[mynameisvlad]

I mean, really, you're comparing paying rent with a $100/yr fee (which now allows you to sign apps across their platforms)? Really? I highly doubt most indie developers even have to make that choice. Finding the $100 a year is not the most impossible task in the world, even for a tiny indie developer.

Plus, more than a few apps have added instructions on their download pages to show users how to get around Gatekeeper. They can clearly take the Gatekeeper hit, so you probably can too.

[chc]

I could afford $100 a month. Affordability is not the point. The point is that Apple will block your app from opening by default unless you pay them a recurring fee, and if not, you must incur additional support burden to teach users how to get around the problem.

Yes, lots of apps do post instructions on how to get around it, but lots of apps do all sorts of user-unfriendly things. We Apple users used to make fun of Windows for the endless sea of pointless dialogs its users had to go through. Those apps could take the shitty-UI hit, mine probably could too, but it still sucks. A lot of people are intimidated just looking at instructions like that, and will just give up.

I don't know about you, but I feel like that's a pretty terrible first-run experience for my app. I don't feel comfortable charging people for something they might not even be able to run. Would Apple be willing to put their own apps behind that kind of painwall?

[mynameisvlad]

> I don't feel comfortable charging people for something they might not even be able to run.

Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world. Plus, once again, you're being way overdramatic. "might not even be able to run" is taking it a bit too far. Your app will be able to run. If you don't trust your users enough to click twice, then maybe you need to learn to trust them more. It's not like it's a hard thing to do, and it only needs to happen once.

Remember, this is Apple's OS, Apple's ecosystem, and Apple's SDKs. You play by their rules or not at all. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it will probably always be (but never say never, look at Microsoft, they're doing things nobody would have ever expected). Yes, it sucks. Yes, it isn't fair. But as with all major companies, it never is. They will always have the upper hand because they're the ones providing the user base and all the tools necessary to get the apps out there and onto their machines. As long as you are developing for their platform, you have to play by their rules. Honestly, be happy they haven't moved the default to the much more restrictive "Mac App Store" yet.

And to be fair, I see where Apple (and Microsoft, IIRC they have SmartScreen which does the same sort of thing but to a lesser extent) are coming from. I'm sure that it lowers the chance of accidentally executing viruses by quite a bit and also slowly is teaching users to think before they execute (especially if you have to right click and click Open).

[chc]

> Honestly, if you're charging users, then there's absolutely no question about it, you get the membership. Your entire "expecting the user to do so" point completely goes out the window the second you said it's a paid app. If you have the revenue, then it's simply a cost of doing business in the Apple world.

Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-seeking. I think that is a bad behavior.

> Plus, once again, you're being way overdramatic. "might not even be able to run" is taking it a bit too far. Your app will be able to run. If you don't trust your users enough to click twice, then maybe you need to learn to trust them more. It's not like it's a hard thing to do, and it only needs to happen once.

I used to do tech support for a medium-sized office. I would frequently get called to people's desks because their computer wasn't working, only to find that their email client had put up a dialog with the message "The email address '[e-mail]' is not a valid address", I'd have to verbally tell them they mistyped the address — sometimes, even after this, they'd just stare at me like a deer in the headlights and I'd have to type in ".com" for them before they felt like they could use their computer again. And then they'd do it again the next day.

I remember patio11 once shared an anecdote about a school teacher who called his support number because she thought Bingo Card Creator had broken Google. It turned out that she'd gotten a new home computer and Bing was the default search provider, and she couldn't figure out how to operate Bing because it wasn't Google.

I have to wonder if you have had to do a lot of support work, because I think you're trusting users way too much. There are many, many people who are really not stupid, but get flustered when doing unfamiliar tasks on a computer.

> Remember, this is Apple's OS, Apple's ecosystem, and Apple's SDKs. You play by their rules or not at all. That's the way it's always been

No, it isn't. It wasn't even this way just five years ago. I was one of the early adopters of OS X, and one of the things I loved about it was how open it was, so even some kid like me (at the time) could easily make software. Apple has gotten worse and worse about this over the past decade.

[comex]

It is not just rent; it is a security feature. Whether this feature is being used wisely is another question...

A few months ago I sent Apple security an email about a fake Flash installer with a valid Developer ID certificate. It turned out that someone else had written an article about the same malware five days ago, and reported it to Apple, yet the certificate was not revoked yet - so it doesn't seem that Apple has a 'rapid response' system in place currently (or then, anyway), perhaps because incidents are still relatively uncommon. But they did promptly thank me for my report, and I bet they ended up doing something about it (I ought to check) - and thanks to Developer ID, they at least had some kind of payment trail as well as a name, likely making it harder for the same person to get additional certificates.

Of course, this trail could be achieved with a lower price. But you do get a number of benefits with the subscription, and since the Mac and iOS developer programs merged into one today, at the same $99 as each previously was individually, if you develop for both the price just halved. It's a start, at any rate.

[gruez]

>thanks to Developer ID, they at least had some kind of payment trail as well as a name, likely making it harder for the same person to get additional certificates

What's preventing me from paying some person in a third world country to get a certificate in his name?

[beagle3]

Nothing does. But that person will likely have no loyalty to you, and would give every info he has about you to Apple for an additional $100.

You don't need to be NSA level to hide your tracks there, but it's not trivial either. And Apple is likely to work with the FBI/Interpol about that if whatever evil deeds your software does is sufficiently high profile. Theses guys might also not be good enough to catch you - but they have access to the NSA data for parallel construction, allegedly. And the NSA has incriminating evidence against you.

[mynameisvlad]

> No, it isn't. It wasn't even this way just five years ago. I was one of the early adopters of OS X, and one of the things I loved about it was how open it was, so even some 17-year-old kid like me could easily make software. Apple has gotten worse and worse about this over the past decade.

I never said that was the way it's always been. I said that "playing by their rules or not at all" was the way it's always been. Which is true, Apple is very big on controlling every aspect of the user experience. It was a matter of time before their massive obsessiveness leaked from iOS to OSX, but it's always been Apple's rules or nothing. Their rules for OSX have historically been very lax, but that wasn't my point at all.

> Yes, because Apple demands rent. They create a problem and then charge you to fix it. This is called rent-seeking. I think that is a bad behavior.

Well, they're providing a service for $99 that extends beyond the signing to be able to run in OSX. They include the ability to list in the various app stores, to have beta programs, access to early APIs, access to developer forums, and more. All that costs them money. They have to get that from somewhere.

> I have to wonder if you have had to do a lot of support work, because I think you're trusting users way too much.

I trust my users just fine. Just because there's one or two crazy stories (I mean, everyone has a few stories of horribly stupid users) does not mean the majority of users are that bad. If you're targeting all 100% of possible users, then sure, those instructions would be useless. However, I'd be confident enough to say that 90-95% (honestly probably leaning towards 95, but still) of users will be able to follow those incredibly simple instructions. So at that point, you have to ask yourself if the $99 (plus all the other perks like early access to APIs) is worth having those 5-10% of users who can't follow them. Because that's what it really comes down to.

[biturd]

I feel being a staunch Mac user from the beginning has been detrimental to me. My first computer was a commodore 64, which I typed the programs out of the book into the terminal and it made balls move around on the screen and such. But I was really young, and no one was there to catch me, so I never thought to fiddle with it, I thought it was like a set of instructions and you had to follow them. I did not yet understand creativity at that age.

I then later, many years later, was given a Mac Plus. I could use BBS software to chat, but remember thinking, it is very hard to even type a conversation back and forth to a user elsewhere with a modem. There really was no software for it, or if there was, it was hard to find or even know about.

How did you know to learn C and then get a compiler? And how did you afford the software to develop back then? Wasn't code warrior around several thousand?

[jamestnz]

Wow, your history matches mine quite closely (manually typing BASIC programs into the C64 whilst not really "getting it", then going on to the Classic Mac OS and onto BBSes). I first got into the Mac around System 6 with a Mac 512Ke, then onto a Plus and other machines from there... remember hacking at apps with ResEdit?

Also keep in mind that the standard language for the classic Mac was originally Pascal[1], not C.

In addition to Metrowerks CodeWarrior (which I also recall being pricey), there was also the Borland TurboC++ family. And starting from around System 7 there was MPW from Apple[2], which targeted a number of languages and was eventually free.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacApp

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Programmer's_Workshop

[chc]

Well, I was talking about OS X, which was released around 2000, probably much later than your Mac Plus days. OS X included a whole Unixy environment and shipped the Developer Tools (GCC + the precursor to Xcode) on a second CD. I had already done some programming before that, though, in Mac game-making software (World Builder and Adventure Simulator), and with JavaScript on the Web, but the ability to really program my computer with Objective-C and Cocoa was amazing.

There was also a free development environment by Apple for OS 8 (maybe earlier, I don't know) called MPW. I think it was originally a paid product, but Apple ended up just giving MPW away because everybody used CodeWarrior. But I found it difficult to use and didn't get much further than some basic C lessons I found somewhere on the Internet. All the more advanced stuff I found wouldn't work (I think it was probably targeted at Windows or Unix, but all I knew at the time was that MPW couldn't compile it).

[gaius]

CodeWarrior academic was much, much cheaper.

[biturd]

Do you have a link to the patio11 anecdote?

[chc]

I'm having trouble finding the anecdote itself where the customer was angry about the change in Googles. Maybe it was in a podcast rather than on HN -- hard to remember, it was several years ago. Here's a later post where he was discussing what he'd learned from incidents like that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808001

[patio11]

I think you're conflating two anecdotes.

The "You broke my Googles. Give my Googles back or I'll tell my husband on you." incident was a customer who installed Bingo Card Creator N minutes before Google had systemic worldwide downtime due to an internal misconfiguration. (http://googleblog.blogspot.jp/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-you...) Her reasoning was "Google worked, I installed BCC, Google doesn't work anymore, accordingly, BCC must have broken Google." Except s/Google/the Googles/g.

My blue Googles/green Googles story happened with several different customers. Basically, they have a mental model of the Internet where it is a lot like a hard drive: your Internet at school and your Internet at home are totes different Internets and so it makes sense that the contents of one are different than the other. They call their Internets Googles, because Google "is the front page of the Internet" or "runs the Internet" or "makes the Internet." One of the Googles -- the blue Googles -- is what a technologist might more readily understand as Microsoft Internet Explorer configured to open to a Bing homepage on a school computer. This "blue Google" will, for any given query, produce different results than the same query run on "green Google" (Chrome/Google/home PC), hence providing further experimental evidence that the user understands adequately what is going on.

The difference between the blue Googles and the green Googles was chiefly relevant to my business in attempting to convince customers that, regardless of the fact that they signed up with an account from the blue Googles, they did not have to sign up for a separate account on the green Googles and then somehow move things from the blue Googles to the green Googles to be able to print them out at home.

[m4x]

Apple isn't forcing you to pay if you want to run your apps, they're warning users and forcing them to take an extra step to run unsigned code. That doesn't completely prevent malicious code execution but it definitely helps which is a net win for users.

Complaining that they ask for $100/year to use their official distribution channel (which incurs ongoing costs for them) seems unreasonable considering the quality and quantity of tools they provide for free. Xcode is a pretty awesome IDE considering it's free to use.

[Fargren]

I have to ask, because I feel XCode is the worst IDE I've ever used. What about it is pretty awesome?

Instruments is pretty cool, though.

[m4x]

There's no way Xcode is the worst you've ever used unless your opinion is just based on personal preference (which is fair enough but not really relevant to the rest of us)

I don't think I'd say it's better than VS if that's all you're comparing it to, but it's pretty much on par. When I last used VS heavily it seemed marginally more robust than Xcode but the only real feature I liked vs. Xcode was the ability to use C# rather than Obj-C (which is less relevant now that Swift exists)

Other than that, every single IDE I can think of is relatively unpolished and if you're developing specifically for OS X then the alternatives are practically useless.

I'm really glad Xcode finally has automated GUI testing

[Fargren]

The other IDE's I've worked with for any significant amount of time are Eclipse, Visual Studio, and various flavors of IntelliJ. Eclipse is the worse of the bunch, but it has a few important features that XCode doesn't. Support for a multi-monitor setup, configuration files that don't cause conflicts every other merge, a complete set of refactoring options. That XCode doesn't have a Search Usages or equivalent for a symbol, forcing you to use text search, is downright weird; they clearly use that functionality internally in the Rename refactoring.

Stability wise, there have been a few versions that crashed a lot, but that has improved lately, so I'm not complaining. And I do love how quickly it opens.

I'm currently using AppCode for developing for iOS, and I find substantially better than XCode. It has a full set of refactoring tools, that I use constantly, better search, it actually creates folders when you create groups (unless you tell it not to, and I think that's the sane default). I'm not sure it's a fair comparison, since it does cost as a much as a Developer License.

[MCRed]

Everything. The way debugging is integrated. Interface Builder-- nobody has anything like that to compete with it. It's totally integrated so you can really develop efficiently, and the simulator makes testing quick and easy.

I've never seen an IDE that was anywhere close. I suspect that people who hate Xcode are simply familiar with something else and find it frustrating to use it (though they've spent a few hours with it and hundreds of hours with something else they're expect it to beat their old IDE with no effort yet spent learning it.)

Seriously, Microsoft and Google can't even do a competent UI on applications built for consumers. Their developer tools are terrible by comparison.

[MrGando]

Are you kidding me? Look, I've been developing Mac/iOS for a while now (7 years). Xcode is mostly a piece of garbage if you compare it with the robustness of Visual Studio. I actually envy the MSFT developer tools, specially VS.

Google is another story though.

[Fargren]

I've used XCode for hundreds of hours. It's very lacking in functionality, I'm not going to copy and paste my other comment.

Interface Builder is very nice, I will give it that. I did have it break on me once or twice(wouldn't let met add a particular kind of segue), and having to manually edit the generated XML file was a pain, but still, it is better than most similar things I've used.

[72deluxe]

What have you used instead? If you've used Visual Studio then it seems pretty bad to begin with. I used to use Codegear RAD Studio (C++ Builder) and that was OK until all the developers left and it became buggy, memory-hogging and generally bad.

XCode seems quite spartan compared to Visual Studio. VS will give you many panes left/right/bottom and a myriad of buttons to do things but xcode just gives you that pane on the left, and you will likely benefit from learning the cmd-1,2,3 etc. shortcuts to jump to the different pages of this "notebook". The other benefit if the quick navigation at the top, the useful "callers/callees" access from the "four squares" menu top left of the editing area. As someone else said, it has Instruments built straight in, the ability to monitor CPU/memory/disk and network and a much better thread stack view (xcode 5 was pretty bad with this I recall - you had to navigate using a popup menu).

You might get on differently with it if you're using different languages. I write C++ in it daily and I really enjoy it (clang is quick). The ability to do static code analysis and have it annotated in the editing window is really really really really great. Lack of refactoring with C++ is a bit sad but not a massive issue for me. Whenever I go back to using Visual Studio I find it to be clunky and there's too much on screen (popups, toolbars, etc.) but that's just me. Also, the glitching and artifacting when VS redraws is irritating (might just be a side effect of running in a VM for me), and the "stop build" takes too long thanks to the compiler running in a hidden window. I ought to upgrade to a more recent Visual Studio as I have to use VS2010 at work for now.

Compared to Eclipse and Android Studio, Xcode is good! I find Eclipse and Android Studio to be slow, and they typically break every upgrade. (AS is currently complaining about a modified ant.jar and refusing to upgrade... wasn't me who did that!)

Having said that xcode currently crashes once a day for me. Not sure if it's in the preprocessing/indexing phase as it falls over with large numbers of #defines and ~80k lines of C++.

[Killswitch]

> A lot of people are intimidated just looking at instructions like that, and will just give up.

You realize it's probably one of the easiest tasks ever, and it's literally 3 steps. Anybody even my grandma can do that. If they know how to download your app and "install it" they will be able to do those simple steps.

And it's a one time thing, not like they need to do it every time they go to install an app.

[chc]

Anybody can do it if they're of the right state of mind, but as somebody who used to do IT for a medium-sized office, all I can say is you're mistaken if you think most people are that way. The task is intimidating and involves 1) going through a context menu (something many Mac users will never even have done before), 2) dealing with a dialog (people get nervous the second a dialog shows up and often don't even read them), 3) if they have read the dialog, ignoring the fact that they're doing something it's telling them not to do.

[mynameisvlad]

> (something many Mac users will never even have done before)

This isn't the 90s. Two-button mice are the default now, and have been for many years. I'm pretty sure everybody has done it at least once, and probably even knows what the term "right-click" means.

> ignoring the fact that they're doing something it's telling them not to do.

They're not doing something it's telling them not to do. Have you even looked at the dialog? Have you read it yourself? It simply asks the user if they're sure they want to open it as it's from an unidentified developer: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare... Nothing in it is telling them they shouldn't or can't open the app, they're not going against anything by saying "Open" (in fact, that might just be why there's an Open button there in the first place, because it's an acceptable choice).

Seriously, you're being overly untrustworthy about your users here. You seriously can't think this is that big of a problem. Because it isn't. Other apps have managed to solve this with download instructions, it's really not difficult, and the fact that they're still alive and running shows that users clearly know what they're doing enough to right click once and press Open once. It's not a difficult task by any means of the imagination.

[derefr]

The dialog that comes up from the context menu looks like that. The one they'll see the first time they try it, though, will look like this: http://www.maclife.com/files/u12635/gatekeeper_1.png

That looks like a "telling them not to" dialog if I ever saw one.

[mynameisvlad]

If they're following the developer's instructions, then presumably they wouldn't even see that screen. Remember, we're talking about the steps needed to open the app, not what would happen if they tried to open the app normally.

I mean, that said, most instincts would be to double click the app right away, ignoring any instructions, but that's a separate matter of how to best present those instructions for your users.

[72deluxe]

I'm not sure if this is a joke??? Context menus are difficult?? How do you open in a new tab in Safari if context-menus are so alien? How do you force an app to stay in the dock or open at Login? How do you change the desktop background?

Dealing with a dialog: it's just another window, just smaller than the main one.... OSX != iOS. (Actually, how do people cope on iPads when it says "5% of battery remaining"? Do they lob it at the floor in fear of the dialog window?)

There's little developers can do if people don't read the text. That's not a developer's fault. Should we put fences up on dangerous beaches to stop people swimming or should people just read the sign saying "no swimming, dangerous currents"....?

[snowwrestler]

Philosophically, it is a bummer. Instead of a developer and customer having a direct relationship, there's now an Apple tax that needs to be paid every year or the relationship gets cut.

However, I can't think of any other way to gain the security benefits of app signing.

Ultimately, all security is a web of trust. If you're going to put an automated, self-service system at the root of that web (the Apple dev program), then you need reliable ways to establish identity and discourage high-volume fraud. A $100/year credit card charge does both pretty well.

[2muchcoffeeman]

As a developer and a user, I more or less like the system. I feel general users get a decent amount of added security without too much hassle.

Thinking of the unsigned applications that I do run, if you know about them, I don't feel it's unreasonable to expect the user to know how to get around the signing.

[cm2187]

And people used to write "microsoft" with dollar signs... No "s" in Apple...