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I swear to the gods of Cupertino I am not trying to start a flame war, but -- Apple fanboy though I am -- I recently started taking a look at Flutter and was ab

I swear to the gods of Cupertino I am not trying to start a flame war, but -- Apple fanboy though I am -- I recently started taking a look at Flutter and was absolutely floored by the difference in the state of documentation between the two. Leave aside all talk of the viability of cross-platform development. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about the developer experience of working with the documentation. At my work there are two of us programming in Objective-C for our iOS apps. We lament that Apple seems to hate its developers. In my most dejected moments, I think of getting out of mobile development entirely, or diving deep into Flutter and getting a job doing that.

bbreier 6y ago
You are totally correct- and the worst part is, it hasn't always been this way. I've been doing iOS and Android development since the days of iOS6, and for the majority of that time, I've found iOS documentation to be significantly more useful than Android's. Recently it has flipped, and it has truly come to a head in the release of iOS14, where many documentation pages still mark live APIs as Beta software. It's so frustrating, and it is so much worse knowing that the developer experience used to be so much better.
jfim 6y ago
> We lament that Apple seems to hate its developers. The joke back then (well over fifteen years ago, pre-iPhone) was that Apple is very user friendly, but that developers aren't users. It's interesting to see that that hasn't changed since then though, you'd think that with all the iPhone money they would've invested a bit of it in developer documentation. Out of curiosity, how's XCode these days? Back then it was a rather scrappy team, but it still beat Metrowerks' CodeWarrior.
- mariodiana 6y ago
  Well, I like Xcode. But Apple keeps making changes with every version, and some of those changes seem to be for no good reason. You get a kind of muscle memory after a while, from using your IDE. When a button is moved or removed, or a menu is changed, it adds friction to your day. Also, I got bit with this thing they did for the new ARM chips in the Macs. Our script to build a fat binary (device and simulator) for a in-house framework broke, and we couldn't add the simulator anymore. That took a lot of tracking down to fix. It's constant aggravation like that that wears on a person. Last year, we had the 3rd-party mapping software we use break, because -- as best as I can tell -- Apple changed the implementation for drawing. That was a pain in the ass to track down, too. I wasn't kidding when I wrote that I was a fanboy. But the other day I was thinking of Steve Ballmer, years ago, running around on stage like a sweaty lunatic -- "Developers, developers, developers!" I mocked him then. Now I'm sorry I did.

bbreier 6y ago

You are totally correct- and the worst part is, it hasn't always been this way. I've been doing iOS and Android development since the days of iOS6, and for the majority of that time, I've found iOS documentation to be significantly more useful than Android's. Recently it has flipped, and it has truly come to a head in the release of iOS14, where many documentation pages still mark live APIs as Beta software. It's so frustrating, and it is so much worse knowing that the developer experience used to be so much better.

jfim 6y ago

> We lament that Apple seems to hate its developers. The joke back then (well over fifteen years ago, pre-iPhone) was that Apple is very user friendly, but that developers aren't users. It's interesting to see that that hasn't changed since then though, you'd think that with all the iPhone money they would've invested a bit of it in developer documentation. Out of curiosity, how's XCode these days? Back then it was a rather scrappy team, but it still beat Metrowerks' CodeWarrior.

mariodiana 6y ago
Well, I like Xcode. But Apple keeps making changes with every version, and some of those changes seem to be for no good reason. You get a kind of muscle memory after a while, from using your IDE. When a button is moved or removed, or a menu is changed, it adds friction to your day. Also, I got bit with this thing they did for the new ARM chips in the Macs. Our script to build a fat binary (device and simulator) for a in-house framework broke, and we couldn't add the simulator anymore. That took a lot of tracking down to fix. It's constant aggravation like that that wears on a person. Last year, we had the 3rd-party mapping software we use break, because -- as best as I can tell -- Apple changed the implementation for drawing. That was a pain in the ass to track down, too. I wasn't kidding when I wrote that I was a fanboy. But the other day I was thinking of Steve Ballmer, years ago, running around on stage like a sweaty lunatic -- "Developers, developers, developers!" I mocked him then. Now I'm sorry I did.