Comments on: Apple’s Instruments for Developers

By: Apple Fan

Apple Fan — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:18:56 +0000

Nice post … In fact, it’s the coolest post I read this month and deserve a Facebook share!

By: Geoffrey Goetz

Geoffrey Goetz — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 04:29:48 +0000

Being a former Borland Employee myself, I can certainly appreciate the value of a well built IDE.

By: Geoffrey Goetz

Geoffrey Goetz — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 04:25:10 +0000

Even languages such as Java with Garbage Collection will crash when they encounter a null pointer exception. Developing in a language that supports Garbage Collection alone does not prevent the types of crashes that the Zombies Instrument can help track down.

By: Geoffrey Goetz

Geoffrey Goetz — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 04:21:29 +0000

Every language has its weak points, and not all of Apple’s instruments are used to track down language specific errors/bugs in developed code. Regardless of platform or language, resources are scarce. Profiling one’s app is essential on any platform. Instruments like the Time Profiler or the Allocations Instrument are tools that are applicable to any/all languages and/or platforms. Almost all code (in any language) can be refactored to perform better, and any code (also in any language) can run our of system memory if not designed carefully.

By: Geoffrey Goetz

Geoffrey Goetz — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 04:14:47 +0000

The most interesting new instrument for mobile is definitely the energy diagnostics. Being able to collect data in the files based on real world usage and taylor your application best on optimum battery performance is something that Apple must take seriously if they invested in the development of tools to help developers make more energy efficient apps.

By: Raimon

Raimon — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:16:26 +0000

Well, Objective-C DOES support garbage collection. It’s just not implemented on the iPhone to save battery life. Although it could be a debatable decision it does not lack its logic.

But saying that not suporting GC is obsolete or a relic is even more debatable. When I’m programming a game or some resource intensive application the last I want is to have a GC thread lurking on the background taking decisions for me about when is the best moment to release memory.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:22:54 +0000

@Nick: Insofar as automatic garbage collection is a Good Thing, it is not a replacement for a developer’s brain… I started in x86 assembler (Darn, .com executables. Do i MUL or bit shift? Which JMP is the best?) then moved to VB and PHP…
The young’uns have never heard of code optimisations, fights between programmers over algorithms that could have saved 1 or 2 bytes (oh, the PDP11…). Heck, I’m dottering and I’m only 32!

What people have forgotten is that mobile devices have a different set of constraints compared to a desktop system, and is much similar to a games console: No upgradability and no OS choice, and from there, all the apps must play nice with what is today a third world computing platform. The platform/OS supplier must force the users to play nice or else, because they don’t want problems 10 years down the road.

The current set of design tools are not perfect, then again, none are. They could be better, and these tools are a step in the right direction.

The other problem is that for the time being, Apple is stuck with a legacy of system development tools, and this is what their developers are currently using, just with an extended internal-only API. Given time, they may come around and end up building an iPhone version of Visual Studio for Mobiles that MS designed yonks ago (and abandonned?).

Desktop computing has come in 20 years from assembler to full GUI’s (and horribily unoptimised code). Borland, CodeWarrior, Microsoft, Apple, RealBasic, all have pushed the envelope in app development for the desktop platform, but mobile computing has had a new bar set by the iPhone, and there is only 3-4 years of development tool investment by only 1 company…

Apple is not whiter than white, and I personally have no qualms in bashing them over iphone jailing, restricting MacOS on Apple Mac’s only and a lot of other things, but for once, I’ll side with them and say cut them some slack and give them a few more years… the technology is still moving :)

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:59:26 +0000

Those debugging applications have (almost) all been around for the Mac for quite some time, so I’m not surprised that they ported it over to the iPhone. I doubt they’re as helpful as you claim them to be, though. I haven’t developed on Apple products for a year or so now, but I remember attempting to do so being the worst development experience I ever had. It’s not like I was a new developer; I’d been writing applications for about 5 years then, but it just really didn’t fit well. I’ve since moved on to platforms and languages which suit me much better.

By: Twelve Design

Twelve Design — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:10:52 +0000

Apple is presenting the developers a great, and yet very exciting challenge!

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:59:31 +0000

It’s amazes me that apple put so much effort into these instruments apps. Why should the dev have to spend all that time tracking down bugs and memory leaks when apple themself are responsible for forcing devs to use obsololete programming language like objective-c with no GC for iOS development. The rest of the world have automatic garbage collection on there mobile os:es helping the devs. Objective-c overcomplicated syntax and lack of GC makes iOS development a not so fun environment to be in. Trust me you may have seen some great apps for your iPhone and iPad but the process behind could be so much better and fun if apple just would let go of the relic from 1985 that is objective-c.