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Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

arstechnica.com

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Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#181

Post by jmathai »

skc wrote: post #142
jmathai wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying they've found zero success. XBox live is probably the biggest. At Microsoft's size they aren't really looking for "pretty big deal" successes. Bing is probably around 15% market share. A home run for most but not (yet) for MS. I can't really comment on Windows Azure. I'll take your word for it but I think Amazon is eating Google and Microsoft's lunch here. This isn't a fight for second place.....

Apologies, I was assuming we were talking about the technical chops of the two companies when it comes to building web scale services.

Apologies not needed. That raises a question though.

I was implying that Apple and Microsoft don't do as well building web services. I wouldn't argue that Azure can't scale but the overall approach seems to be a little bit "unfinished".

Let me explain, the only true cloud computing environment that really solves 90% of any companies needs is AWS. Somehow Amazon understands what the developer community needs. I'm really perplexed by Google not getting this right.

Apple doesn't and I don't believe Microsoft does either.

I don't think this is about technical chops. It's something else that I can't put my finger on.

Similar to how I don't understand how Amazon crushed Best Buy so quickly.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#182

Post by crag »

killerpopiller wrote: post #150
crag wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Good lord, that sounds like a complete mess. I haven't been anywhere near it as a developer so I can't really speak on how bad it is from that point of view." Let me tell you it's not exactly happy land for us consumers either. Apple's "cloud" is a mess. And don't even get me going about the "new" and "improved" iTunes. Frankly I pity developers, cause Apple's mess is giving them a bad name. I can't think of 1 iclou…

I switched from linux (after 9years) to an iMac and iCloud was one of the first things I couldn't believe how poorly it works. Ubuntu One sets a standards it seems. Right click your desired folder click ubuntu one and it gets synced. with iCloud (and box, dropbox) I have to duplicate the folders, weird. I spare you the finder, sftp-integration and the keyboard-layout bitching.

Well to be fair, Finder's been a mess for years. ;)

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#183

Post by Atanvarno »

joelreymont wrote: post #141
Aloisius wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, from having studied this for many, many hours over many moons, is that what Apple is trying to do is fundamentally hard, if not entirely unfeasible. They're trying to replace a smart server with one that's dumb as a doorstop. More specifically, they're trying to emulate a CRUD web service with a file sync engine. Having dug through iCloud's underlying structure, I can tell you what they're doing is very close to…

How do you know that the iCloud server is hosted on Microsoft Azure?

It's known from the start: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/06/16/iclou...

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#184

Post by zoul »

ianstallings wrote: post #162
druiid wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey man, not sure how worried about your info getting out there, but generally when people troll for 'proof' here I ignore it. Essentially it's just one more avenue for people to use against you, especially in regards to linking a name/identity to work and I generally (personally) try to keep them separate. Your choice, just something to think about... also, don't feed the trolls etc ;)

A valid point I'll have to keep in mind next time. I do use my real name here. I should probably think about changing that.

What’s wrong about being a real person with opinions? That is, unless you behave like an idiot, which is certainly not the case here.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#185

Post by zoul »

ianstallings wrote: post #86
JonnieCache wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this toolset of tomorrow your peers are using to blow past you, if you don't mind me asking?

I mainly mean my web-developer peers. Their toolsets are moving so rapidly that I see them surpassing us in the next 2-3 years unless we make some huge improvements. Just my opinion.

Web development is quite a different beast. There’s huge amount of life and struggle in the ecosystem, but only a fraction of that pushes the platform forward. I am relieved every time I move from some web development work back to plain, sane Cocoa APIs.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#186

Post by pjmlp »

potatolicious wrote: post #122
JonnieCache wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this toolset of tomorrow your peers are using to blow past you, if you don't mind me asking?

I'm not OP, but one key complaint I have is that there isn't much in the way of testing. Unit tests are somewhat well-developed, integration testing is a complete mess. Much of the iOS community still creates software by the seat-of-your-pants model (i.e., write code, boot it up, does it look like it works? ship it). Engineering rigor is still a concept relatively foreign to iOS, and it shows. Apple has little-to-no…

Actually this is still the reality in most corporations out there.

I seldom see TDD, unit testing, continous integration and so on outside the startup world.

Most of the projects I do in the enterprise start agile and slowly evolve to a mix of agile and waterfall. When stress for delivery raises, many entrerprise project managers just kill unit testing related tasks.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#187

Post by orbitur »

ianstallings wrote: post #151
coldtea wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to Cocoa Touch? I've worked with both and I can say this is just a case of "the grass is greener". Nothing "exciting" about HTML5 and the Web for people well versed in a mobile framework. The most interesting things are re-inventions of the wheel, only more hacky and less performant. Plus, since you can use web views in your native mobile app, there's literary nothing (technologically-wise) you can achieve w…

Yea I tend to agree on a lot of those points. I'm currently working on a native application that does heavy AV compositing and there is no way that HTML5 solution would be as capable. Mainly the pain points are on the API and the legacy nature of it, and the surrounding crappy tools. I see cool IDEs, testing frameworks, scaffolding/bootstrapping sets and I can only be a little jealous. Sure we have our share, but it'…

I think the open source toolchain for Cocoa is pretty great. There are hundreds of incredibly useful projects on Github, like RESTKit or CocoaPods or AFNetworking, libraries to ease the pain of Core Data fetches, etc.

ObjC does have a legacy nature, but I think the community is doing a great job of making life easier.

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#188

Post by mdellabitta »

pifflesnort wrote: post #48
potatolicious wrote: post #5

I've worked with iCloud in conjunction with Core Data. It's as broken as the article describes, and in fact has gotten worse over time. No one really fully knows WTF is going with iCloud - documentation is basically nonexistent, support unavailable, implementation broken in trivial ways, and error messages inscrutable. I was at an Mac/iOS conference recently where the Core Data iCloud talk morphed from a standard tal…

Core Data is barely functional locally, requiring an enormous amount of invasive runtime hooks to create the appearance of a "transparent" (it's anything but) object store on top of Objective-C objects. The fact that anyone, anywhere (including Apple), actually expected Core Data to work as a distributed object store is totally beyond my comprehension.

I think Core Data did that back when it was EOF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#189

Post by ianstallings »

orbitur wrote: post #187
ianstallings wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I tend to agree on a lot of those points. I'm currently working on a native application that does heavy AV compositing and there is no way that HTML5 solution would be as capable. Mainly the pain points are on the API and the legacy nature of it, and the surrounding crappy tools. I see cool IDEs, testing frameworks, scaffolding/bootstrapping sets and I can only be a little jealous. Sure we have our share, but it'…

I think the open source toolchain for Cocoa is pretty great. There are hundreds of incredibly useful projects on Github, like RESTKit or CocoaPods or AFNetworking, libraries to ease the pain of Core Data fetches, etc. ObjC does have a legacy nature, but I think the community is doing a great job of making life easier.

I agree. I would at MKNetworkKit too! I just want more more more! :)

Re: Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up

#190

Post by seivan »

delackner wrote: post #179
gurkendoktor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A large save will easily reach into >200ms land on an iOS device, and your app will feel like crap. Can you give an order of magnitude at this would happen? I usually only have 50-200 entities in my database in total, saving maybe half of them at the same time. Yet libraries like RestKit insist on a two-context setup to avoid the saving delay you mention. I'm not sure if I should fight the libraries and go back to…

Fetch and save operations get pretty slow with even just 10,000 entities (if you touch all those entities). It gets a little better if you pre-fetch all the entities rather than one at a time, but the save is still very slow. Breaking that out into a backround thread is feasible, but as the previous commenter mentions, then you risk momentary divergence between the UI and the backend.

Index properly. Save in a queue.
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