So I took Christmas off, but don’t forget: even as Democrats play blame the Victim, you should get your debit card or credit card replaced if you used it at Target recently. The attackers got your PIN even.
The traitor Edward Snowden very interestingly says he won, which seems to mean he thinks it’s himself against we the people. He’s sure not on the side of liberty, when he’s on the side of the child pornography den Tor. And yet, He’s still desperately trying to feel his Russian paymasters. Not even loyal to them.
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“Developers, Developers, Developers!”
Yeah, Steve Ballmer was right. His firm’s Windows platform continues to do well in part because it tries to smooth things out for developers. On the other hand, Android developers have a problem working on that platform because despite the releases of new OS versions, huge fractions of the userbase are stuck on Android 2.x. That’s fragmentation.
BGR is highlighting end-user fragmentation, which is not a problem.
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I was asked today on a forum why I am unhappy with Xcode as an IDE, and how exactly it forces me to do things in a certain way in order to use it. Here was my reply, with minimal editing done.
I’d rather be able to pick and choose what parts of an IDE I’d like to use, and which I’d rather not use. I’m going to use Xcode here as my example since it’s the first IDE I’ve tolerated in years.
What does an IDE do, at core? It integrates different tools. It integrates your core text editor (that if you’re like me you’re going to spend more time in than everything else combined) with your build tool, your debugger, your profiler, your interface designer, your documentation, and even source control.
A good IDE isn’t going to make you use any one particular flavor of any of those tools. The more poorly designed the IDE, the more you’re wedded to one or another.
Xcode 4 just happened to take the one thing I use the most, the text editor, and mandates you use its flavor of that to be able to use any of the other integration. I have to have it bring up things in its text editor to make use of its build logs, and I have to bring up things it its text editor to make use of its debugger, etc, so Xcode 4 has no value to me. Its integration is counterproductive. Ideally I could just close the window… but you can’t close its text editor window even! It’s all one giant, poorly-designed clutter of an interface.
There are other simple but practical reasons this ruins it for me. I like to have many editor windows open. At times I like to have several docs windows open.
So Xcode has been reduced to me to being a way of generating xcodebuild configurations, and a way of uploading iPhone and iPad test builds onto the hardware. I can use nothing else it does without having its single text editor window shoved in my face, with its editor that isn’t the mature, sophisticated one I use for everything else.
So, I blew a lot of my spare development time last week not actually making progress, but rather figuring out how to get by without loading Xcode. I’ve done that now fortunately. For iOS dev I’ve even gotten an xcodebuild + Makefile process going to run things in the simulator. I now only need to load Xcode when I make changes to the build, because Xcode projects are not really written for human readability. [insert rant against XML]
Integration is great when you want to use every single tool that’s integrated together. But just like some people wanted to use MS Windows without MS Internet Explorer, so too do I want to use some of the Xcode tools without its text editor.
Top story: the great Steven Crowder has a new video on Net Neutrality. With all the hype on Twitter leading up to this release, I was looking forward to Crowder’s video release. It’s funny, accurate, and devastating to the left. As usual for Crowder.
Sometimes a patent troll runs into fire. Lodsys, as you may recall, decided to abandon the strategy of targeting deep pockets and went after small-time and single developers. Well, Apple struck back, demanding that Lodsys withdraw threats to iOS developers, and warning that Apple would defend its own rights as a license holder.
There’s some rough language, but Twitter user oceankidbilly sums it up perfectly. Heh.
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