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

Write code for the web

mrmr.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 364 posts

Re: Write code for the web

#21

Post by TillE »

zshrc wrote: post #2

Apple provides thousands of APIs to make developing on the platform easier, has created their own programming language that integrates nicely with the platform and has a fully integrated IDE that works with both above. Sure, buddy… They don’t care about you unless you develop for their platform. And who can blame? The above is a terribly expensive and timely investment.

Swift is great, but the vast majority of apps really don't need to be lovingly hand-crafted for each platform, and Swift is (currently) a bad choice for anything non-Apple.

Personally if I were working on mobile stuff, I'd be looking at .NET MAUI.

Re: Write code for the web

#22

Post by realusername »

blitz_skull wrote: post #4
zshrc wrote: post #2

Apple provides thousands of APIs to make developing on the platform easier, has created their own programming language that integrates nicely with the platform and has a fully integrated IDE that works with both above. Sure, buddy… They don’t care about you unless you develop for their platform. And who can blame? The above is a terribly expensive and timely investment.

Lol. Have you ever used their “IDE”? My guess is you haven’t based on the tone of your remark. Apple has been developer-hostile for years, and OP was just synthesizing their thoughts around this and TBH I found the conclusion to be fairly nuanced and apropos.

xcode is indeed the worst coding software I ever used, it looks like some kind of 90s software which got left rot since.

The whole thing takes 13GB to download where resuming fails, has an undocumented config format which doesn't work with git properly and is more sluggish than an Electron app.

The app upload process itself is so broken that even Apple had to release a third party tool to bypass it.

I refuse to believe they are using this thing internally, they must have some kind of special internal process to make this mess sort of work.

I could say similar things about appstoreconnect where even reordering app images is broken with a race condition if you click too quickly and you have to reload the page.

Re: Write code for the web

#23

Post by DelightOne »

romanovcode wrote: post #6
blitz_skull wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Have you ever used their “IDE”? My guess is you haven’t based on the tone of your remark. Apple has been developer-hostile for years, and OP was just synthesizing their thoughts around this and TBH I found the conclusion to be fairly nuanced and apropos.

I still can't figure out how to format on save in Xcode. Or format in general?

Format with this integration: https://github.com/ruiaureliano/X-SwiftFormat

Then make CMD+s the shortcut.

Re: Write code for the web

#24

Post by coliveira »

Quothling wrote: post #9

I once had to setup an Apple developer account to have one of our municipality apps shown as ours. I'm not sure why that was considering all our other apps never needed that, but it was what it was. It was a pretty terrible experience. First I needed an Apple account, and since I didn't really want to use my private one, I needed to create one for work. I couldn't create an "organisation account" so it was tied to me…

> This was some years ago

This is probably worse today, they're all the time throwing more roadblocks to avoid people to publish apps in their "ecosystem", except if you're a large US company that can easily handle the paperwork.

Re: Write code for the web

#25

Post by pjmlp »

aetch wrote: post #12
blitz_skull wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol. Have you ever used their “IDE”? My guess is you haven’t based on the tone of your remark. Apple has been developer-hostile for years, and OP was just synthesizing their thoughts around this and TBH I found the conclusion to be fairly nuanced and apropos.

Lol. Have you ever used Android Studio IDE? The grass always looks greener on the other side but Xcode and iOS development is miles ahead of how slow and unhelpful Android Studio is the majority of the time. Don’t even get me started on opening up your app 6 months later to update the code and it’s a 99% chance some Android gradle build system or dependency has changed and broken the build…

I love how it has become a meme in Android developer circles that a "stable" Android Studio release always requires a fix release shortly thereafter.

Also Gradle breaking the DSL all the time has become such a pain, that eventually they had to create an upgrade wizard, as if debugging performance issues with the build wasn't fun enough.

Re: Write code for the web

#26

Post by ederamen »

zshrc wrote: post #2

Apple provides thousands of APIs to make developing on the platform easier, has created their own programming language that integrates nicely with the platform and has a fully integrated IDE that works with both above. Sure, buddy… They don’t care about you unless you develop for their platform. And who can blame? The above is a terribly expensive and timely investment.

They don't develop those APIs out of the goodness of their heart - it's a lock in strategy.

They've made it practically impossible to write native cross platform code that runs on IOS, and they've everything they can (within political limits) to prevent web apps from being able to compete with native apps.

Re: Write code for the web

#27

Post by coliveira »

Writing for the web would be great if you didn't have to learn a new framework every six weeks because people will not stop coming with new ways to do the same thing over and over again.

Re: Write code for the web

#28

Post by mark_l_watson »

I like the author's healthy attitude towards large corporations - basic modern survival skill.

If I had my way, I would not have to install any apps on my iPhone or iPads but platform limitations make this a requirement. I noticed that on Safari, the X/Twitter web app is not playing videos, even after I turned off Lockdown Mode for X. Is this Apple's fault for a platform inconsistency or X trying to force users to install their app? I would like to know.

I specialize in deep learning and LLMs, but I have also always enjoyed web development. What holds me back is how complex the tooling is. That said, someone I know has been writing a lot about ClojureScript + Dart so maybe I will give that a try. I would like to find a simple stack for web apps that I could learn in a few days and that was well supported. Any suggestions?

Re: Write code for the web

#29

Post by bmitc »

coliveira wrote: post #24
Quothling wrote: post #9

I once had to setup an Apple developer account to have one of our municipality apps shown as ours. I'm not sure why that was considering all our other apps never needed that, but it was what it was. It was a pretty terrible experience. First I needed an Apple account, and since I didn't really want to use my private one, I needed to create one for work. I couldn't create an "organisation account" so it was tied to me…

> This was some years ago This is probably worse today, they're all the time throwing more roadblocks to avoid people to publish apps in their "ecosystem", except if you're a large US company that can easily handle the paperwork.

I have never understood how Apple gets away with it and even more than that gets a huge amount of love. Whereas, if Microsoft just looks at you wrong, pitchforks are out. I'm not cheerleading any company here, but it has been frustrating in my career where people absolutely refuse to touch or even consider anything Microsoft related but love their Apple computer. Apple is probably hundreds of times more agressive, more stubborn, and moat building than Microsoft. Microsoft's dev tools are some of the most open in the world for a big company, certainly more so than Apple and Google.

Re: Write code for the web

#30

Post by realusername »

Quothling wrote: post #9

I once had to setup an Apple developer account to have one of our municipality apps shown as ours. I'm not sure why that was considering all our other apps never needed that, but it was what it was. It was a pretty terrible experience. First I needed an Apple account, and since I didn't really want to use my private one, I needed to create one for work. I couldn't create an "organisation account" so it was tied to me…

It's still the same, I had some error loop on the iPhone when setting up a developer account and their support just didn't understand what's going on until something like 6 months after, it somehow worked suddenly.

It's as random as ever, it might work straight away or you are unlucky and hit some of the random bug in this process and it'll fail for a long time

Post reply on HN