

Another Xcode Version, Another Example of Crappy Apple QA - AliCollins
http://thecodist.com/article/another_xcode_version_another_example_of_crappy_apple_qa

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ioquatix
Xcode 4.2 was atrociously buggy and I frequently had crashes on an hourly
basis. 4.3 seems a bit more stable - but lldb still has quite a few issues
(understandable). As a developer, I'd sort of expect a bit more support and
_reliability_ from the development tools.

It isn't completely a cost center as they do make money from developer
subscriptions.

~~~
christoph
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to experience these constant crashes. It got to
the point where my colleagues were convinced it was something wrong with my
code/project that was causing it to crash constantly (I'm the only one using
Xcode here).

It's a great tool and I am glad for the constant improvements Apple seem to be
making, but it is a source of regular frustration for me at the moment.

~~~
reidmain
Have you been upgrading your Xcode installs or installing from scratch? I have
a theory that Apple really doesn't test the upgrade path much and a lot of the
problems I've seen seem to stem from that.

If true reinstalling everytime is definitely not an acceptable solution but at
least it is a solution.

~~~
jonhendry
With 4.3 Xcode is self-contained, so this shouldn't be an issue.

~~~
reidmain
True but these complaints of crashing seem to be about Xcode 4.2 and below
because 4.3 just came out. I haven't even upgraded to it yet.

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bcrescimanno
Flagging as trolling...and then taking the troll-bait.

All software ships with bugs--including the software this guy will create
using XCode. Despite that, this type of drivel is still common among software
developers. "One (relatively minor) bug exists that happens to annoy me: that
must mean their whole QA process is shit!"

Come off it; this type of rant would be warranted if XCode routinely crashed
when you paste a paragraph of text into a label--not because it behaves in a
funky way.

~~~
mikeash
Xcode routinely crashes doing pretty much anything, sadly.

~~~
bcrescimanno
I don't use XCode regularly--so I honestly wouldn't know. If the rant was
about that constant crashing, I wouldn't have said anything.

~~~
mikeash
I think what happens is that developers see this instability all the time, and
it slowly drives them to the edge, then one day a particular bug, not very
important on its own, causes them to go over. If they aren't careful to
realize that it's the huge history of bugs driving the rant, then it will come
off looking like much ado about little.

I completely agree that this particular complaint is blown way out of
proportion. But I think that's probably where it's ultimately coming from.

~~~
veidr
I agree (from personal experience and obvservation). The cumulative effect of
all the little indignities a developer suffers at the hands of Xcode build up
like steam in a pressure cooker, until it has to go _somewhere_. (A rant on a
blog, a mouse hurled against a wall, chairs kicked over, whatever...)

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idspispopd
With all due respect that bugs are frustrating to deal with.

This user couldn't be any more of a prima-donna if they could sing F6.

A page dedicated to a completely superficial bug, whose fix will go mostly
unnoticed. How about some useful criticism?

~~~
viraptor
I read it as the last straw. Instead of the impression of fewer and fewer bugs
in new releases, he started running into them often enough, until the first
action he tried in the new release was buggy. That's really not a good state.

I'm not sure what would be a useful criticism for a "I keep running into bugs
in your software and it's pissing me off enough to share this with random
developers on the internet" situation. Especially when a bug is a regression
and the proper behaviour can be found in the previous version. Apparently
submitting the bug is something that the poster is familiar with and which
doesn't work that well either. Can you come up with some useful criticism for
such situation?

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kennywinker
Unhelpful trolling. Xcode is buggy. As dev-facing software that's undergoing a
cycle of rapid change, it's not as clean as everyone would like it to be. I'm
not convinced it could be much cleaner at the rate they're changing things.

And IB has always handled labels with long blocks of text badly. That's
because they're not supposed to hold long blocks of text, they're supposed to
hold labels.

~~~
_debug_
I'm not being rigorous here, but it seems to me that the top comment on every
HN article that points out anything wrong with an Apple product is by an Apple
apologist? It's a bit...fawning.

~~~
tvon
You certainly can't get far without someone playing the "apologist" or
"fanboy" card. This is annoying because you are presenting no argument or
evidence, you're just saying "this person's opinion is bullshit because of the
apparent side they have chosen". I don't see what value that adds, it just
dumbs down the entire conversation.

~~~
_debug_
> you're just saying "this person's opinion is bullshit because of the
> apparent side they have chosen"

Firstly, that is not what I tried to say. I tried to say, "There's a whole
bunch of Apple-apologist-upvoters", and for this...

> you are presenting no argument or evidence

...I did present evidence : the comment is the top comment, which means it was
upvoted, eh?

I'm not arguing against Apple, but pointing out the prevalance of fawning
brand-loyal upvoters.

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metafour
Why are so many poorly written articles making it to the front page? It seems
to me the author didn't do any QA on their article either. It's hard to take
someone's argument seriously when they don't take the time to proofread their
own work.

~~~
DennisP
I'd be happy if people just stopped claiming they made a pun, simply because a
word has two slightly different meanings in the dictionary and they used it
both ways.

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jfhollingworth
have you tried JetBrains AppCode (<http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/>) - much
better than XCode

~~~
cageface
Thanks to your comment I decided to take a serious look at this. I'm a big fan
of IntelliJ so I know how good their other IDEs are.

After working with an existing project for about half and hour I think I'm
convinced enough to risk $99 on it. My main worry was that it wouldn't
smoothly hand off xibs/storyboards to interface builder but that seems to work
ok. Already this feels like a tool that was designed for programmers and not
to fit somebody's idea of a shiny interface.

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DrJokepu
I don't really understand the sentiment of the author. Xcode is free, and even
when it wasn't free it was very very cheap. A decade or two ago it was very
common to charge hundreds of dollars for much much shittier IDEs, the
Professional edition of Visual Studio is still at least $500 and Apple is
giving away Xcode for _free_. There are alternatives if you don't like it,
JetBrains has an excellent IDE for Objective-C development but you can also
use VIM or Emacs.

Really, I am puzzled by this level of sense of self-entitlement.

~~~
shadowfiend
XCode is free in part because it is expected that Apple will make money off of
it indirectly. Even if you don't pay for XCode itself, Apple can make money:
\- because you build a Mac app that attracts people to the Mac \- because you
build an iOS app that attracts people to iOS \- because you build a paid Mac
or iOS app that you sell through the app store, and they take a cut

Beyond that, if you want to package an app for the app store, as far as I
understand, you have to use XCode. So Apple is saying, if you want to make
money building for our platform, then generally we'll get money too, and you
have to use our IDE for at least part of the process. At that point, it's
understandable to expect some quality out of the IDE, I think.

~~~
DrJokepu
This is a fair point; it makes business sense from Apple's point of view to
give it away for free, however the same reasoning didn't stop Microsoft and
IBM in the 80's/90's to charge developers $3000 for the OS/2 SDK.

In response to your second point, I would like to point out that submitting to
the App Store is the only part of the process that has to be done in Xcode,
which is a very tiny part of the app development cycle.

~~~
pjmlp
Many people are too young to remember there was a time without free
development tools. Where most of them had a cost of several digits.

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the-kenny
For the record: This bug was in Xcode 4.2 too: Labels in the Interface Builder
behaved exactly like this.

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netshroud
Your example seems to work for me: <http://cl.ly/2p2I3g443g2p3Q0F241e>

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mark_l_watson
I have been using the developer preview for Xcode 4.4 (running on Mountain
Lion) to work through some OS X and iOS 5 programming tutorials. I am doing
this for fun, not as part of my consulting business, but that said, I am not
running into any show stopping problems.

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Maro
We're still using Xcode 3.x, one of the reasons is buggyness of 4.x.

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jkmcf
FWIW, a friend mentioned that disabling sync over wifi solved at least one
major crashing issue.

Link to tweet: <https://twitter.com/#!/mmartel/status/169145796107833345>

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mathnode
Hacker News != Ranter News. Take it to the $VENDOR support forums.

~~~
to3m
You are more likely to get a useful response posting it here.

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jarsj
Apple already charges for XCode. 99$/year and 30% of everything built using it
is not cheap.

~~~
fullmoon
Wrong in all accounts.

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jarsj
I think I came out wrong. I know its freely available. However, most people
who use it to get anything useful done (iOS apps, mac-appstore apps) end up
paying Apple, subscription fees.

