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Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

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501–510 of 535 posts

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#501
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The excuse that freedom exists because one other market player is not a tyrant skates extremely thin ice. If Android went dark side too, where would we be? This excuse is exhausting, lacks any principles whatsoever; these are general purpose devices, browsing the web & allowing arbitrary apps to be developed & squeezed into the world, if they pass through the tyrant's gauntlet. That one company offers some modicum of…

>If Android went dark side too, where would we be? Android went dark long ago too. All of the open source apps are abandoned and unmaintained replaced by closed source versions. The Play Store takes a 30% cut of things like Apple. Google decides what kind of apps are available on the app store and it closely matches Apple. Not arguing but rather expanding: You may be thinking "He just ignored sideloading get real" bu…

Yeah there are porn apps. For example Wolf's Stash (yes, I am a trashy furry).

In terms of mainstream stuff, I think that's less of a "Apple & Google don't want you to have them" and more "society doesn't want you to have them, won't somebody please think of the childreeeeen".

Parents ignoring the fact, of course, that the 3 year old they gave a fucking tablet to with unlimited access can still end up on any of those sites via the browser.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You try step by step. Run grapheneOS, use f-droid, try open source alternatives and so on. Its not complete, you still need a pixel which is made by google, and might also need google services for some apps, but its still better than doing nothing.

I've gotten off chrome and now use firefox + Proton VPN, so browsing I've done to some degree. I think Gmail is the next thing to go then Gdrive. The issue I'm having is ditching the Apple ecosystem. I've been editing on Apple machines for over a decade in Premiere/FCPX/DaVinci Resolve/etc. and the idea of breaking it all down - losing probably 70% of my plug-ins due to licensing restrictions, for instance - and movi…

I am a Linux user, I will say just save your time and stay on macOS.

Unless all you use is just davinci resolve (PRO), which works on Linux well (RHEL/Rocky with more steps needed for others), Creative apps on Linux are still not good enough.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#503
post #97
post #68

What bothers me about this -- and it bothered me enough to leave the platform -- is not fees, or "hobby computing," or "it's just for my own use," or trying to figure out why this or that would be in Apple's interest. What bothers me is that it feels like an offense against the entire notion of what a computer is. I am, of course, aware that many (perhaps most) computers in the world are effectively appliances, but a…

First, you are right. Jobs himself said that he wanted to go beyond selling computers, and sell information appliances. In that respect, he and Woz were diametrically opposed. When he was squeezed out of management in his own company, it is not a coïncidence that he elbowed his way into Jef Raskin's Macintosh project: Raskin was also interested in building information appliances, the difference between the two men wa…

> The UX he designed was text-centric and used high-speed incremental search as its navigation paradigm.

That sounds exactly like emacs with company-mode or ido-mode.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually mean all the little Vista-style popups that recent macOS versions introduced, on top of the quarantine and notarization bullshit which gets harder to skip in each release. Just give me a simple checkbox in the system settings that this is a "developer machine and I know what I'm doing" which disables all that stuff and it would be fine.

Well, they can't make it a simple checkbox or everyone would just check it (see how many people already download Developer Betas of the OSes every summer). But if you really do want this, you can have it: disable SIP, done.

The problem with disabling SIP is that (AFAIK) it also does a lot of useful/important things (for instance protecting the system folders).

Simply disabling it globally isn't really a good solution to the problem. Neither signed nor unsigned, notarized or un-notarized apps should ever be allowed to write to those folders, no matter if SIP is on or off.

OTH preventing an app to read/write subdirectories in the user's home folder is definitely not a useful feature.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#506
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Parent also said that they are not real computers. What I am saying is that they are.

With the set top box, the fact that there’s a computer in there is just an implementation detail. Technically there’s a real computer in my refrigerator, my printer, and my headphones but I don’t have any expectation that these are general purpose computers that are available for me to compute on. I think it’s those expectations that matter and it isn’t always black and white. I look at my phone as being similar to a…

The fact that there's a computer in there means that there's a computer in there, which is the OP's point.

Yes, we get it, those computers are intentionally locked down by their manufacturers. That lockdown is what the problem is.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's like giving someone a deck of cards and telling them that these cards can only be used to play blackjack. You can't invent a card game, or change the rules, or build a house of cards, or do card magic. Millions of people buy cards that can only be used to specifically only play, say; 'Magic: the Gathering' (MtG). You could probably invent some sort of new game with MtG cards, or do some sort of card magic wit…

You could probably invent some sort of new game with MtG cards And people did, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_Commander , which is now the most popular MtG format. So yes, even in this case the freedom to explore and experiment is good.

Except that's not really a different game; it's merely a slight change of format. It changes the recommended card count (100 cards per deck rather than 60), adds two significant restrictions (one copy of each non-land card per deck; only colors that match those on the Commander's card), and one significant new mechanic (the Commander, who doesn't have to be in your hand to be cast), but otherwise it is played exactly as the standard 60-card game.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#508
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get full access down to the hardware level, but equally the contention that these aren't general purpose computing devices and aren't programmable is just tosh. They're far more programmable, in the sense you can learn a huge amount more about programming on them, than the home microcomputers I learned to program on as a kid.

I guess I'm a bit younger than you, but on the computers I grew up with (Windows/Ubuntu/OS X), you were (and are) able to create and run any program you wanted. On an iPhone or iPad, however, you are limited to a sandbox; programs you write on it run strictly within the context of the IDE, and if you want to write any first-class programs (apps), you need to pay up. In high school, I had a friend who was very talente…

I'm probably older than you, but I agree with you and disagree with the other guy. I grew up with a C64 and Amiga, and that's where I learned how to program, I feel like it gave me a deep understanding of how to program and how a computer worked, plus they were also basically real-time machines.

But peak iPhone for me was a jailbroken device running iOS 5 or 6. Back then, everything was still Objective-C, which meant that every object could be introspected in the live system and swizzled which allowed for making tweaks to the actual system. You also had Unix underneath and could login to a bash shell and install a compiler.

But someone who learns to program Swift on an iPhone or iPad simply won't have a deep understanding of how anything works. Even if you pay the $99, it's still a rather unpleasant experience to program on iOS given all the restrictions.

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#509
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of HyperCard: Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media. HyperCard used a metaphor of stacks of cards containing graphics, text, buttons, and links that could take you to another card. The HyperTalk scripting language implemented by Dan Winkler was a gentle introduction to event-based programmin…

speed is important to you. I can tell because you abbreviated an abbreviation. > &c for those not in the know, "etc" is an abbreviation for "et cetera" which is Latin for "and so on." the Ampersand character itself evolved from the shape of the word "et" which alone is "and" in Latin. what do you do with all the time you save? :D

Others may not know the origin of &c., so it's great that you explained. But here's a thought: Abbreviations are not about saving time typing for me. Other reasons for abbreviations:

1. Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms are a kind of jargon that compress long words into single tokens that communicate something in a single chunk. That is more efficient for _readers_ to parse... If they are in the know.

2. Speaking of being in the know, abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms communicate which tribe you belong to, and this strengthens social bonds between writer and readers.

3. Some mediums have limited space available. Newspaper headlines, SMS messages, and the original Twitter tweets are examples of mediums with limited space. Abbreviations help compress longer messages to fit the medium.

I happen to be a very slow author compared to just about every professional I know. Since it takes me a while to think about what I write, I find that trying to find shortcuts is not helpful with code or the written word.

Cheers...

Re: Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malware teams would loooooove that checkbox.

Yes they would, and so would I... a developer who likes running unsigned executables and doesn't like having to jump through hoops to enable them... each time I download a new one.

Yup. And apple is trying to make an OS safe for typical consumers who make mistakes and can be tricked. Hoops for you are a necessary burden to protect them. If you hate them, lots of Linux distros meet your desires. I personally think they are right to not trade off the security of the majority for the convenience of the minority.
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