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The move toward integrated, worry-free, easy to use products for consumers is a good thing. In order to keep such things being developed, Apple will need to pr
by msutherl 14y ago
The move toward integrated, worry-free, easy to use products for consumers is a good thing.
In order to keep such things being developed, Apple will need to provide an adequate development environment.
Thus, Apple has an incentive to keep both worlds alive.
The only thing to worry about is that, because they only have the incentive to keep their development ecosystem merely adequate, we won't see much improvement in developer tools – just slow, linear change. Fortunately Xcode has competition from Visual Studio to keep it going, but whether they will continue offering a competitive BSD development environment is a legitimate question. Most Linux distributions already provide a better experience in this respect, having package managers and user communities and such.
Ultimately, I find the attitude you present here to be a bit overreactive. Lion and Mountain Lion introduce a number of iOS-like features and integration, but as far as I know, the developer tools were not crippled in any way, only improved, a bit.
- X-Istence 14y agoApple decoupled the compiler/command line tools from Xcode specifically so that projects like MacPorts and HomeBrew can continue to exist on the Apple platform. There was a post on this a while back on HN! I absolutely love HomeBrew, it is modeled a lot after MacPorts/FreeBSD ports tree and provides a way to compile packages from source (some are even hosted as bottles... no compiling required). It is an excellent tool to download and install libraries and do development with. Will Apple keep all those tools around? Only time will tell, but so far it is looking good and I don't think it is in their best interest to move away from it.
- msutherl 14y agoI like Homebrew to, but compare it to Arch Linux's package manager and user community and you'll see that it's far from competitive.
- radley 14y agoIf you did anything with media you'd have a different view.
- msutherl 14y agoI'm actually a designer and musician. Apple's recent media production tools are excellent. Logic, FCP, iMovie, Keynote, Quartz Composer, etc. are best in class. The move toward iOS influenced software is a net win IMO. Fewer details to worry about, more fluid interfaces, and command line utilities from the Linux community aren't going anywhere.
- danieldk 14y agoI used Aperture and Keynote a lot, and I liked them. But Aperture has gone down the drain - there were lots of regressions of Raw support for various camera's (search the discussions forum for plenty of examples). Also, it has become slow, the interface regularly freezes, and feature-wise the gap with Lightroom widened (e.g. denoising in Lightroom is far and far better). Since Apple didn't seem to care, I switched to Lightroom. Keynote was and is a great presentation application. But PowerPoint 2008 surpassed it, PowerPoint 2011 even more. The only major feature missing from Powerpoint is magic move. Other than that, PowerPoint has better table and chart tools, better graphics, and at the very least adjusts font sizes automatically when necessary.
- DeepDuh 14y agoI actually think that besides performance issues on older macbooks, Xcode has developed quite nicely in the recent updates. At least for obj-C it's a pretty productive and powerful environment. I definitely prefer it over VS2008 and lower, haven't yet had the chance to work with the newer VS versions though. I like eclipse too, however the panel management in XCode is so much easier - I don't see anymore why you would need a fully controllable widget-docking space that you have to micromanage until everything works the way you want it.