Dear Apple

https://github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple

by pepibumur • 9 years ago

291 203 9 years ago

github.com

sehr• 9 years ago

https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

For anyone who signs this, make sure you throw a report at em as well!

wool_gather9• 9 years ago

And see also http://fixradarorgtfo.com

thedjinn• 9 years ago

The one thing I'd really like to see is a more stable autocomplete. Having a decently working editor should be prioritised above everything else in my opinion.

AsyncAwait16• 9 years ago

Not only autocomplete, but syntax highlighting as well.

SourceKit seems to crash with every moderately complex expression.

slavapestov2• 9 years ago

SourceKit crashes are caused by bugs in the Swift type checker most of the time; it's not SourceKit itself that's at fault usually. We did a lot of work to fix architectural problems in 3.1, especially with generics, and there will be more improvements in 4.0. It's definitely a priority now that the language design has settled down.

tajddin• 9 years ago

It would also be an absolute joy if we could actually refactor with Xcode.

Larrikin• 9 years ago

I immediately downloaded appcode when I found I couldn't rename variables in swift

scribu• 9 years ago

But you can rename variables in Swift 3 + XCode 8: move cursor to a symbol and press Command + Control + E.

Sadly, that's the only refactoring support available right now.

valuearb6• 9 years ago

This is one of the only criticisms of Xcode I'd agree with. And it's a minor issue for me.

AsyncAwait16• 9 years ago

It would, but in the meantime, I find AppCode to be pretty great for that[1].

1 - https://www.jetbrains.com/objc

matt20003• 9 years ago

I don't think it's considered a problem by the team at Apple, or even by some developers, but I would love a more stable Swift language. The number of changes per version * the number of projects in the world is causing a large amount of work and instability. This is contributing to the low tool quality as well.

dwaite• 9 years ago

Swift 3 had a purposeful effort to prioritize syntax-impacting changes and API changes as possible with the idea that Swift 4 and beyond would have backward compatibility for Swift 3 code.

Swift 4/5 will establish ABI compatibility, so that binary swift libraries will work across compiler versions

wool_gather9• 9 years ago

Finalized ABI has been deferred from Swift 4, if you haven't heard: https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-Mo...

Another year of breaking changes, hooray!

matt20003• 9 years ago

Yes I know that's what Swift 3 was trying to do, that's what I don't agree with. In my opinion the tradeoffs are just not worth it.

Whatever happened to graceful deprecation of older language features an APIs? They invalidated all the related example code online and created a ton of mandatory work for all iOS developers within a 1 year timeframe, that's nuts. In my opinion :)

valuearb6• 9 years ago

I switched to Swift with version 1.0, it was terrible. Version 1.2 was when I was finally able to ship product. Since then it's just gotten better and better and the changes per version are a minor inconvenience. Usually am able to update a project in less than an hour.

Clubber• 9 years ago

I've given up on App store development. I wrote a handful of moderately successful apps in the 2009-2012 range, but the market is too crowded and the expectation of free, or near free software isn't profitable for the small team of "just me."

They do fascinating work though. Making a living with Microsoft technology at my day job(s) for two decades, Apple stuff was a refreshing change.

fleshweasel2• 9 years ago

It's absurd to have to beg the wealthiest software company in the world for what should be considered really basic stuff. Xcode is consistently unstable, slow, missing simple essential functionality (like refactoring), and Apple's interface builder is something that most experienced Apple devs know to run for the hills from.

M_Grey• 9 years ago

That very wealth is what's insulating them from the long-term reality of the choices they're making. It's a trap!

yourapostasy2• 9 years ago

Indeed, Apple has the high-tech equivalent of "dragon sickness", in a nod to Tolkien.

Google has a long road ahead of it, but it looks like they have the right pieces in place where I see small, incremental improvements each year, so maybe they're the tortoise. Milestones on that long road are like migrate away from Dalvik, fix business model / monetization issues with the Android marketplace, switch to vector-based canvas blitting, rationalize API support for different manufacturer-added features, and so on. What would be interesting is if they steal Apple's developer thunder by capitalizing upon open source and their in-house build system, and out-flank Apple's developer mindshare, by creating a developer-oriented ecosystem.

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. App development shifts to a posture where open source frameworks/modules/libraries that already power a lot of software are orders of magnitude more convenient to develop under this ecosystem, and the agility/efficiency of all those Android developers coalescing around common open source components online in a single build and CI ecosystem far outstrips Apple-based developers stuck with XCode and their own person-oriented toolchains. Apple has nothing in the pipeline remotely like that kind of ecosystem. Google would also get big data-based insight into phone app development trends in real-time that Apple could only dream about. Google's phone app development OODA loop would tighten considerably smaller than Apple's.

I also wonder if Google and Microsoft could find benefits to team up to replace Dalvik with CLR, and then Microsoft Visual Studio becomes a first-class citizen on Linux for building CLR-based apps on Android.

coldtea3• 9 years ago

That very wealth is what's insulating them from the long-term reality of the choices they're making. It's a trap!

What "long term reality"? They have been doing this when they were near bankrupt and continue to this day, 20 years later, and they are now the richest company on the planet.

Maybe the long term reality is actually success?

wool_gather9• 9 years ago

The one that's been getting me lately is the split between Xcode 7/Swift 2.2 and 8/3. We have an older project in Swift 2 (yes, it's slated to get changed over, just not yet), and new work on a project in 3. If I try to open one while the other is already open, one of the Xcodes invariably freezes or crashes.

I will say, though, that I've always liked IB (though not storyboards). But then there's the wonderful "Oh, you opened a nib, I should move something around in the XML." -> SCM status changes even though I didn't modify the file.

orbitur4• 9 years ago

Can you still submit apps with Xcode 7?

In response to your problem, having done the Xcode Old/Xcode New dance every year since 2012, I got into the habit of making sure they are never running concurrently. Things get even worse if you run xcodebuild on the command line while a different UI version is running.

fleshweasel2• 9 years ago

The file changing just from being looked at is one of the basic reasons that IB is bad. Apple made a grievous mistake in designing UI markup that is intended to be hidden from developers. Un-organizable, un-diffable toxic sludge.

toobigtotry• 9 years ago

I've noticed this effect recently - I call it "too big to try."

Once a given institution reaches a certain scale, the apparent limitations on human attention at the top of the hierarchy make it impossible for the organization to contemplate small ventures. Like the parable of Bill Gates finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk, it's no longer worth the time to stoop to pick up the small stuff.

(Intuitively, this seems related to the absurd inflation in the cost of public works in the US over the last century.)

wpietri• 9 years ago

Definitely. To me, it's a symptom of control-oriented organizations, where too much information processing has to take place at the top. As a contrast, support-oriented organizations work to keep most decisions happening lower down.

It's especially frustrating here because the business case here seems pretty simple: go make these developers happy and effective. It's a known audience, they're easy to reach, they're not shy about telling you what they want. I don't think a lot of information needs to get to the top of the hierarchy.

Apocryphon• 9 years ago

Ironically, Bill Gates is probably not the best billionaire for this parable: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...

na85• 9 years ago

Sooner or later people will wake up to the fact that this is their own fault for leveraging a proprietary ecosystem.

You want to play in Apple's walled garden, you take the scraps they give you.

They have no financial incentive to make the experience better for you if you're already a captive developer.

valuearb6• 9 years ago

Yea, but iOS developers make twice as much as Android developers. Lots of customers love the walled garden and those customers spend a lot more on apps than Android customers do (Android installed base is multiples of iOS, yet revenues are double on iOS).

And one of the reason the bigger spending customers are with Apple is the benefits of the walled garden. It's more secure, and it's updated far faster (or at all). For developers it's a better environment to develop for, consistent screen sizes and hardware features and I know I can write my latest app for the latest iOS and within months of it's release the vast majority of revenue producing customers will be on it. That's a big reason why better apps are written on iOS first, it's easier.

concinds3• 9 years ago

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 this too.

But if that's really the attitude within Apple or the Xcode team, don't hold your breath for improvements.

Edit: changed my paraphrase of the presenter. since I remember it a little better now.

crowbahr• 9 years ago

Well gee they are working so hard so we shouldn't criticize obviously. Golly all that hard work, so nice that it exempts them from derision for their substandard product.

j2kun• 9 years ago

So... they just don't know it's bad?

zuck9• 9 years ago

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

IBM• 9 years ago

Apple is not a big company. Out of the 116k employees they have 60k are in retail [1]. Another 6k are in AppleCare call centers [2]. So about 50k of them are at corporate. Contrast that with Google which has 72k employees [3] and Microsoft which has 120k employees [4].

Apple's organizational culture is meant to be about small teams. Steve Jobs once said "we're the biggest startup on the planet" [5]. This leads to complaints about various neglected features or products and calls for Apple to hire more employees or spin off divisions so it can have dedicated resources. Just like people will always complain about the quality of service at airlines, Apple watchers will always complain about whatever pet issue they feel isn't getting enough attention. That there are complaints doesn't in and of itself mean that Apple needs to change their organizational culture. These complaints always miss the opportunity cost of the changes they suggest: that Apple is Apple because they are resource constrained.

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/01/28/apple-retail-ahrendts-employee...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/how-apple-empo...

[3] https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20161231_alphabet_10K.pdf

[4] https://news.microsoft.com/facts-about-microsoft/

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60dheI4ARg

kbenson2• 9 years ago

Did you seriously just try to convince me that a 50k employee (by your logic) company is not a big company?

Flammy• 9 years ago

I'm not sure the best way to measure and compare, but it sure seems like Apple focuses a lot more on a narrow set of products than either Microsoft or Google.

Apple might be vertically integrated to a higher degree than Microsoft and Google, but Apple doesn't have as big of product diversity.

maxxxxx3• 9 years ago

You don't need many people to improve xcode. I bet 50 people could do miracles if anybody cares.

jccalhoun• 9 years ago

It seems like what was once their strength is now becoming a liability. They seem to be spreading themselves too thin and more and more people are complaining about more and more things. Since more customers are unhappy it seems like they either need to hire more people or cut products.

rhizome• 9 years ago

Apple should start asking their software engineering candidates to invert red-black trees in interviews. I hear that makes these kinds of issues unlikely.

debt• 9 years ago

It boils down to budget. The app ecosystem simply isn't a high priority because it makes little to no money relative to Apple's core business. Matter of fact the best thing they did was introduce ads to app search, at least now they're probably making a few more bucks.

They invest most of their resources into hardware and critical software. Everything else clearly is secondary.

It doesnt take much to form this opinion either, just look at the quality of their software overall. Very inconsistent, trending towards mostly stable. Design improves which is good I guess but not what developers need.

They don't make a ton of money from independent developers and it doesn't matter anyway because most of the heavily used apps are created by Apple themselves.

mercer2• 9 years ago

I'm only just getting into Apple development, and the course is using XCode and the interface builder. Could you tell my why I should avoid it and what approach to take instead? Or is it fine or even preferable to use it in the 'learning phase'?

afro88• 9 years ago

Signed. But is there some way you can hide the email addresses on the Google Sheet?

snackai• 9 years ago

Just stop pushing apps for iProducts. When all the major apps stop adding features for a while Apple will focus on getting developers back or customers switch to Android.

eddieroger2• 9 years ago

Yup, that. Vote with your keyboards. Apple writes software with the same tools and languages - if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now. Besides, Apple has mechanisms for feedback, and it's not open letters on GitHub.

orbitur4• 9 years ago

if they considered this stuff a problem, they'd have fixed it by now

It's not good but it's workable. Which Apple accepts as a reason to focus very few resources on dev tools.

EdHominem• 9 years ago

They don't really, not ones that they won't delete when they want the problem to go away. Using corporate forums for problems is a losing game.

Yes, this letter should probably reference a bug#, but it should not be in the bug itself. And, because it's an open letter, you can go add a bug and make a PR to add it to the letter.

usaphp• 9 years ago

It's an unrealistic advice. It's easy to say it when your income is not dependent on these apps. But if you have an app in a marketplace that pays your bills, you can't afford to risk it just because you don't like dev tools...

dwightgunning• 9 years ago

It's only unrealistic if you aren't willing to adapt to changing market conditions.

doggydogs94• 9 years ago

Unfortunately, studies have shown that developing for iOS is much more profitable than developing for Android.

realusername2• 9 years ago

Unpopular advice here in HN but I honestly advice people to think twice about devoting all their career to technologies made and developed for a single company, there are some big risks there, you never know what Apple will do in the future.

valuearb6• 9 years ago

You know Apple will sell a ton of iOS devices to people who have enough money to actually buy apps, which isn't yet true of Android.

jaxondu• 9 years ago

I guess you can only do this when you're not dependent on App Store income or you're big. Tencent has a top hit mobile game 皇者荣耀 that is only Android. They can afford due to China market. Both Facebook Messenger & WeChat has no integration to iOS 10 CallKit and Siri.

budde• 9 years ago

Both Facebook Messenger & WeChat has no integration to iOS 10 CallKit and Siri

Messenger has had CallKit integration for quite a while now.

valuearb6• 9 years ago

Customers aren't switching to Android. Apple is making almost all the profits in the mobile space and it's developers are making much more than android developers.

Those are the important things, quibbling about some features in the development system is silly, esp. when Apple has poured tons of resources into Swift and done it really well.

CppCoder• 9 years ago

Since their tools and software is not improving and each version brings new bugs to enjoy, I am happy to see Microsoft support compilation of other platforms with Visual Studio. The best would be Apple stops their whole desktop lineup and focus on mobile Devices, making everything easily accessible from other platforms. Maybe the way the Macs are updated is a sign in this direction.

geophile• 9 years ago

I use XCode for the absolute minimum, and when done with it, go back to AppCode.

joe_fishfish• 9 years ago

I'm surprised I had to scroll this far down to find mention of AppCode. The ESP edition is even free.

benologist• 9 years ago

Xcode is 14 years old and Swift is a new language with no baggage that really only needs to target iOS and has new APIs for graphics and more. Seems more likely their goal would be a much-more simplified IDE for iPads that anyone can learn that can only publish to iOS.

They also stopped making computer monitors and routers last year and haven't updated most of their computers in years.

Best reason to host WWDC outside of SF this year is so it won't be a building full of Xcode developers lol!

wool_gather9• 9 years ago

Can we give this HN post a better title? This is atrociously clickbaiting. Granted it just goes to GitHub, but I would like to have at least an _inkling_ of what I'm about to read.

tedmiston• 9 years ago

Dear Apple - Xcode feature requests and bug reports (@dang)

numbsafari• 9 years ago

Yet, oddly, not a single reference to a radar report that people can try to support.

Is this a manifesto, or an attempt to get a bunch of Apple developers to put their email addresses on a list as part of someone's marketing campaign for iOS-focused dev tools?

ryanSrich• 9 years ago

Especially given the length as well. It's a small, short list of issues that users of XCode/Apple Developer tools have. Why is this #1 on the front page?

infinisil2• 9 years ago

Because it's by far one of the most annoying issues every developer has with Apple now. It's so frustrating to see the syntax highlighting and auto completion engine crash continuously as you try to figure out what line causes it just so you can rewrite it the more verbose way for the engine not to choke. You may think this has to be a beta version or a newly introduced bug, but no, these issues have been there in the official release for at least 1 1/2 years now. It got better over time, yes, but it's still far from being where it should be.

richdougherty• 9 years ago

I wish Hacker News would display both the original title and an editorialised subtitle. The first is important to capture the linked author's intent but the second is necessary for actually knowing what the link is about.

You can see how it works on the Economist where there are two "titles" for each article, a catchy one and a useful one.

e.g. From http://www.economist.com/printedition/2017-02-18:

Catchy / Useful

- Taking the low road / Scotland's economy

- Back to the desert / Britain in the Gulf

- Still cleaning up the Co-op / Ethical banking

- Errant Flynn / Turmoil in the administration

- etc

pmoriarty• 9 years ago

I've always found HN's policy of no editorializing of titles, and their insistence on original titles to be counterproductive.

Quite often an excellent article will have a really generic or vague title that few people will ever read, and a judiciously edited title will interest people enough to read it.

At that point, upvotes should determine whether the article lives or dies, as usual. If readers don't think the article is worthwhile, they don't have to upvote it.

I like your subtitle idea too. It's definitely better than insisting on keeping just the original title. Unfortunately, it will make for some practical difficulties with the layout of HN pages, which will be able to fit fewer articles in the same space, and it will also be problematic with RSS feeds and the like, which will often still display just one title, not a title and subtitle.

codr4life• 9 years ago

This is what you get for relying on proprietary software, begging on your knees for crumbles while your supplier is busy pivoting themselves out of relevancy. It's always the same game, and we never learn; as soon as the next new shiny arrives, people get in the same old lines and beg for another round of abuse.

JustSomeNobody• 9 years ago

These letters always come off as sounding immature. The open letter, the why I quit, the why I switch letters all do. It is as if you need validation for something.

concinds3• 9 years ago

That's a losing mindset.

I don't think the letter goes far enough.

If Apple is doing something you don't like, put pressure on them. A better strategy than OP's would be to go to greater lengths, like labeling Apple "anti-developer" (the same way Trump uses labels against his opponents), but too many here are too scrupulous and rationally-minded to do this. The basic fact is, the tactics you need to use in a philosophical debate and the tactics you need to use to effect change are different, and, to be effective, you need to be a bit radical and a loose-cannon. Activists who insist on being factual, moderate or respectful, lose. That includes political activists, union leaders, as well as anybody that wants to change corporate behavior or policy as is the case here.

concinds3• 9 years ago

To expand on this:

Unions are an old-school idea. But unions won't work to protect iOS developers from Apple.

So why doesn't someone build up a brand, blog, or platform as a "developer's advocate"? A Twitter account, speaking on behalf of 100k followers, has leverage influence, and power. They can represent people, organize communities discussing developers' issues, and speak out with a single voice. Why does nobody do this? It's easier for Apple to ignore 100k individuals than for them to ignore 1 organization with 100k followers. The latter will get much wider media coverage.

Social media empowered mobs, why not use that for good?

valuearb6• 9 years ago

I develop in Xcode every day, and it's usually the least of my problems. Everything this letter asked for is an I don't care for me.

AsyncAwait16• 9 years ago

I guess you're lucky, because I fight SourceKit crashes every couple of minutes.

rdiddly• 9 years ago

Everything posted on the internet is like that.

mercer2• 9 years ago

Validation is exactly why 'these letters' can be useful and even necessary. Nobody cares if a lone developer complains, but if he find enough validation (through letters or as others here say, filing a bug report), it very well might make a difference.

I'm honestly curious what makes it sound immature though. Could you elaborate?

politician• 9 years ago

@dang Can you add the repo name to Github URLs that point to repos? For example, display the title as "Dear Apple (github.com/dear-apple/dear-apple)".

I thought this was a letter from Github to Apple, but was disappointed to discover that it was a letter from some subset of the Apple developer community.

I recognize that this is sort of pulling at a thread, but since Github is so widely used, perhaps some sort of exception can be made?

LeoNatan254• 9 years ago

Apple works with their bug reporting system; instead of encouraging people to "sign" "letters" (on Google forms no less) - open a bug report at https://bugreport.apple.com, post the bug number and encourage people to duplicate it. This is the only way to move something at Apple.

chmaynard2• 9 years ago

You're joking, right?

LeoNatan254• 9 years ago

No, I am completely serious. This is how things work in big organizations.

meesterdude2• 9 years ago

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: vote with your keyboard. I do ROR web development in part because I am free of many of the constraints other devs must face on custom platforms.

If you don't like doing dev with Apple, don't do dev with Apple. Either pick better tooling (if available) or ditch the platform (if possible).

tlrobinson• 9 years ago

Can you give some examples of advantages of doing ROR development on Linux vs Mac?

michaelmrose• 9 years ago

I'm not the original commentor but a better package manager has got to be in that list.

meesterdude2• 9 years ago

doing dev in linux, the commands you run locally are the same ones you run in production. You install the same packages and control them in the same manner. I'm more comfortable in production because production is very similar to my local machine.

my dev machine is a VM, which gives me a ton of other benefits, like portability, resizability, backups, versioning, and overall stability. I can (and have) given devs my VM to get up and running immediately on a complex project, without having to do a lot of setup.

With each OSX update, usually stuff broke, needed to be reinstalled, or performed differently. With Linux, that is not the case. And with a linux VM, I can ride out host upgrades and keep plugging away with a machine i know works - or attempt an upgrade on a cloned VM and have a trivial way to backtrack if it fails.

ben_jones• 9 years ago

Not a RoR dev but I imagine his deployment environment is also linux, and many of the tools he uses likely run better on Linux (as OSS usually targets linux first). Correct me if I'm wrong but Docker for example, although I think they brought parity recently, was always easier to get going on Linux then Mac.

majewsky7• 9 years ago

Not the grandparent, but I can share one example: Our team deploys OpenStack and is developing a custom dashboard in Rails. I'm more of a backend guy, although I also do my fair share of frontend development. But I had a ticket in my sprint, just a tiny UI bug, but I was busy in the backend, so I asked a junior dev to take care of it. He cloned the repo, then proceeded to fight with rbenv and postgres and what not on his Mac for a full 2 days, until he gave up and spun up a Linux VM on OpenStack to work on the Rails app in there. Sure enough, he got up and running in there in under an hour.

Shit like this is why I do all my development in a VirtualBox with Arch Linux. While my co-workers argue about the best way to install Docker on their Macs, I just `pacman -S docker && systemctl start docker` and get on with my life.

mahyarm• 9 years ago

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 pros or mac minis.

Android devs, even though they have build tooling options with java, have other problems that make developing on their platform painful. Their simulators are bad compared to iOS, the fragmentation / lack of updates is pretty annoying and overall it's harder to deliver good equivalent android apps than it is for iOS. iOS as a software platform is actually pretty solid.

What do you use to develop on? Any specific laptop or is it a desktop?

SmileyKeith2• 9 years ago

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.

mmahemoff• 9 years ago

They should recruit the services of Miss Swift, who received a swift response from Apple when she tried this, albeit not on a Git repository. http://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902085/to-apple-lov...

hd42• 9 years ago

I made a conscious decision a while back to simply use a Linux distro (Ubuntu) with easily/cheaply-available commodity hardware for programming. Correct me if I'm wrong but other than iOS development, there isn't anything I can't do on Ubuntu with a 2010-ish laptop that I can do with a 2016-ish Macbook.

sandworm101• 9 years ago

iTunes.

Subnautica.

That's about it.

vermooten• 9 years ago

Ableton Live.

nurettin3• 9 years ago

In my personal experience, with everything else being equal, iOS development yields on average 6x more income than Android development. I haven't found a decent alternative, yet.

hd42• 9 years ago

Which is why I feel for a lot of us who don't own Macbooks, it's a major sticking point, and you get a lot of people trying out "Hackintoshes" (which I don't really have much of an opinion on).

I just wish Apple had taken the Google route and made development a lot more open, not sure what they stand to gain by keeping even iOS development a walled garden but hey it's their platform to do with as they please.

iaml• 9 years ago

For programming yes, but there are some pretty neat tools for web designers such as sketch.app and tons of prototyping software.

vacri• 9 years ago

Battery life. Battery life sucks on linux, on the same machine it's worse than Windows or OSX. Plus a 2010-era laptop didn't have good battery specs (in comparison to 2016) and that battery is now 6-7 years old.

jmkni• 9 years ago

The best way to build native iOS applications is in Visual Studio with Xamarin IMHO.

It pulls in the UI designer from XCode, and you get all of the advantages of Visual Studio which is hands-down just a better IDE than XCode.

saurik3• 9 years ago

Yeah :/... I do not understand, nor have any sympathy for, all these people who insist upon using Xcode even though we all know how bad it is... there are so many alternative toolsets you can use, including just vim+git+make, that are just so much more stable and easier to customize to get the optimal testing workflow, that to sit around and smash your head against Xcode over and over again while constantly complaining to Apple, as if that is really going to help, makes no sense at all :/.

AsyncAwait16• 9 years ago

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.

cbsmith• 9 years ago

It's kind of sad seeing developers beg for things they could build themselves if the tool was open source.

sergiotapia• 9 years ago

74 signatures is hardly a blip. I would've waited for at least 5000 signatures before publishing this.

vortico• 9 years ago

How do you get 5000 signatures without publishing it?

0xFFFF0000• 9 years ago

Normalization of Deviance - this is a not uncommon problem with organization that grow as big and are successful. I'm curious on ideas on how a company as big as Apple and it's somewhat unfocused relation with the developer community can fix this? Maybe their CEO needs to call out to Developers.

chris_wot2• 9 years ago

I really don't know what Apple gets out of keeping XCode as closed source. Why not open it up?

sebleon2• 9 years ago

There's always non-zero work involved with open-sourcing stuff. How would Apple benefit from this move?

chris_wot2• 9 years ago

In much the same way that Mozilla benefited from open sourcing Netscape's source. If they open source the code, then someone could work towards fixing the problems in this letter, for instance.

tubehouse• 9 years ago

While we're at it, maybe we can put pbxproj out of its misery and get a modern project file format and module system

AsyncAwait16• 9 years ago

There's the Swift Package Manager, it should be part of Xcode sometime soon.

camdenlock• 9 years ago

Oof. This isn't good for Apple, and I say this as a fairly big Apple fan.

From my perspective as a programmer, Apple's success has hinged entirely on the quality and innovation of their OS and dev tools. For a long time, both of these have been ahead of the game (since NeXT came to Apple).

They lose this advantage, they crumble. Mark my words! Go on, mark them.

AsyncAwait16• 9 years ago

They did develop Swift fairly recently, which is actually very nice, so it's not like they're doing nothing for developers, but the Xcode team really needs to pick thing up.

vrutberg• 9 years ago

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.

accatyyc• 9 years ago

What's worse... the refactor functionality for renaming used to be great, but when swift came along it stopped working for Objective-C as well...

dep_b• 9 years ago

the refactor functionality for renaming used to be great

Objective-C did have some basic tools. But even Eclipse was better?

You can always use AppCode, I believe it has the usual JetBrains level of refactoring. I have a copy paid and installed yet I almost never use it.

wsc981• 9 years ago

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't experience the crashes like you do. And I've never really used much refactoring tools in the past, so I guess I don't know what I am missing out on.

But you might want to consider AppCode from Jetbrains. Apparently it supports both Objective-C and Swift and it's refactoring support -at least- should be good.

bartvk2• 9 years ago

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.

makecheck2• 9 years ago

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 of Xcode.

I am very thankful that they at least had the wisdom to expose "xcodebuild", etc. as command-line tools, because I have always set up my primary build to rely only on the commands. (Even when “building” from Xcode, the build that I click runs "make" underneath with xcodebuild.) That way, I never need to be in the GUI and can work around its quirks or bugs that make it unusable, which has paid many dividends.

bartvk2• 9 years ago

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

makecheck2• 9 years ago

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").

sebleon2• 9 years ago

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. Overall, they seem like small improvements that won't really move the needle on Xcode's effectiveness... Breaking up targets to make 15sec compilation times to <1sec would be nice though

Things I do with every project: -Don't use the interface builder, easier to do all UI work programmatically - Use Pods

mileycyrusXOXO• 9 years ago

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

Dear Apple

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