This is somewhat strange pricing - it seems ridiculously cheap if they're trying to make significant profits off of it, but pricey enough to prevent tinkerers who don't really know about coding but feel like trying it from getting a start in xcode.
> it is due to some bizarro accounting rule. xcode4 is sufficiently new that it doesn't count as a free update or something. paid adc members should get free access. yeah, clearly we're trying to monetize it... doh
Same story as with FaceTime except worse. Apple's accountants seem very very weird.
That is certainly the case with Facetime and the 802.11n update.
The real amusement to the law degrees, I'm sure, is that Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't really do anything and it's just a scare word, like Communism.
/s
All kidding aside, just look at that lead-in on Wikipedia. I needed a shot at the end of that, and that's not even a section. I'm curious why this would be the case myself, and I'm still looking, a couple hours later. On a Wednesday night.
If this is all Apple is doing, expect Xcode 4 to be included in Lion. If it's not, they are simply charging for it now.
When you see token $.99 charges for things that should be free, this is the reason Apple does it. It's how they interpret the rules -- and, they are probably right. Since, there is no maintenance yearly charge, they can't keep delivering value to you for the initial price without spreading that money over the lifetime of the value delivery.
$5 is nearly as bad as $50: the difference between charging nothing and something is way higher than the difference between charging something and something higher.
Is it to defray hosting costs for a 4 gig app on the App Store? Then why host it for free before on their site?
For me, I actually had to get a Mac before I could even think about writing my first iPhone app. Then I found out my 10.5 Mac Mini wasn't compatible with XCode, so I had to fork over a bit to pick up Leopard. Then comes the $100 or whatever for a developer license so you can build on phone.
After all that, $5 doesn't sound so bad.
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5092/5513444433_fd70db527e.jp...
I actually had to get a computer before writing my first apps, but I could get whatever computer I liked. I never had one that was incompatible with these tools. Then came the $0 for a Python/Java/Perl developer license, so I could build on any server I liked.
After all that, $5 plus hooking myself up to Apple's death by a thousand cuts slow drip sounds pretty bad.
I remember when I first switched to OS X as a student. The free developer tools were very impressive to me. I remember telling people "See, this is how it should be done. You shouldn't charge people to develop for your operating system. More applications for your system only helps you sell!"
I'm sure the free developer tools were also a factor in Microsoft offering a free version of VS. Now, it seems, as Apple is becoming more and more popular, they are moving more and more in the direction that MS did in their hay day.
It appears that a once fairly open system is becoming slowly more and more closed. I sincerely hope that the cynic in me is wrong.
They are trying to drive developers to use the App Store? Sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth.
They are trying to kill off OSX hobbyist experimentation in favor of iOS? I think I'm getting warmer.
Maybe they're trying to set the precedent that you can charge money for utilities in the app store.
I'm not happy about that, but it's seems ever more likely since Linux is getting a lot more usable and the Apple tax is getting a lot more expensive.
Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers.
They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5. That's not a death blow to hobbyists, that's maybe one of the cheapest hobbies on the planet.
Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why.
It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.
They just plowed thousands of engineering man-hours into significantly overhauling both the infrastructure (huge amount of work around LLVM) and interface of Xcode for the Xcode 4 release, addressing a substantive number of long-standing complaints along the way. This release is by far the biggest overhaul of the product in the last decade. All of those engineers cost a lot of money. They aren't working on this out of charity. That's why.
I simply do not understand why people are hung up on an IDE that is the product of thousands of engineering man-hours costing as much as a single foot long sandwich slapped together by a bored teenager in 60 seconds.
I think people are objecting because they themselves happened into programming as a passion and career - I know I did. They found some tool, probably for free (QBASIC for me) that got their feet wet initially, and that's how they got their start. A beginner who is neither sure nor convinced that programming is a good thing to pursue is unlikely to spend even a footlong's worth of money on it, and we've lost yet more potential future engineers.
Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free. Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free. When the status quo of the industry is free tools (and the few that are for-pay are getting cheaper every year), one can question why Apple is the odd man out in a sudden reversal.
Sure. And Xcode would probably scare them off anyways, because it's decidedly not set up to be friendly to beginners. This is a non-issue. Beginning programmers on the Mac should under no circumstances go grab Xcode unless they want to feel utterly bewildered.
The $5 charge is utterly beside the point, here. One wonders how you imagine anyone ever gets into a hobby with more than a $5 barrier to entry.
> Also, the fact that Apple has poured a significant investment into building these tools says nothing - they've been pouring a significant investment into their dev tools for years and offered it for free.
They seem to have drastically increased the amount of effort they're putting into it, probably because of the increased iOS dev audience. That extra effort probably justifies the minor $5 price increase.
> Their competitors have also poured enormous sums into dev tools that are available for free.
Which competitors would those be? Microsoft isn't giving their professional tools away for free, just a drastically cut down starter edition. Sun plowed a ton of cash into NetBeans, but following their financial lead seems ill-advised.
Do you mean Eclipse, NetBeans or any other modern, professional IDE is crippled?
This is a death blow to Apple hobbyists who live in parts of the world that don't have access to the Mac App Store.
All three of them, most probably.
And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice.
As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
I have't tried the intelliJ IDEA series (pyCharm, phpStorm, etc) but based on the scala plugin, I betcha they're quite solid as well.
http://devnet.jetbrains.net/thread/287853;jsessionid=521D68C...
XCode Pricing: kinda like pinboard.in at $9.26, just enough to deter somebody from buying, for whatever reason.
There is a reason why Eclipse, NetBeans, Emacs, Eric and so many others compare favorably, if not blow their competition out of the water: it's because some of the developers who use them give back and improve them.
If you just need a compiler, install the development tools on the OS X install DVD that came with your computer. If you want to be doing software development for Mac or iOS, the developer fee is worth it for the documentation and prerelease software.
Apple's leveraging the work they put into building the App Store infrastructure (and business deals with credit card companies) to do something a lot of other companies couldn't (make something that was free cost something again without too much fallout).
I mean seriously, you're going to spend at least 10 times that amount on programming books, or thousands of times that amount on college classes.
If all you want is to learn programming, there are free alternatives to XCode.
How much have you spent on iPhone apps so far? I have friends who spent several hundred €, one Happy Meal at a time.
Oh wait, you can.
In any case, you need a Mac, and it's gonna cost you.
Getting the proprietary parts for five dollars is certainly not a bad deal. But one has to wonder... why? Is it to cover download costs?
The potential pool of software developers isn't (and shouldn't be) limited to the US and Europe.
This is a step in the wrong direction.
This might be to make that harder and to thwart software piracy up to a point.
Install Instructions for Protools 9
• 0. Make sure you have gdb installed. Test by typing “gdb test” into terminal.
1. Uninstall any versions of Pro Tools that are already installed
2. Install Pro Tools, Complete Production Tookit 2 and HEAT (in the optional installers folder) from the full iso
3. Use the [K]‘ed installer to overwrite the necessary files
4. Launch Pro Tools from the loader and everything should work as expected
This crack requires Xcode to be installed. Xcode can be downloaded for free from developer.apple.com. Also, DO NOT REPLACE THE LOADER. The loader included with the new release (loader version 1.1) was designed for this release as a background process which is what people wanted. It also now breaks on ptrace so there is no need for the anti-ptrace extension posted later in the topic. To use Pro Tools launch the loader and wait a few seconds. Nothing will show while it does some work in the background and then it will launch the main Pro Tools app a few seconds later. Big thanks to unsanity, simblism, and XVX for their respective contributions.