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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

>Twenty years of using Macs conditioned me to think, “well, that’s the Apple way.” It’s such a small price to pay for such a user-friendly device.

Another Stockholm-syndrome patient cured! I recently took over a prototype project targeting the Mac. XCode is garbage. OS X itself actively works against improving your workflow. It's Apple's way or, well Apple's way. iOS is built to keep the user in a padded cell (aka Walled Garden) and OS X is moving in that direction.

Use Cyanogenmod. Be Free. Google Now is amazing by the way. Unfortunately I had to turn my google search history back on, but it was worth it.

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> XCode is garbage

Once in a while I see an argument like this and I wonder - does this guy really do mobile development? For the better part of last year I was into Android development, in Eclipse. If XCode is garbage, I don't know what Eclipse is. Resource-hogging, buggy monster with seven heads with shit on them, probably. I could list annoyances of Eclipse that got me for hours. On the other hand, in last month I jumped in to iOS development. And XCode was a breeze. Sure, it has its own gotchas, but many of them either have fixes or workarounds, and the start/build speed is just fantastic, compared to slow Eclipse and Android emulator.

and I wonder - does this guy really do mobile development?

...

in last month I jumped in to iOS development. And XCode was a breeze

Something's off here. You're questioning veteran iOS developers' abilities after having started iOS development a month ago?

I used to do iOS development and still keep in touch with several iOS developers of apps everyone has on their devices. The best I can get out of any of them is "XCode is okay", but more often than not, there's expletives and scathing remarks, especially since XCode 4, when they "iTunesified" the interface.

You just started iOS development, which means you're still getting the hang of things and the workflows. Give it a little time before you call people out.

That said, I can't say that Android development is much better, although I've just gone through the tutorials on developer.android.com for the heck of it.

IntelliJ Idea is vastly superior and when developing on Android it is very easy to use Idea as first class IDE.

Compare this with iOS development. IntelliJ's AppCoder is nice, but because quite a lot of things can be only done from XCode, Appcoder is second class citizen. Let me re-iterate, if you haven't used Appcoder, it is a vastly superior IDE compared to Xcode any given day.

Well there's your problem. Use Intellij IDEA. It makes every other IDE you may have used look like garbage.

Also, the ADT bundle that Google now has works way better than downloading Eclipse and installing the plugin.

Although, I agree with you, I think Xcode works quite well. But, there are improvements that could be made...

As a matter of fact I tried IntelliJ. It was nice, but it had it's own set of problems. Two of them: - compilation times of bigger Android projects sucks hard. It's just not fast enough. I even feel that using word fast in this sentence is a misuse. - one of the selling points of the IDE (from their website) is Jabber integration for team coding. Tried for several hours, didn't get it to work. Even filed a ticked for it, which is still unsolved (the package is unmantained for years).

>does this guy really do mobile development?

Nope. Like my comment said: "Targeting the Mac"

So why do you feel qualified to comment?

I can't tell if you're joking? XCode is not exclusive to mobile development.

File -> New -> Project

See all that fun stuff under listed under OS X?

Wow. I may have misread your initial diatribe, but the inference was that you don't use it often. But hey, being rude is the best way to correct me.

> So why do you feel qualified to comment?

How dare you try to call someone out for being rude when your first comment to them was that.

How dare I? Who are you!? My question was a legitimate one, I was being serious, not fucking fatuous like the OP. As I explained, the post came across to me as if the OP didn't have much day to day experience using Xcode, hence the question. The OP initial comment was aggressive to begin with! How dare I? Wow.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that because you're new here[0], you haven't read the comment guidelines. I suggest you do, and modify your behavior accordingly.

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.[1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_Simon [1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Get over yourself. 1) I have been reading this site for a while, certainly since 2010 and have read the guidelines. Since your account is only 150 days older than mine, it hardly puts you in a position to lord it over me. 2) I absolutely would say everything that I have said to your faces. 3) I haven't been uncivil, my 'crime' is at worst misreading a post, however I don't think I did. Rereading the OP, he was looking to troll and I fed him. My bad, I will be more diligent in the future. You, on the other hand attacked me. Would you be so damned patronising to my face? Reading your history (how utterly childish) it looks like you are generally a bit of a patronising know it all. I won't respond further. Just waiting in anticipation for you to attack my spelling, grammar or punctuation, which seems to be the modus operandi of a HN troll.

Amused to see you going through the same process with other people as you did with me: ie you post silly statements in sloppy language, act all hurt when people point out your mistakes, and finally accuse them of being trolls (using yet another word you don't understand).

I really don't think you are properly equipped to debate things on HN. You should go back to Digg. It's your natural home.

Never worked with XCode, but I can't understand why anyone would like Eclipse. It might be powerful but it's also buggy, slow and complicated.

Besides that I'll just repeat what was that here and what's said in pretty much every discussion mentioning Eclipse: IntelliJ Idea.

Intellij is better than Eclipse and XCode.

I do a lot of iOS development in Xcode, and a lot of Android development in IntelliJ. The IDE experience is vastly better in IntelliJ. Xcode is garbage. Maybe Eclipse is worse, I don't know, it's been a long time since I used it, but that's irrelevant. That something is even more garbage doesn't somehow make Xcode better.

The only thing I really miss about iOS development when doing Android work is not having blocks in Java, and it's still generally Good Enough if I squint and pretend that anonymous inner classes are equivalent. (IntelliJ helps to reinforce this illusion with automatic folding, too.) The iOS simulator is a bit better, but I don't generally find myself really missing it, especially since developing on a real device is much better in Android land.

Xcode is way behind the times in terms of automated assistance while coding. Every time I have to stop in the middle of writing some code to go up and add an #import that the IDE could easily add itself, I hate Xcode a little more. And that's really the tip of the iceberg.

I'm really hoping that AppCode 2.0 can give me the IntelliJ experience for iOS coding, because Xcode 4 has been a disaster from day one and is not getting better fast enough.

Your opinion may differ, but please don't act like disagreement can only be due to ignorance.

I've been meaning to ask for a long time. Are you this http://www.mikeash.com Mike Ash?

The very same. I hesitate to ask, but, is that good or bad? :)

Good, but to be fair to every other Mike Ashes, they aren't bad either. I just never know of them :)

Thank you for the time and effort put into NSBlog. It's awesome. Had no idea you write for Android now. Will there ever be an NSBlog equivalent for Android?

Thanks, glad you like the blog. I've been doing Android fairly heavily (roughly 50% of the time) for a year or two now. As for NSBlog-Android, only if and when I ever get to the point where I feel like I understand it as well as I understand the Mac/iOS side of things. Which will probably be a while.

IDEs are an odd thing thou, some people can't stand my favourite VS1012+R#. I sort of understand why, I am willing to pay the price for the 2GB of RAM it just swallows, I have an SSD so it isn't dog slow to load.

Which is why whenever I see the XCode vs Eclipse talk I'm left with the gut wrenching feeling of hating them both.

You should try another IDE. Eclipse isn't maintained by Google. Xamarin Studio is very nice. http://xamarin.com/studio

Xamarin Studio isn't maintained by Google either...

Also it'd be nice if the IDE supported the platform languages (Java and ObjC).

qt 5.1 comes out this month, you can write qml interfaces targeting both ios and Android, and qt creator isn't garbage!

No, please don't. Android app design is already a gigantic clusterfuck where half of the apps still look like they're stuck in 1995 and using a non-native UI toolkit isn't going to help.

And this is coming from a huge fan of Qt and a KDE user.

The work put into LLVM and Clang is great. But Xcode (the UI frontend) is really one of the worst Apple product.

Is there a better C++ IDE than XCode? Serious question, works well with cmake and all the other tooling people use with amazing autocompletion (given how hard parsing C++ is)

Can you give examples of good stuff you've seen from Google Now that have been a real help to you? Stuff that's genuinely useful rather than just "look at that" cool.

EDIT: So far I'm seeing a lot of reasons why Apple wanted to get into maps. A lot of the value add here seems to be navigation related.

If I search for an address on google my phone will know and tell me how long it will be to get there and offers to bring up driving instructions.

I searched for sports teams so my now cards will show up with scheduled games as well as previous scores, but only immediately before and after games. It's not permanent clutter.

Handles package tracking. No more logging into amazon and going through my cart to find a tracking number, or digging in email.

It does meetings notifications based on how soon I need to leave to get to the location. Previously I'd have to find out how far away the location was and set a reminder for that amount of time and leave enough time for traffic. Not having to worry about an accident or construction is spectacular. This is really my killer feature.

Google Now does all of that automatically.

Google Now will remind you when to leave in order to arrive to an appointment on time (as long as you are using Google Calendar) taking into account the local traffic situation. This one helped me already a few times not to miss a meeting.

I actually had an OpenTable confirmation in my gmail that wasn't added to my calendar, and Google Now still alerted me when it was time to leave. That one creeped me out until I realized it had scanned my email (still kinda creeps me out).

Several people have mentioned Google Now mining their email for flight reservations. I've seen that, but recently saw a new twist: it wasn't me flying but some friends coming to visit me who had forwarded me their details. Google Now put up a card for their flight, and labelled it with them as passengers, meaning it had distinguished between a reservation for me and one for them. Then the next day, along with the weather card for my town, it showed one for theirs as well. It had recognized that I picked them up.

Another story, this time where I was the one visiting: after spending a night at friends, Google Now added a card for directions and driving time back to what it called "Unknown location." From my location info, it surmised I was staying at that place and was offering directions back. Being in a foreign city, this was actually very useful.

Creepy, yes, but useful.

One thing I thought was awesome recently, had a business trip, Google Now knew about my flight information and popped up a notification telling me when to leave to be at the airport an hour early - even offered to navigate!

Any idea on how it knew? An entry you'd made in your calendar? Scanning your e-mail?

I'm pretty positive this came from Gmail.

It also regularly updates me when my flights status changes (delays, gates changed, that sort of thing).

I'm really torn on this. Part of me says "hey, I never [expressly] said you could look at that" and another part is saying "that's really neat".

This is all a YMMV situation... I find that if I google something associated with a physical address on my desktop machine, logged into google, my phone will have a card with directions to that location.

That can be useful, but it's usually just an annoyance as I only wanted to call them or do something on their website.

Anybody have a solution to deactivate that behaviour?

They don't make a secret of the fact that they scan your gmail account for a lot of Google Now's functionality.

I believe it scans your gmail for things like flights and package deliveries.

Google Now notified me that it had determined where I live, where I work and where I make regular visits, and asked me to confirm that it had the locations correctly (it did). Now it tells me when I need to leave to get to an appointment, depending on how I'm getting there and what the traffic is like. I didn't have to set up or configure any of it - it just worked.

One thing that I find genuinely useful is the Traffic/Navigation feature. It is almost always correct and gives me the best route even in Bangalore (India). Also if I search for some location on Google Maps, I get a suggestion on Google Now about traffic, route and direction.

Using Google Maps on my desktop to search for a specific location will pull up that location as a card in Google Now. This is always useful if I forget to record the address before I leave.

Appointments has a nice reminder that you need to get somewhere and it will take X amount of time, so you should leave at Y.

Traffic card is amazingly helpful and surprisingly very accurate.

I work from home and go into the office 1 day a week (on Thursday). Google Now has picked up on this and every Thursday morning I'll have card on my home screen showing me estimated time to the office.

Searched for restaurants on Google Maps on my Laptop's Chrome... there were navigation options for each on my phone in Google Now.

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