there is a very high bar for a native app for me. I tend to assume the app is garbage if it could have been done just as easily as a web app.

I find this surprising and it makes me wonder if native android apps are just bad? The difference between a native iOS app and a fake app that's really just a wrapped web page is obvious. Native apps are a lot faster. It's possible there is some selection bias here and you only notice the web apps when they're bad, but I really don't think this is the case. Native apps just seem categorically better. If Facebook pour…

More money doesn't mean good web app though. Most big websites ironically google's doesn't follow their own accessibility, speed, UX, UI, inclusiveness etc guidelines they recommend for getting into search results.

They are also the biggest abuser of UA agent while chromium team is trying to get rid of it. There are so many things they get wrong that they preach or push themselves.

Also, there are technical limitations especially around tracking lol. Web apps can't run processes in the background or access your files without your consent everytime.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#138

Post by hansvm »

electricviolet wrote: post #98
p1necone wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the way Jetbrains does it is ideal - every chunk of 12 months you pay for with your subscription gives you permanent use of that version.

But this only works if you're releasing a new version every subscription period -- and in that case, it's equivalent to upgrade pricing.

If the developer isn't providing upgrades then they shouldn't keep getting paid for a product someone already bought. If the argument is that developers need _regular_ pay days then we have dedicated financial instruments for smoothing an irregular cash flow.

In any case, subscriptions aren't directly equivalent to upgrade pricing even when an upgrade is provided every subscription period because in an upgrade pricing model the end user can always choose to stop paying and continue to use software they already bought.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#139

Post by gonehome »

thunderrabbit wrote: post #129
gonehome wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree (at least on the ads piece, not sure about the rest of your comment) - I think the ads are an unnecessary dilution of their brand. They can help developers with ad discovery in a bunch of different and better ways that are less hostile for devs and users.

*app discovery Thank you for the funny typo "ad discovery" "We curate the finest ads for your consumer experience.."

Ah yes - my bad, too late to edit :)

Ad discovery is more Facebook and Google’s business.

Re: Every year I fill out this survey from Apple, for Apple developers

#140

Post by pier25 »

MintelIE wrote: post #20

I have simply stopped buying "apps" even though I am still an iOS user. Quite a few of my purchases have just disappeared over time. I moved to a newer device and they couldn't be installed. I'm not happy with Apple and I got rid of my modern Macs (still have 1/2 dozen SE/30s) completely, now I use Debian or OpenBSD. Apple is extremely tight lipped on what they're doing and where they're going, they will support and…

> and now moving to Swift seems like a message that all my work in Objective C will be thrown away by Apple

Totally.

Cocoa, Objective C, OpenGL, etc, are all going to die some day and Apple will announce it a year or two in advance like they usually do with major breaking stuff. Any serious company would announce these EOL 4-5 years in advance.

With Apple the only safe strategy is to keep investing dev time to update everything to the newer stuff or let the project die because in 2-3 years max it will most likely stop working.

It's no coincidence all big Mac apps (other than Apple's own stuff) are actually cross platform projects. No wonder Apple is trying to bring people over from iOS with Catalyst.

I was going to start a macOS product this year but with the transition to SwiftUI I decided it was a really bad idea to invest in a Cocoa project.

And Jesus don't get me started on having to update the OS to get the latest Xcode version every year with their half baked macOS versions.

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