MacsWithPenguins

Teenagers will always find a way to create exclusive clubs and decide who’s in and who’s out. Think back to when you were younger: maybe there was an actual club the popular people went to, or an expensive bike with a particular brand you should use ”if you want to be cool”. In my case, it was getting a Nintendo 8-bit and later the SNES (except I was team SEGA and fortunately my friends liked it).

This is different, but not by much. Let’s say Apple made iMessage an open system, even introduce their mocked up app in a finished state on Google Play Store. What would happen next is, iMessage is uncool and some new Snapchat-like app would take over the crown. It would be invite-only based and anyone not able to register would be left out.

100 percent on Apple’s side here. This complaint is laughable, except it’s not because it seriously need to be pulled as soon as possible. Where is the antitrust against OnePlus/Oppo and Poco in India, then?

I have never had a Facebook account in my whole life and will never sign up. For me it’s about not comparing my own life and achievements with others. Twitter works out for me, because I can follow strangers announcing trivial things on a daily or weekly basis, which for me is all about reading and discussing the latest trends in tech. If friends want to reach out, it’s not going to be on social media, but rather via private conversations or real-world meetings (except Covid complicated this).

rezwits said:

Definitely a stepping stone, but Xcode is a BEAST.

One day we might see a STRIPPED down SwiftUI? or just Swift Xcode...

Yes. I know Apple has rewritten the code base multiple times already, perhaps the biggest one being Xcode 4.0 (btw, those Xcode 4 betas were crazy unstable). But despite that, just look at the number of files it unzips when you install it from a direct download: I've seen it report an install of more than 500k (!) files). This is pretty interesting, though, because, likewise, Microsoft Visual Studio Professional apparently installs more than 700k (seven hundred thousand) registry entries. Yes, registry entries. That is mindblowing to me, but I think both VS Pro and Xcode contains a lot of baggage, a lot of backwards compatibility.

I'm starting to think the task of trimming Xcode is too unwieldy at this point. Maybe some day in the future (maybe?) they will start fresh with a new app development tool written from scratch. It will be completely designed for Swift 5.0 and upwards with SwiftUI only, dropping all of Objective-C and every Swift version prior to Swift 5.0, calling the app something else (sort of like how they slightly renamed iMovie HD to iMovie and the Final Cut Pro 7 sequel became Final Cut Pro X and then just Pro), while still maintaining Xcode as the stable, feature-rich version developed in parallel with the new development tool. In a way, some people might say this is what Playgrounds is. However, Playgrounds is targeted towards learning development – not professionals.

Being in the public beta, I already have the 12.1 RC2 version, which is likely the same as the final build.

These kind of download issues aren't exactly new, though: updating an iDevice or a Mac the same day as the update comes out is guaranteed to make you compete with a lot of other people wanting to update at the same time. This will probably settle itself within a day or two, if history is any indication.