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What's new in Xcode 7

developer.apple.com

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Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#141

Post by gaius »

biturd wrote: post #104
chc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world. Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-see…

I feel being a staunch Mac user from the beginning has been detrimental to me. My first computer was a commodore 64, which I typed the programs out of the book into the terminal and it made balls move around on the screen and such. But I was really young, and no one was there to catch me, so I never thought to fiddle with it, I thought it was like a set of instructions and you had to follow them. I did not yet unders…

CodeWarrior academic was much, much cheaper.

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#142

Post by gaius »

biturd wrote: post #104
chc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world. Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-see…

I feel being a staunch Mac user from the beginning has been detrimental to me. My first computer was a commodore 64, which I typed the programs out of the book into the terminal and it made balls move around on the screen and such. But I was really young, and no one was there to catch me, so I never thought to fiddle with it, I thought it was like a set of instructions and you had to follow them. I did not yet unders…

CodeWarrior academic was much, much cheaper.

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#143

Post by Entalpi »

Fargren wrote: post #58

Not even a mention of refactoring tools for Swift? Right now you can't even do a Rename. This was one of the biggest reasons I bought Appcode, actually. And I'm still waiting for either IDE to implement Extract Method. It boggles my mind how little I hear people complain about this. Aren't these basic tools by now?

This is amazing how long they can go on without a basic functionality as renaming ...

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#144

Post by anon1385 »

pjmlp wrote: post #44

> Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages. This says it all, regarding what the future for Objective-C looks like.

They just added generics to Obj-C, which is one of the biggest new language features in a long time.

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#145

Post by pjmlp »

anon1385 wrote: post #144
pjmlp wrote: post #44

> Swift is a successor to both the C and Objective-C languages. This says it all, regarding what the future for Objective-C looks like.

They just added generics to Obj-C, which is one of the biggest new language features in a long time.

I guess that is just required for interoperability with Swift.

Generics don't make much sense in Objective-C dynamic model.

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#146

Post by 72deluxe »

Fargren wrote: post #105
m4x wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn't forcing you to pay if you want to run your apps, they're warning users and forcing them to take an extra step to run unsigned code. That doesn't completely prevent malicious code execution but it definitely helps which is a net win for users. Complaining that they ask for $100/year to use their official distribution channel (which incurs ongoing costs for them) seems unreasonable considering the quality a…

I have to ask, because I feel XCode is the worst IDE I've ever used. What about it is pretty awesome? Instruments is pretty cool, though.

What have you used instead? If you've used Visual Studio then it seems pretty bad to begin with. I used to use Codegear RAD Studio (C++ Builder) and that was OK until all the developers left and it became buggy, memory-hogging and generally bad.

XCode seems quite spartan compared to Visual Studio. VS will give you many panes left/right/bottom and a myriad of buttons to do things but xcode just gives you that pane on the left, and you will likely benefit from learning the cmd-1,2,3 etc. shortcuts to jump to the different pages of this "notebook". The other benefit if the quick navigation at the top, the useful "callers/callees" access from the "four squares" menu top left of the editing area. As someone else said, it has Instruments built straight in, the ability to monitor CPU/memory/disk and network and a much better thread stack view (xcode 5 was pretty bad with this I recall - you had to navigate using a popup menu).

You might get on differently with it if you're using different languages. I write C++ in it daily and I really enjoy it (clang is quick). The ability to do static code analysis and have it annotated in the editing window is really really really really great. Lack of refactoring with C++ is a bit sad but not a massive issue for me. Whenever I go back to using Visual Studio I find it to be clunky and there's too much on screen (popups, toolbars, etc.) but that's just me. Also, the glitching and artifacting when VS redraws is irritating (might just be a side effect of running in a VM for me), and the "stop build" takes too long thanks to the compiler running in a hidden window. I ought to upgrade to a more recent Visual Studio as I have to use VS2010 at work for now.

Compared to Eclipse and Android Studio, Xcode is good! I find Eclipse and Android Studio to be slow, and they typically break every upgrade. (AS is currently complaining about a modified ant.jar and refusing to upgrade... wasn't me who did that!)

Having said that xcode currently crashes once a day for me. Not sure if it's in the preprocessing/indexing phase as it falls over with large numbers of #defines and ~80k lines of C++.

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#147

Post by patio11 »

chc wrote: post #131
biturd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the patio11 anecdote?

I'm having trouble finding the anecdote itself where the customer was angry about the change in Googles. Maybe it was in a podcast rather than on HN -- hard to remember, it was several years ago. Here's a later post where he was discussing what he'd learned from incidents like that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808001

I think you're conflating two anecdotes.

The "You broke my Googles. Give my Googles back or I'll tell my husband on you." incident was a customer who installed Bingo Card Creator N minutes before Google had systemic worldwide downtime due to an internal misconfiguration. (http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-you...) Her reasoning was "Google worked, I installed BCC, Google doesn't work anymore, accordingly, BCC must have broken Google." Except s/Google/the Googles/g.

My blue Googles/green Googles story happened with several different customers. Basically, they have a mental model of the Internet where it is a lot like a hard drive: your Internet at school and your Internet at home are totes different Internets and so it makes sense that the contents of one are different than the other. They call their Internets Googles, because Google "is the front page of the Internet" or "runs the Internet" or "makes the Internet." One of the Googles -- the blue Googles -- is what a technologist might more readily understand as Microsoft Internet Explorer configured to open to a Bing homepage on a school computer. This "blue Google" will, for any given query, produce different results than the same query run on "green Google" (Chrome/Google/home PC), hence providing further experimental evidence that the user understands adequately what is going on.

The difference between the blue Googles and the green Googles was chiefly relevant to my business in attempting to convince customers that, regardless of the fact that they signed up with an account from the blue Googles, they did not have to sign up for a separate account on the green Googles and then somehow move things from the blue Googles to the green Googles to be able to print them out at home.

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#148

Post by 72deluxe »

chc wrote: post #55
Killswitch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of people are intimidated just looking at instructions like that, and will just give up. You realize it's probably one of the easiest tasks ever, and it's literally 3 steps. Anybody even my grandma can do that. If they know how to download your app and "install it" they will be able to do those simple steps. And it's a one time thing, not like they need to do it every time they go to install an app.

Anybody can do it if they're of the right state of mind, but as somebody who used to do IT for a medium-sized office, all I can say is you're mistaken if you think most people are that way. The task is intimidating and involves 1) going through a context menu (something many Mac users will never even have done before), 2) dealing with a dialog (people get nervous the second a dialog shows up and often don't even read…

I'm not sure if this is a joke??? Context menus are difficult?? How do you open in a new tab in Safari if context-menus are so alien? How do you force an app to stay in the dock or open at Login? How do you change the desktop background?

Dealing with a dialog: it's just another window, just smaller than the main one.... OSX != iOS. (Actually, how do people cope on iPads when it says "5% of battery remaining"? Do they lob it at the floor in fear of the dialog window?)

There's little developers can do if people don't read the text. That's not a developer's fault. Should we put fences up on dangerous beaches to stop people swimming or should people just read the sign saying "no swimming, dangerous currents"....?

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#149

Post by dijit »

druidsbane wrote: post #47
tdicola wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this today. Just download XCode and go to town. Or use any other programming language supported on OSX like Python, Go, etc. etc.

This is the first time you could install apps on your device without paying for a membership. Previously you could design and test through a simulator for free, now he can build and actually use his app without paying extra as he isn't distributing.

You can always distribute, but you can't submit to the mac app store.

I used to run a multitude of OSX (xcode developed) applications for beta testing, and while not signed, they were indeed runable.

Re: What's new in Xcode 7

#150

Post by bbrian »

arihant wrote: post #137

Every year the new XCode comes, and I'm less excited about new features and more worried about how many more Macs will I have to buy. Last update on XCode 6 made it impossible for some 2012 models to run it. This update is almost surely for Yosemite and above. The cost of developing on Apple platform is crazy these days. I miss the days when they could mock Microsoft for having an expensive Visual Studio. Now they ma…

I run XCode 6 fine on a 2011 MacBook Air.
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