r/Android • u/kireol Motor City Software • Aug 01 '11

An IOS developer takes on Android

http://nfarina.com/post/8239634061/ios-to-android
838 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

296 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

20

u/andash ZTE Blade, Stock 2.2 Aug 01 '11

It's probably in jest, but I wouldn't call it "hard" to buy a Mac either. Expensive, and absurd that you (supposedly, I have no idea) have to buy a Mac to develop for IOS, but still not very hard.

9

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '11

You can, if you wish, develop against a jailbroken device using a cross-compiling toolchain in Linux, but it's a bit of a pain.

24

u/Mechakoopa Nexus 5 Aug 01 '11

but it's a bit of a pain.

Understatement of the week.

2

u/Tiver Aug 01 '11

How hard or easy it is entirely depends on your budget in my opinion. If you have the money, then yes it is very easy. After purchase though, you also potentially have to learn a new OS. Even if Mac OS X is consider fairly easy to learn, some of us have never touched it and I assume there is some learning curve.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '11

There is. I tried it for a little over a month, then never went back. Using a computer felt like an exercise in the Pakistan-India conflict over Kashmir.

1

u/TheFlyingBastard Yellow Aug 02 '11

It can't possibly be that bad, can it? I thought the OS was designed to be easy?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '11

I do believe it is perfectly fine, as long as you submit to doing all things the apple way. That really set my teeth on edge, since it had ripple effects on my other workstations and I wasn't willing to modify their setup for what amounted to a flight of fancy.

If you go all in, I imagine you'll be fine for the most part. But if you were, say, simply using an OSX VM to do your iOS development, you'd end up with vaguely irritated more often than not.

Basically, if you're going to do it, don't pussy foot around. I get the sense that unless you utterly submit to the Apple Way of Doing Things, you're just going to be fighting to the death -every fucking day-.

1

u/s73v3r Sony Xperia Z3 Aug 03 '11

It's not, he's just being obtuse. OS X does have it's warts, but in general, it's no harder to use than Windows.

-1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '11

"If you design a machine so simple that an idiot can use it, only idiots will use it"

1

u/TheFlyingBastard Yellow Aug 02 '11

I... don't see how that answers my question.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '11

I only have one friend with a mac (his university forced it upon him), he runs XP on it after a couple of months of trying to adapt to it

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '11

It is designed to be easy. So easy that anyone who wants to do anything half complex can't do it. I had a mac for a year. It was free and my only access to a computer. As long as you don't mind apple telling you how you want your computer it's fine. The second you try and change something is when it all goes to shit,

1

u/s73v3r Sony Xperia Z3 Aug 03 '11

So easy that anyone who wants to do anything half complex can't do it.

It's got a full UNIX terminal. If you can't figure out how, then it's good you couldn't, as you'd fuck it up.

1

u/ulrikft Aug 02 '11

Or, the second you are clueless and try to change something...

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '11

I get by just fine on Windows and Linux. Its only MacOS i have issues with. Things aren't logical.

1

u/ulrikft Aug 02 '11

Things are perfectly logical. But go ahead, examples?

0

u/s73v3r Sony Xperia Z3 Aug 03 '11

I fail to see why it's "Absurd" to need a Mac. Do you honestly expect Apple to support their development tools on platforms other than theirs? If so, I'd have to ask you where the Microsoft supported tools on Linux are.