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I wasn't sure how to answer this yesterday. I never experienced Apple's "better days" as I've been developing in Windows for the last 20 years. Apple's current

by chaz72 11y ago

I wasn't sure how to answer this yesterday. I never experienced Apple's "better days" as I've been developing in Windows for the last 20 years. Apple's current days, well, they seem pretty good for my needs, but I wasn't paying attention during the times you're talking about. I suppose when I need real control I would look to, say, OpenBSD instead, which I prefer to use remotely from a very pleasant and very predictable - but not super-powerful - Apple machine. Our needs, I'm sure, are not the same.

mikeash 11y ago
I like having an intuitive, easy-to-use WIMP system for my common tasks. I don't want to read my e-mail in a terminal window, or use some X11 chat app with a programmer-designed UI. I also like being able to get a terminal window to fiddle with the guts when I want it. Some tasks are better suited for that interface, and some powerful tools are only available there. During those better days, Apple fully embraced the UNIX nature of their OS, without compromising the usability of their GUI layer. They got Mac OS X certified by The Open Group. They started opensource.apple.com and distributed enough of the OS's guts that you could actually get a full Darwin OS up and running entirely from source, even if the result wasn't super useful. They gave out a full suite of developer tools free of charge that you could use to build powerful apps for the system, and were in fact the exact same tools that Apple used. Then iOS came. No more open source, except the absolute bare minimum they're required to distribute for open source licenses. (Their open source archive for iOS 9.0 contains a whole six packages, of which five are various parts of WebKit.) No more visibility into anything. Everything runs in a sandbox that you can't bypass by any means except finding a security vulnerability. The developer tools are still free, but if you want to actually use them to ship anything, or even run anything on real hardware locally, you have to pay and agree to their terms. (The "run anything on real hardware locally" bit has changed with Xcode 7, which is what f.lux was briefly taking advantage of, but this is new as of just a couple of months ago.) Apple suddenly wants to play gatekeeper to everything; if you want to ship apps to your customers, you have to first let Apple review and approve it, and they'll reject you if you don't follow their rules. The Mac retains much of what was great about it before, but it's slowly drifting the same way.
- chaz72 11y ago
  As far as free developer tools, I again don't know what is different from before. I hear you, but haven't experienced the nirvana you describe: I've been on Windows, where development tools have very often been free to play with and require payment to use them for real work. The way I look at it is that Apple's gatekeeper role is appropriately minimal on OS X and appropriately strict on iOS, and for my part I trust the twain will never meet because of exactly that "general purpose computer" difference, but you have added some thought-provoking perspective.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Before, the process for shipping an app looked like: 1. Obtain Xcode, either as a free download, or from your OS install media. (Apple just shipped Xcode along with the OS for a while.) 2. Develop your app. 3. Distribute your app directly to customers. With iOS, the process for shipping an app looks like: 1. Obtain Xcode as a free download. 2. Start developing app. 3. Realize you need to test on real hardware at some point. Before Xcode 7, testing on real hardware, even your own, cost $99/year. With Xcode 7 you can do it for free, as long as you get an account and have Xcode fetch the certificates for you. 4. Submit your app to Apple for distribution on the store. If you did step 3 without paying, then you need to pay your $99/year here. 5. Wait a week or so for Apple to review your app. With luck, they'll approve it. If they find something they don't like, they'll reject it and you get to go back and repeat this process until you appease them. With the Mac today, you have a few choices. You can go through the App Store, where the process looks much like the iOS process, except you don't have to jump through any hoops to test on your own hardware. You can go through Developer ID, where the process looks like the old Mac way, except you pay $99/year to have a signing certificate. Or you can keep doing things the old way, at no cost, but most of your users will get scary, scary warnings when they try to run your software. The thing is that it's not about the tools being paid, but the distribution being paid and restricted. I can completely understand paying for developer tools. Until they went crazy, I was happy to pay JetBrains for some of their tools, for example. Your Windows tools required payment to use them for real work, and that's fine. But if you didn't want to, you could have used mingw or something like that, and done everything for free and without restrictions. This option is simply not available on iOS, and is being slowly ratcheted down on the Mac.

by chaz72 11y ago

mikeash 11y ago

I like having an intuitive, easy-to-use WIMP system for my common tasks. I don't want to read my e-mail in a terminal window, or use some X11 chat app with a programmer-designed UI. I also like being able to get a terminal window to fiddle with the guts when I want it. Some tasks are better suited for that interface, and some powerful tools are only available there. During those better days, Apple fully embraced the UNIX nature of their OS, without compromising the usability of their GUI layer. They got Mac OS X certified by The Open Group. They started opensource.apple.com and distributed enough of the OS's guts that you could actually get a full Darwin OS up and running entirely from source, even if the result wasn't super useful. They gave out a full suite of developer tools free of charge that you could use to build powerful apps for the system, and were in fact the exact same tools that Apple used. Then iOS came. No more open source, except the absolute bare minimum they're required to distribute for open source licenses. (Their open source archive for iOS 9.0 contains a whole six packages, of which five are various parts of WebKit.) No more visibility into anything. Everything runs in a sandbox that you can't bypass by any means except finding a security vulnerability. The developer tools are still free, but if you want to actually use them to ship anything, or even run anything on real hardware locally, you have to pay and agree to their terms. (The "run anything on real hardware locally" bit has changed with Xcode 7, which is what f.lux was briefly taking advantage of, but this is new as of just a couple of months ago.) Apple suddenly wants to play gatekeeper to everything; if you want to ship apps to your customers, you have to first let Apple review and approve it, and they'll reject you if you don't follow their rules. The Mac retains much of what was great about it before, but it's slowly drifting the same way.

chaz72 11y ago
As far as free developer tools, I again don't know what is different from before. I hear you, but haven't experienced the nirvana you describe: I've been on Windows, where development tools have very often been free to play with and require payment to use them for real work. The way I look at it is that Apple's gatekeeper role is appropriately minimal on OS X and appropriately strict on iOS, and for my part I trust the twain will never meet because of exactly that "general purpose computer" difference, but you have added some thought-provoking perspective.
- mikeash 11y ago
  Before, the process for shipping an app looked like: 1. Obtain Xcode, either as a free download, or from your OS install media. (Apple just shipped Xcode along with the OS for a while.) 2. Develop your app. 3. Distribute your app directly to customers. With iOS, the process for shipping an app looks like: 1. Obtain Xcode as a free download. 2. Start developing app. 3. Realize you need to test on real hardware at some point. Before Xcode 7, testing on real hardware, even your own, cost $99/year. With Xcode 7 you can do it for free, as long as you get an account and have Xcode fetch the certificates for you. 4. Submit your app to Apple for distribution on the store. If you did step 3 without paying, then you need to pay your $99/year here. 5. Wait a week or so for Apple to review your app. With luck, they'll approve it. If they find something they don't like, they'll reject it and you get to go back and repeat this process until you appease them. With the Mac today, you have a few choices. You can go through the App Store, where the process looks much like the iOS process, except you don't have to jump through any hoops to test on your own hardware. You can go through Developer ID, where the process looks like the old Mac way, except you pay $99/year to have a signing certificate. Or you can keep doing things the old way, at no cost, but most of your users will get scary, scary warnings when they try to run your software. The thing is that it's not about the tools being paid, but the distribution being paid and restricted. I can completely understand paying for developer tools. Until they went crazy, I was happy to pay JetBrains for some of their tools, for example. Your Windows tools required payment to use them for real work, and that's fine. But if you didn't want to, you could have used mingw or something like that, and done everything for free and without restrictions. This option is simply not available on iOS, and is being slowly ratcheted down on the Mac.