Comment by taraharris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taraharris | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I poured a year of my life into an app written in Swift for iOS before I ran into a brick wall trying to figure out how to use Apple's stuff to encode frames into an mp4 video. It's a pretty slick thing that uses low-level APIs like Metal, Core Audio, CFRunLoop, etc. https://github.com/realtaraharris/arezzo

I accidentally spilled a latte into my M1 MacBook Pro, which cost me $2000 to buy. At that point I decided to just forget about Apple and their entire ecosystem because it is designed to abuse everyone. $99/year, no source code for any of the stuff I'm struggling with, no access to any of the people that can answer questions about the black boxes? No thanks.

What am I doing now? I am rocking a ThinkPad T440p from 2012, which only cost me $285. I spend all my time writing apps in C++ for Haiku OS and I have never been happier. Instead of pouring more of your life and energy into a corporation that has labored tirelessly to destroy your freedom, please consider contributing to the commons instead.

There is an argument that making and publishing free macOS apps is a lot more "contributing to the commons" than writing C++ for Haiku that will be used by 100 people maximum.

I put up all my code. I wonder why I'm getting downvoted?

And how is Apple ever going to change if no one makes a credible competing open solution? I believe Haiku is going to get a lot more popular with creators. Unlike Linux, no corporations control it, and it's also more Mac-like than the thing the Mac has become.

One of the biggest improvements coming to Haiku is hardware-accelerated Vulkan graphics. I am so excited for this! https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/vulkan-lavapipe-software-rend...

You could have been building apps on a cheap Mac Mini; even cheaper if bought used. You (like me) choose to buy an expensive MacBook Pro.

Back when I developed iOS apps, I experienced a lot of pain (especially when everything was covered by an NDA). But I find it pretty bizarre to abandon an ecosystem because you spilled coffee on your expensive device.

The coffee damage was the last straw. I was fighting the language (Swift), the lack of documentation (WWDC videos are not a substitute for documentation), and the general lack of any attention paid toward the needs of small app developers.

I spent a lot of time building my own stuff to render pen strokes because Apple refused to supply an API that gives access to the underlying stroke data. SwiftUI was similarly crippled: developers have no access to internals, which made it impossible to write tests that would inspect the view hierarchy. I understand that Apple wants to retain flexibility with their APIs, but they took away far too much. I have no interest in an expensive platform that treats me like a child by locking me out of everything I actually need from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com