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by theamk 1268 days ago
It always saddens to me when people only think of the extremes, while perfectly good options exist!

If your develop for highly locked device (iPhone) which requires the very latest version of huge dev environment -- maybe choose some other development target which does not evolve quite as much. Qt, Java, etc.. are not updated for years. And don't forget to make sure that your OS does not break without updates either.

Gimp is more clunky than Photoshop, but it will never fail because of lack of license server.

This part is especially annoying:

> At sea, without internet, if I wanted to look up how to fill a polygon, I couldn't do it, but if I had printed it?

.. or maybe you could have gotten some e-books? They take much less space that paper books (important on yacht!) and lasts forever. Postscript format, from 1985, is still readable by all modern systems. Plain text ASCII, from 1968, is still being written every day. Even HTML 1.0 is rendered by all modern browsers.
1 comments
nine_k 1268 days ago
The thing with iOS and iPhone is that it's the market that pays best. A typical iPhone user is more conditioned and used to pay for apps, and is more ready to pay for the cool factor. So, switching the target market to Android devices may be harder than one thinks.

> Qt, Java, etc.. are not updated for years.

Hmm. Have you really been paying attention? They very much are, and in exciting ways. They don't make old versions unserviceable though, and that's great.

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theamk 1268 days ago
Yes, but "things that pay best" and "sustainable computing" are often in disagreement. Nothing wrong with chasing the money, but you should be honest: "Because I wanted to earn more money, I decided to use locked-down cloud-based devices. This means my computing is not really sustainable, and sometimes required putting smartphone up the mast, but I need to pay port fees and buy fuel for my boat"

And yes, there are all sorts of exciting things in Qt and Java world, but you don't have to use them. We currently build some tools on Qt 5.9 (2017) and feel no pressure to upgrade at all. And my computer still has Qt 4.8 available (including dev headers) from 2011, which I assume still works. Which is great, I agree.

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