

Ask HN: What frustrating things do you wish someone would solve? - buss

What frustrates you about your day-to-day development process that you would like someone to solve?<p>What tools or processes get in your way instead of making life easier?
======
makecheck
What gets in my way...I think "Xcode 4" sums it up. Almost everything Apple
did to that once-great IDE has created endless frustration and slowed me down
considerably (not to mention making my 2nd display practically useless). It
was apparently designed by someone who doesn't do much programming, or at
least someone who doesn't know how to multitask.

I can still use Xcode 3.x and Interface Builder for now, but I'm sure their
days are numbered. So what I need (again) is a decent set of high-level Mac
development tools. If I could open-source Xcode 3.x and start from that, I
would.

Note that I've never used an IDE exclusively (I use makefiles and terminal-
based text editing for instance), but basically Xcode is no longer suitable
for the things that an IDE was useful for.

~~~
buss
That's really interesting. I haven't done any mac development (I'm almost
entirely *nix or web dev), so I'm not aware of the difficulties with Xcode.
I'm generally only using vim, but I've struggled through Eclipse (and its
roughly weekly crash cycle) when doing java development to know the kind of
problems IDEs can introduce.

I've been meaning to do some iPhone & OSX development, so I will check out
Xcode with a toy application and see what gets in my way.

Thanks for the suggestion!

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dividebyzero
Quickbooks. Integrating an online store with quickbooks can be a nightmare.
And their pay structure (single user, multi user) is extremely frustrating. I
really wish someone could make a good web solution with a nice API that
destroys this massive headache.

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dholowiski
Paypal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) api just about had me in tears
last night.

~~~
buss
Oh jeez. It's been years since I've dealt with paypal, but if it's still as
bad as it was then there's a ton of room for improvement. I've heard great
things about stripe & fee fighters but I haven't checked them out yet. Maybe
they've missed something...

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glimcat
Crappy documentation.

~~~
buss
Yeah, I feel you. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to tackle this
without a fundamental shift in the development community. Self-documenting
code is practically a fallacy, and people forget that we're supposed to write
code primary for other humans to read, and only incidentally for computers to
execute.

I wonder if a marketplace for documentation development would help the
problem. This might not work, however, since writing documentation requires a
good amount of familiarity with the code base.

