Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

macOS As a programmer, what was your biggest disappointment with SL?

F

foidulus

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 15, 2007
904
1
While there is a lot of buzz(and deservedly so) about all the cool new developer tools and APIs in Snow Leopard, there are inevitably some letdowns. I'm just curious to see what other devs think is Snow Leopard's biggest shortcomings when it comes to slinging code.

For me it was how Apple barely expanded the QTKit API(though they did document it much better). Despite all the buzz about 64-bit apps, and Apple supposedly being a real media-friendly company, the QTKit is absolutely pathetic when compared to its much older brethren, the Quicktime API(which Apple did not port to 64 bit).

So a lot of developers of video-facing applications are facing a difficult choice, do they make their job much more arduous by trying to go all QTKit and giving themselves the option to go 64-bit(even though most of the actual work is still done by the 32-bit QTKitServer process), or go with the Quicktime API knowing full well we will have to re-write it eventually.

I guess what most devs are doing are using QTKit as much as possible, only digging down into the quicktime API when absolutely necessary, but this supposed bridge has been there since Tiger. Snow Leopard was supposed to change all this, but it didn't.

So now you have(perhaps) read my rant, now it's your turn.
 
I was hoping they were going to replace the dot-syntax with a different symbol so c-structs would be visually distinct, and yet the people who like having a syntactic distinction between state and properties could be happy too. I know it's never going to happen, but one can dream...
 
No disappointments yet.

However, I hope to become annoyed, vexed, severely disappointed, and ultimately disillusioned before the end of the year. I then expect to become deeply embittered and a famous blogger at about the same time in Q1 of 2010. At that point I'll hop on the "Apple is evil" bandwagon to publicly rant about how I'll never write a program for any Apple product ever again, be it a Mac, iPhone, or that new tablet thingy.

You can call me crazy and say it's already been done, but a guy's gotta have dreams, even if they're painted with irony.
 
chown33 said:
No disappointments yet.

However, I hope to become annoyed, vexed, severely disappointed, and ultimately disillusioned before the end of the year. I then expect to become deeply embittered and a famous blogger at about the same time in Q1 of 2010. At that point I'll hop on the "Apple is evil" bandwagon to publicly rant about how I'll never write a program for any Apple product ever again, be it a Mac, iPhone, or that new tablet thingy.

You can call me crazy and say it's already been done, but a guy's gotta have dreams, even if they're painted with irony.
Click to expand...

Classic! :D
 
foidulus said:
While there is a lot of buzz(and deservedly so) about all the cool new developer tools and APIs in Snow Leopard, there are inevitably some letdowns. I'm just curious to see what other devs think is Snow Leopard's biggest shortcomings when it comes to slinging code.

So now you have(perhaps) read my rant, now it's your turn.
Click to expand...

For me, no rants (so far!). Still digging into the new stuff and supporting the older stuff.

Also, I look at QT X as being a (major) work-in-progress and expect them to more fully flesh out the new API with migrated Quicktime functions as time goes by. Sooner than later, I'm sure, seeing as how crucial QT is to Apple's media empire.
 
My biggest disappointment is the dropping of PowerPC support completely. This move further fragments the customer base for me as I have to support people using 10.4 still (and occasionally 10.3.9).

I know it was inevitable, but still having it finally happens means having to deal with it officially with thick-headed corporate executives who's sole tech expertise encompasses checking their email on their blackberry.

Fortunately I haven't found any show stoppers on 10.6 yet. Although I have yet to exercise the AppleScript interface for the new Mail.app (bane of my existence from a developer perspective).

If the AS interface for Mail is still partially broken, add that to my list of disappointments (for not being addressed/fixed in a major bugfix/polish release).
 
Missing Java 6 plugin 2 support. Am I the last Java developer still putting up with Apple's Java policy?

2nd complaint has got to be XCode, the editor is just soo weak it drives me crazy. At times I consider pulling all my objective-c code into eclipse. I was really hoping that the SL release would include a better XCode. It's starting to feel like Apple are spreading themselves too thin, what next, iPlay games console?
 
Been finding a ton of bugs with the Quartz Composer framework. Been a royal PITA. I have a demo project that perfectly illustrates a fairly major problem.

I reported another non-related bug to Apple in December 08, they marked it as a dupe, yet it still has not been fixed in SL.
 
My biggest disappointment is making Java a second-class citizen (or third-class?) in XCode. They removed Java from the standard templates and it now seems to require a separate installation.

Otherwise, I like the new dev tools.
 
Broken & crippled OpenCL support for ATI cards.

For all the fanfare, what was actually brought to the table with regards to OpenCL was pretty sad.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back