RWW Hacker Poll: Is OSX Still Developer Friendly?
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
drinks 6 energy drinks a day, has 5 pages of iPhone games
So many people just seem to want to bitch about Apple because it makes them feel better about their technology choices.
If you're not motivated or resourceful enough to scrounge up a few bucks for an iTunes gift card, I doubt BitTorrent is a totally foreign concept to you anyway.
* Download a large 4.5GB file
* Spend a decent amount of time installing XCode
* Sacrifice 15GB of disk space to an app they likely won't use
I upgraded to a 256 GB SSD in January. This means that every GB counts on my disk. I never launch XCode. There are a couple of utilities included that are useful, but I literally never use any of the XCode tools, and I have no intention of developing an iOS application.
Running DaisyDisk against my /Developer folder shows that 8.4 GB of the space is occupied by "Platforms", which contains iOS related platform and simulator files.
For developers who don't develop specifically for OS X/iOS, there is a lot of baggage here. I'd still happily pay the $5 if I could get a trimmed down "XCode Express" install that didn't include any of the platform target stuff. As it stands now, I'm afraid to delete it because I don't want to go through the hassle of downloading and reinstalling (however you do that) such a large package.
What's more, so far App Store software updates have been free. So even if you paid $5, it may be the last $5 until Xcode 5, if ever.
If you've ever had to build GCC from scratch, you'd be willing to pay $5 just for that. And Apple gives you an IDE and by far the best interface to performance tools I have ever seen (Instruments).
Honestly I think they should just include an xcode license with any of the Pro models.
This might well change but we don’t yet know.
The point is Mac still blends a good combination of Unix terminal, nice GUI, and less hardware problems. I have to admit though, it really depends on what type of developer you are.
I do web, so I mostly stay in the browser and the app (RoR/Django/etc), so not many issues. Perhaps other type of developers need to use Linux or Windows for their specific environments.
It's a bit easier over my DSL, but they just started metering that really tightly as well.
There's no such thing as one set of requirements for all developers that OS X either meets or doesn't. For a specific developer, it either met or didn't meet your needs prior to this, and nothing should have changed because of this.