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Dear Apple

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Re: Dear Apple

#201

Post by invalidname »

ghuntley wrote: post #199
AsyncAwait wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist upon using Xcode > there are so many alternative toolsets you can use Actually no, if you want the latest, most supported tools, frameworks APIs etc. you have to use Xcode. Most of us don't want to use Xcode, but we also don't want to use C#, (Swift is actually very nice), which IS NOT a native solution.

How does one define `native`? To me, native is using the platform API's exactly - 1:1 - with zero abstractions. With Xamarin you do exactly that, in either csharp or fsharp. When using Xamarin a UIViewcontroller still is a UIViewController, you'll be directly interacting/pinvoking the underlying APIs that you already know and potentially hate :p (cough Android). See http://continuous.codes/ for an example of what can…

That is one way to define native. Another is to use the platform native source code and provide access to that. E.g. on Android Xamarin includes an overhead due to constantly passing thru the slow JNI bridge when it needs to communicate with the native UI widgets. It also includes a relatively large overhead because of standard C# libraries that need to be included on iOS/Android.

OTOH Codename One ( https://www.codenameone.com/ ) has a very different interpretation of "native". They use their own widget toolkit like QT which makes them "less native" in that regard. But they are native to Android (being Java based) and translate directly to C/Objective-C which means you can literally write OS native code and use native widgets within the hierarchy.

I think native is a worthless word in that regard as it doesn't properly convey meaning in these sort of complex situations. Once PhoneGap started billing itself as "native" this all went out of the window...

Re: Dear Apple

#202

Post by richardwhiuk »

bsder wrote: post #198
richardwhiuk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 is peanuts to anyone actually earning money, and it's definitely peanuts compared to developer cost.

Except that I seem to remember a statistic like 95% of the iOS apps don't actually make enough to cover that annual fee.

If they didn't make $100, then it wasn't worth their time developing the app either, even without that fee.

Re: Dear Apple

#203

Post by bartvk »

makecheck wrote: post #156

While I have slightly despised Xcode ever since 4.x when they integrated Interface Builder and everything else unnecessarily into one buggy app, it has only been completely broken for me with the latest version. “Something” makes typing s...l...o...w......a...s......h...e...l...l... and I have never figured out what. The editor became utterly unusable no matter the project and I was forced to do every change outside…

That's very interesting. What code editor do you use, and does it support good auto-completion, navigation and the like?

Re: Dear Apple

#204

Post by bartvk »

wsc981 wrote: post #147
vrutberg wrote: post #131

As a developer who moved from Java and JavaScript (IntelliJ IDEA) to Swift and Xcode about a year ago, the experience has been horrendous. How is it okay for a company as big and serious as Apple to have an IDE and tooling as bad as Xcode? The IDE frequently crashes, there is no refactoring support at all, practically non-existant code completion, syntax highlightning frequently stops working, etc etc.

I've been using Xcode for many, many years now. In the past (~8+ years ago) I've used Visual Studio. From my perspective Xcode is a really nice IDE. I prefer the lean UI compared to Visual Studio and Xamarin. The only thing that annoys me is that since Swift the syntax colouring and autocompletion breaks multiple times a day. This is a slight annoyance for me, but otherwise I personally think it's a decent IDE. I don…

Yup, I agree. I think Xcode is not bad at all. I wouldn't call it great, but it's good enough. I get a hard crash every couple of weeks. Autocompletion breaks maybe 2 times a week, and this month, I haven't seen syntax colouring break.

It used to be worse, of course. Especially in Swift 1.x and 2.0.

Re: Dear Apple

#205

Post by Nullabillity »

yourapostasy wrote: post #192
Nullabillity wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if you could hook up your own Docker container that Google's build infrastructure then taps to build your Android app...but all the open source your app depends upon are in their build infrastructure, with near-instant feedback on build and CI problems of the open source bits operating at a massive scale. But... why? Gradle already does a good job eliminating works-on-my-machine-isms, that sounds like cloud…

> Gradle already does a good job eliminating works-on-my-machine-isms, that sounds like cloud-for-the-sake-of-cloud. Github for build and continuous delivery/deployment/integration; extremely distributed build. Today an app developer pulls down the latest version of an open source library and building against it, then files any integration issues against the library's ticketing system. Google's system allows the libr…

> Google's system allows the library developer to build a version, then find everyone whose apps that use their library break because of the new proposed version.

That assumes that library authors can see the code of dependent applications. Ehhh...

> It vastly speeds up the delivery cycle and increases robustness between builds of all your dependencies and your app.

Presumably by breaking repeatable builds? I certainly don't want it to replace libraries without my knowledge, and that's the only part where I can see it possible "speeding up the delivery cycle".

Oh, yeah, Gradle can do that anyway with -SNAPSHOT dependencies.

> A lot of people really like the re-factoring and IntelliSense features in Visual Studio, but hate working under Windows. The new Linux compatibility push under Windows when it matures may accomplish the same as making Linux a first-class citizen in Visual Studio.

Tried IntelliJ/Android Studio? Especially considering that ReSharper, which is more or less a port of IJ's refactoring, is usually considered a must-have add-on for VS.

> Google trying to further develop Dalvik/Android Runtime for Android seems to me eerily like Sun developing further generations of SPARC. Google would have to put up a really big war chest to continually find and address all the edge cases to sustain a process virtual machine going forward into the future, and I'm not clear where the value proposition lies in doing so, rather than settling upon an existing process virtual machine with more developers working upon it.

Sounds like migrating to OpenJDK would be a much more reasonable path in that case, since it wouldn't mean starting over in third-party application support.

Re: Dear Apple

#206

Post by orbitur »

megablast wrote: post #155
xenadu02 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't run multiple versions of Xcode concurrently due to CoreSimulator fighting over which version gets to run. This is a limitation we are aware of. We are also very aware of the problems it causes. As for other problems, please file radars and respond to requests for additional information. I have been on the external side of radar, I know it can be frustrating, but we do read them and we do take direct action…

What? I have very little problem running Xcode 7 and Xcode 8 along side each other. As long as you close the simulator before running from the other version.

I've found having IB open in both versions will eventually lead to errors in IB, if not outright crashes.

Re: Dear Apple

#207

Post by makecheck »

bartvk wrote: post #203
makecheck wrote: post #156

While I have slightly despised Xcode ever since 4.x when they integrated Interface Builder and everything else unnecessarily into one buggy app, it has only been completely broken for me with the latest version. “Something” makes typing s...l...o...w......a...s......h...e...l...l... and I have never figured out what. The editor became utterly unusable no matter the project and I was forced to do every change outside…

That's very interesting. What code editor do you use, and does it support good auto-completion, navigation and the like?

Just using "vim" in a terminal, although I install some plug-ins to give me a bit more power while editing code (like "nerdtree.vim" and "a.vim").

Re: Dear Apple

#208

Post by [deleted] »

mileycyrusXOXO wrote: post #182
sebleon wrote: post #163

As someone that has dabbled in Android development, I have to say that Xcode is light years ahead of its competitors re: developer friendliness. It's realistic from a complete novice to setup their environment and create a full app in a few hours. Just getting your environment setup for Android can take a whole day or more. I'm surprised by how few of these comments actually touch on the suggestions in this letter. O…

This is an exageration. Setting up a clean install for Android development takes all of two minutes.

[deleted]

Re: Dear Apple

#209

Post by SmileyKeith »

zuck9 wrote: post #115
concinds wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a few years ago, at a WWDC session on Xcode, the presenter was talking about version control improvements. He said something to the extent of "Xcode has a robust version control system" and the crowd laughed. And the presenter got offended, said it "wasn't nice" of the audience to laugh considering how hard-working the Xcode team was. My recollection is blurry so it would be nice if someone else remembers…

Can someone link to a video of this session, or the title and the year WWDC was held?

The videos from many WWDC sessions are altered. So even if you got the right session it may not have this. I've been in sessions where much less interesting this have happened that haven't made it in to the video. Also last WWDC they started pre-recording sessions so they could be up on the web sooner. Many of the video sessions from last year don't have any audience noise and differ significantly from the live session.

Re: Dear Apple

#210

Post by SmileyKeith »

mahyarm wrote: post #185
meesterdude wrote: post #37

Wow, it's that bad for developers of their own platform? I do rails development and left OSX for linux a few years ago after finding all the custom song & dance to do things on apple was painful. Not a day goes by I am not grateful for doing that, i am much happier doing web dev on a linux box. But I was under the impression Apple at least took care of the devs who work on their platforms. As someone else has noted:…

The tooling is a lot worse in swift land than objective-c land. In Obj-C land compiles are fast, the debugger works and is stable and the indexer works just fine. The entire pbxproj format is horrible, but at least you have stuff like BUCK ( https://buckbuild.com/ ) that can mitigate some of that. Another thing I would add to that letter are good build boxes. Bring back xserve, so we have CI that is not based on mac…

> The entire pbxproj format is horrible, but at least you have stuff like BUCK (https://buckbuild.com/) that can mitigate some of that.

FWIW I'm still not sure what the BUCK workflow is suppose to look like for most teams. It seems like if you use BUCK you're expected to not use Xcode even as an editor, yet there isn't another editor to pick up the slack (assuming you want autocompletion and decent highlighting). I think there's still a lot of work to be done for it to be a viable replacement, even for Objective-C, for Swift it's even further away.

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