This is the new word for proprietary. All I want to do is experiment with their proprietary language and see what its all about. But you have to pay a 99 dollar fee, you have to have an Intel Mac with OS X, and you have to have their special IDE. Now if theres been as many prereqs for a piece of software before I want to know about it. For Gods sake, a 3000 dollar investment for even a simple experiment! You can experiment with C on any computer out there. Why most computers in the garbage can will open up DSL linux and a simple C compiler. But there aren't no Macs in a garbage can. In fact they PAY you not to throw it away. They want the parts back so they can re-use them in other mac products. So why would you shell out 2000 dollars on a Mac made out of the garbage of other macs? You have to be either rich or foolish to want to play with a Mac. I'd even be cool if it required a mac. I have an old G3 mac, but its PowerPC, not intel, and it can't run osx. Ugh! So you have to buy a new mac every new operating system anyway. G3s are only about 5 years old. New 2000 dollar computer every 5 years. That's why mac is so filthy rich! And their iPods that when the battery dies, you can't replace it. and their terrible treatment of good devs. sickening really.

(PS, just wanted to make a rant about it. Still bugs the heck outta me. Has for years)

I don't blame you at all; it is extremely concerning. Their development platform is very closed and tightly locked-down, and allows almost no free usage of the platform. I feel that's exactly the wrong way to go about encouraging developers.

If I understand correctly, they are good if your goal is to develop a product for multiple platforms, as you can work on Mac, PC, and I think even Linux on the same machine using bootcamp, which has the added advantage of comparing just the OS performance with your product with the same hardware. Other than that though they're just an expensive cage of lights and clockwork.

That's only really an issue because Mac OS X cannot legally be installed on non-Apple machines - Apple hardware is much the same as "PC" hardware (I presume you meant Windows in your previous example).

Indeed, right down to the manufacturers. Apple doesn't actually manufacture any of its own hardware, so people who say that Apple hardware is better-constructed and similar statements bother me. :S Ah well.

Yeah, I meant windows, my bad. I was referring to legally developing a product on all 3 platforms. Obviously if you don't care about legality you can put together a hackintosh and multi-boot all 3. Getting anything to work right on an OS that's not designed for user servicing would be a hassle, but you could at least boot it.

It depends on what you're comparing. Apple machines tend to be more highly priced and so will generally have better parts than the average offering from (say) eMachines. The playing field is of course evened out if you buy more expensive "PC" hardware, but you can't really go the other way as Apple don't cater to the cheap and nasty side of the market.

You can get the fastest gaming PC in the world for the price of a decent macbook. I think the choice is painfully obvious.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. You only have to pay money to be an iPhone developer or to get the exclusive benefits like OS X pre-release testing (just like MSDN). But there's is still nothing preventing you from installing Darwin or even experimenting with Objective-C and GNUstep on Linux or Windows or Solaris. Chill out and learn what you're talking about before you go on a rant.


Also, you can get a Mac mini for $600 and run Xcode just fine.

But I cannot currently install Xcode on my G5 due to how the installer works... It only comes bundled with the iPhone SDK which is x86 only and yet the download page says Xcode will run just fine on PPC. I tired seeing if they had an older version I could install but their site just runs me in circles trying to find it. I literally just gave up because of how stupid it was. In the end it was just easier to leave my G5 booted into Arch Linux 24/7 than to deal with trying to get a development environment working on Mac OS X for PPC.

Apple has the worst support for it's developers of any company I've ever seen.

McDonald's is worse.

Bull.

I was actually finally able to find an old version via the mac ports, but if I didn't have a direct link I would have never found it. If you can point me to how I would have found that page from the regular Xcode download page let me know but as far as I could tell old versions were nowhere to be found.

Edit: And of course Mac OS X crashed and asked me to hold down the power button to restart while installing, isn't that nice... :/

http://www.google.com/search?q=xcode+tools+ppc
First result is:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2142515
With a list of Leopard (and thus PPC) compatible versions of Xcode. Which would be every version before 3.2. And a link to the proper download on Apple Developer Connect. But you also could have just gone to Apple Developer Connect, clicked Developer Tools under the Downloads sidebar, and scrolled down the list (which has every version of Xcode from the last six years). OR, you could have just popped in your installation discs which come with every Apple computer, and include a version of Xcode (or Project Builder if you're old school) compatible with that computer.

also,

Their iOS development platform is a closed ecosystem, like every other console/phone maker's development platforms. OS X development is easy-peasy, and just about as open as it gets. Every program I've written on the school Linux computers has compiled and run without changes on my Mac. I would have expected better than a bunch of FUD from an informed individual such as yourself.

It seems even the method of finding the old versions listed in that thread are no longer correct as far as I could tell, so I would have still needed a direct link to find it, and the fact that you need an account to even download the IDE is rather annoying to me, though I'm not sure if you need and account to get VS express edition from MS.

If you download the .iso version of Visual Studio Express then you don't need to do anything. If you use the web installer you need to "activate" the software within 30 days (which is done with a regular Passport/.NET/Live account - or whatever they're calling them these days).

Mac mini w/ no monitor. And you do have to pay to be part of the Mac Dev Network for the iOS. I've checked. And it's 99 dollars for the most basic package. And Mac mini's are worse than a netbook. They are cheap, precisely.

Does everyone around here seriously just read half of a post and ignore the rest?


If you can't figure out where to get a cheapo/free monitor, you should probably just hand in your geek card. For starters, have you never owned a computer before? But hey, you were the one complaining that it was $3000 or nothing. I just called you out on a load of b.s. As for the second load of b.s. about a netbook, lets compare an Acer Aspire to a Mac Mini:
Proc: 1.66GHz Atom vs 2.6GHz C2D
RAM: 1GB DDR2 vs 2GB DDR3 (with motherboard support for 8GB DDR3)
Video: Intel GMA 3150 vs GeForce 320M
I/O: 3 USB vs FireWire 800 + 4 USB.
HD: 120GB vs 320GB
Video out: VGA vs mini-DisplayPort and HDMI and a free HDMI->DVI adapter.



Yes, that's what I said: for iOS. What you said was "All I want to do is experiment with their proprietary language and see what its all about." If you'd actually read my reply you would have learned that you can learn Obj-C with XCode for free on a Mac without doing iOS-specific development, but you don't even need a Mac because Obj-C isn't proprietary. Lets go over this again.








Ditto for Mac. If you install from the discs they give you when you buy a Mac, they don't make you register. If you download from the ADC, they want some usage statistics on want kind of development you're doing.

Yeah, but why would you want to? The only reason anyone willingly codes in Obj-C is to tap into the massive piles of cash that iPhone idiots part with so easily.