Twitter launches Fabric mobile app for developers | Hacker News Reader

Twitter launches Fabric mobile app for developers

fabric.io

172 pointsgrowthhack46 comments

FYI it's built using Swift and ReactiveCocoa. They put up all the dependencies licenses in Settings so I made a list of the packages they use https://gist.github.com/ropiku/b259f35060a40eab1597.

it's the second time this week i hear about reactive cocoa.I'm starting to hate uikit with a passion, but what's so special about it ?

iOS engineer who worked on the Fabric app here :) I gave a talk about this topic at a Swift conference last year, if you wanna check that out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ent6LJDIB3I

Maybe you can answer who was the person that decided that your library was so special that you have to use a damn application to add it to a project, rather than use the same exact procedures to add a library that every other library uses? No, I don't want to use your application to add the library, and no, I don't want to have to go through the onboarding every single time I need to add it or update it.

i was really hesitant when i saw how fabric is supposed to be installed, using a mac app, but i've got to admit that it's a really pleasant experience so far.

hi, thanks for sharing. one question though : to me, the hardest and most convoluted api in cocoa isn't related to model handling but to the view : doing simple things like a tableview reload immediately followed by a scroll, or animation composition when updating data always is a problem because the way uikit elements work internaly is quite opaque ( and the fact that there are three orthogonal api to position a view don't help).

So the fact that reactive cocoa tries to hide the notion of state transition makes me wonder how you can then deal with UIKit views animations api ( collection flow animations or tableview begin updates, no to mention view controllers interactive transitions).

I've wondered if using a future based api for view animations wouldn't be a solution..

I use the ObjC ReactiveCocoa in a big project and, albeit the idea behind it is very nice the lack of debug integration is hard. No the framework issue - but lldb is not good at this kind of tracing... Even, if, to be honest the way RAC is integrated into the app is maybe the issue. The story is a bit better on Swift, because some part of the reactive ideas are "built in"(mapping, filtering), but it still can be hard to understand the flow of the app.

In case anyone else was confused, Fabric is also the name of the CSS framework from Microsoft for developing Office 365 add-ins. https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/31/introducing-office-ui-fa...

It's also the name of a Python devops tool http://www.fabfile.org/

It's also the name of a rad nightclub in London. http://www.fabriclondon.com/

Oh, memories (or lack of)

It's also the name of a JavaScript HTML5 canvas library: http://fabricjs.com/

It's also, most confusingly to me, the name of Facebook's datacenter design.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/facebook-fabric-an-innov...

It's also the name of a brand selling yarn and buttons and stuff.

https://www.fabric.com/

Super rad!

I'm an iOS Developer working on a project that uses Fabric ad I -absolutely- hate it. Maybe something is wrong with our integration, but I hate the fact that any run of the XCode build runs the Fabric Mac app and you HAVE to have it running, or else your XCode build fails. This doesn't help when your Fabric app crashes sometimes or isn't seen by Xcode for some reason, so every now and then my Chrome browser will just re-direct me to Fabric's website to download the SDK and I'll have about 20 tabs open before force quitting & relauncing the app. I like the idea of housing a lot of useful dev tools together, but hate having such a large overhead around it to do so.

I'm using Fabric for the Twitter SDK on Android, and it is just the same there.

No, I don't want an IDE plugin that rewrites (read: messes up) my config files to "help" me install things. All I need is a website to generate API keys and a package URL to add to the dependencies file.

The IDE plugin must have taken quite a bit of effort as well - not sure why and how someone at Twitter considered it to be a good idea. Perhaps a misguided attempt at "capturing developer mindshare" or the arrogant assumption that Twitter/Fabric SDKs are important parts of people's apps?

Same. Is it that hard to just ship a library via CocoaPods? Google do it, Facebook does it. But nooo, Twitter is "speshul" and they just have to be able to drop multiple folders in the root of my project.

You can totally use CocoaPods to add and update Fabric https://docs.fabric.io/ios/fabric/cocoapods.html. I'm not sure if this still requires the Fabric app but I didn't have issues with it.

Hey, I work on Fabric and we recently added some new pages that could help. If you have trouble using our plugins with your project, check out our manual onboarding process at https://fabric.io/kits/ios/crashlytics/install

I confess I never trust an animal until I can see its mouth; until I know what it eats, I can't be sure whether I'm dinner. So how does Twitter benefit from this? Is it just hoping that people will use their ad platform?

Given Twitter's fickleness toward developers in the past I'm especially wary.

This is one of my favourite quotes about pricing ever.

There is an article from wired that talks about it here http://www.wired.com/2014/10/twitter-fabric-sdk/

Getting your company ingrained into a larger part of the app market has huge benefits. Now if people aren't using the Twitter app, Twitter can track them and get data from them if they use an app that relies on Fabric.

The benefit is purely integrating themselves with larger and more diverse user bases.

Huh. That article says basically what I said: "The payoff for Twitter will come if it can get developers to embrace MoPub, its advertising product, because it gets a cut of any ad revenue."

In which case, I'd be kinda skeptical. If the other tools are mainly loss-leaders for advertising, then Twitter will be prone to limiting or canceling them when the internal politics change.

Which is exactly what they did with API access previously: they cost money to operate and weren't for the moment seen as directly beneficial, so what was previously going to be free forever was suddenly cut back.

I agree. Personally I think it's a great tool, run by a wrong company. If some other company--say Google, Microsoft, or even Amazon--acquired this I would trust it 100 times more. This is not just because of their history of betraying their own developer ecosystem but more importantly because Twitter has never known (and still doesn't know) what they want to be (which in turn was the cause of aforementioned betrayal). All that fluff on the Wired article is just a fluff. Yeah sure you collect more data and sell it to advertisers to make more money, but tomorrow they may find out that the model doesn't work so well and may ditch it.

Does anyone currently use Fabric? And if so, have you moved on to integrate MoPub Twitter-ad-network functionality? I'm curious how adoption has gone.

Wondering the same, they've burned relations with devs pretty badly over the years.

I am using Crashlytics, which got acquired and is now part of Fabric.io. For the most part, it's "use Crashlytics and pretend the rest doesn't exist".

Twitter's mobile dev tools are fantastic. Love that they have this on iOS now.

:) thanks!

Definitely a good start. I'm hoping they add Answers integration to the app quickly as that is one of the more impactful Fabric uses for us.

Hey! I am the PM on the Fabric app. Answers is a key part of our app and powers the top level charts, as well as our stability alerts. Would love to hear more about what other data from Answers would be the most helpful to you :)

Thanks for reaching out! I'm specifically looking for certain events. For example, I use Answers to send a custom event each time a user does XYZ within the app. I'd love to be able to see those charts and high level figures from the app.

How does one get Audience Insights? The FAQ says: In order to protect the privacy of users, we only show this data when it exceeds a minimum size.

Does anyone know what the minimum size is?

https://fabric.io/kits/android/answers

Not to be confused with...

Fabric - A platform for secure distributed computation and storage https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/fabric-sosp09.pdf

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/fabric/

From the place that brought us practical, cutting-edge security like JIF, SIF, SWIFT, and CIVITAS. Link below gets you to most of that:

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/

Then there's this Fabric which probably has different security properties. ;)

I beta tested the mobile app, great tool for keeping an eye on stats/crahes. Highly recommended.

Thanks for all your help :)

For someone who doesn't do mobile development, what is this and how's Twitter involved?

Fabric is Twitter's mobile SDK and platform.

I thought Twitter banned external applications years ago. Or is this some SDK they use for their own mobile apps and have now shared with the developer community?

Still not sure what it does - provides monitoring, analytics, and a nice UI for cocoapods?

Doesn't seem like you can look at issues? There's an activity section that shows comments, and from there you can look at the related issue, but not view all of them.

This is great. I don't have to frequently opened Fabric.io page to see the stats anymore.

Follows the launch of the Flurry App last week: http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/18/yahoos-flurry-unveils-rede...

Is this for statistical debugging as well?

Good to Know that. Thanks!

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