Legacy? Are we inserting a little opinion piece in our news story or are we inventing new uses for existing English words?

Biff is a jackass…move along nothing to see here.

The story is real with no opinions but just facts. Apple has good customer service which is why it is number 1 in that area for the last 2 or 3 years. It's probably why that OSX is seeing more market share as well. Funny how that works when you listen to your customers.

Last paragraph, "just didn't exit" should be "just didn't exist". Seems like a nit, except that MS customer service does exit (or perhaps did exit decades ago).

I'm even more Joe Schmoe with a problem than the developer. I had some strange crashes with my Mac, and sent a crashreport. Since it happens very rarely, I filled it out with the info I thought was releveant and hit Send. A day later, a dev from Apple contacted me via mail. Wow! He had some questions about the crashes and we exchanged e-mails back and forth, where he instructed me on different things to try. We nailed the error to be at the program Salling Clicker, and how it interacted with the Bluetooth stack. That's a third party app, and Apple contacted Salling or fixed it in a BT update.

@biff - code that is finished is legacy code.

Dear Apple,
Why am I forced to use Objective-C instead of C++ to use the Cocoa framework? And why is XCode such a piece of garbage when it's really just a shell on top of gdb?
Cheers,
Jack

Response?
<crickets...>

I suggest you read the comments at that article. They are not all approving of Apple; nor do they uniformly diss Microsoft.

Same thing happened to me, except it was for Windows, whatta ya know. Seems to me anyone can make up some BS story, apparently I'm right.

Everything in the story is real, except the whole email response.

To bad the email doesn't exist, (exit) or we might be able to know the truth. Shame the email wasn't posted, huh? You'd think that would be absolute proof, but apparently it is not.

Why use Objective C? Because it's better. Why use Xcode? Because it's not a piece of garbage. Stop expecting it to behave like your Windows crap and you'll learn that it's actually quite better than it.

Well, I've been a Beta tester in several Microsoft Beta's now, and I haven't been able to reproduce your experience. I have had developers respond to my bug reports to thank me, ask for more information, or even explain why it won't be fixed (by design, or problem on my end, or third party problem, or whatever).

Wow, sounds like you had better customer service developing code than I get when I go in their store. They didn't make you pay them a restocking fee for their faulty OS did they? That's what they wanted me to do for their faulty iPod.

Glad you had a good experience with Apple. I am sure that they will continue to improve your code, and reply with tailored responses when they are on 90% of the worlds computers.

I'm a developer using Microsoft technologies. This story is very innacurate - there are many ways you can get help from Microsoft and the developer community. For example hit the MSDN forums and you generally receive feedback in minutes. More propaganda from the Apple nuts.

Have creepy crawlies hijacked this thread? And they all have the same name.

I am beta-ing Leopard as well. I've submitted several bug reports. Each one has been personally answered via email. Several were duplicates of existing reports. One was new and more information was requested. One time an engineer contacted me several times with "fixes" and even followed up to find out if they worked or not. I've been amazed at the attentiveness and support so far.

> "Legacy? Are we inserting a little opinion piece in our news story or are we inventing new uses for existing English words?"


Legacy, as in 'older'. Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, 3.11 and
now XP can all be considered legacy code.

i will firstly say that i have worked for apple for just over a year now and was previously and only a windows user so go ahead and call me biased now if you wish. However, to all of the people that love finding threads like these and trying to disprove or shoot them down solely because of their dedication to windows or because they had a bad experience at an apple store, this will not and does not discredit the millions of times apple users recieve excellent service especially in comparison with other technician support. Get over your one bad experience and if you hate apple and never want to use one, then dont.
And there is a "restocking fee" at most any electronics store. I'm sorry that someone else doesnt want to pay full price for your opened/used ipod and you didn't bring it back within the return date. Apple policies are pretty layed back, especially in comparison to other electronic retailers and their warranty/return policies, stop complaining to complain.

Of course it is easy to get the response - they are just happy that somebody cares and runs their stuff! Not only is 95-98% of the market PCs, but there are also far fewer apps for macs. Not to mention that they have pretty much only one configuration, and a fraction of the drivers to deal with.

>Of course it is easy to get the response - they are just happy that somebody cares and runs their stuff! Not only is 95-98% of the market PCs, but there are also far fewer apps for macs. Not to mention that they have pretty much only one configuration, and a fraction of the drivers to deal with.

Apple has enough employees to keep up with the demand for customer service, their 2-5%. Why does't Microsoft have enough for their 98-95%? Do they not want to retain all that marketshare because I'm sure Apple would like some of it.

Sorry, I forgot to adress your otheer issues.

>but there are also far fewer apps for macs.

What do you have we don't? Office? We got it! Cheesy crappy educational video game? We got it! Quake? We got them all! Where is your amazing, breath-taking, awing presentations? We have Keynote and PowerPoint sure doesn't come close. Please tell me what apps it is that Macs don't have a matching or very similar (and probably better) app.

>Not to mention that they have pretty much only one configuration,

I'm not a programmer so I'm not quite sure what this means... we have system prefreces... or are you reffering to the umpteen versions of vista? Yes, I gotta admit it, Apple gives you their very best when you buy, they won't even give you the option to buy anything short of their best like Microsoft. They give you... (looking at versions of Vista... OH MY G... who's the freaking idiot who made these things!? I don't have any idea which one is good enough but they all cost alot more than OSX and appear to do less.) Simpler to choose, you're calling that a problem.

>and a fraction of the drivers to deal with.

My printer is the only thing that has needed a driver so far and it had that. Several things I bought told my I needed a driver if I ran Windows but didn't if I ran Mac. Hmmm, easier to use, you're calling it a problem?

Yes, I suppose you're a bright one. Lets call up the good things about Apple, and call them bad. Lets call up some rumors that have been proven wrong so many times and say their true. Do you have a Devil on your shoulder? Who's on the other one, Bill Gates? Your in deep-poo with that crappy decision making combo.

Especially when you have 1/10 as many customers.

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Guest wrote:
Legacy, as in 'older'. Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, 3.11 and now XP can all be considered legacy code.

Ok thats great. But you see I actually gave Johnny boy the benefit of the doubt and I checked out our Windows developer friend's other blog posts to specifically see if he specialized in writing software for legacy operating systems or legacy hardware drivers, or anything that explains the use of the word legacy. Now my 2 minutes of research was certainly not exhaustive, so maybe I missed something, but it looks to be quite the opposite. Thus it seems to me like we had a little injection of opinion in this news piece. I understand that writing opinion pieces is easier and tends to get more talkback posts. So hey, why take the high road? But I personally come to this news site for news. Call me old fashioned, but mixing opinion into news reports is bad reporting. Again, if I'm wrong and this guy writes parallel port drivers for Windows 95, then I appologise.

Maybe legacy as in traditionally a Windows developer (or previously, if you prefer). Implying that now he is an OS X developer. Windows is his heritage, OS X is his future.

both automated and personal... though perhaps just 1 in several hundred.

That's why it's better. Duh.

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Anonymous wrote:
That's why it's better. Duh.

What?

Imagine that, apple can spend more individual time with each of the 10 mac software developers than Microsoft can with each of the 10,000,000 windows software developers. It's a big news flash!

Quote

Guest wrote:
Dear Apple,
Why am I forced to use Objective-C instead of C++ to use the Cocoa framework? And why is XCode such a piece of garbage when it's really just a shell on top of gdb?
Cheers,
Jack

Hey Jack,

I hope you'll try out Objective-C. There's one little advantage coming with Leopard: GARBAGE COLLECTION.
BTW, you do C++ for mac, but seriously, if you think about programming for the mac, just do a little project in Objective-C, there's some good stuff there. Just try to be "objective", meaning OOP.

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Intruder wrote:
Maybe legacy as in traditionally a Windows developer (or previously, if you prefer). Implying that now he is an OS X developer. Windows is his heritage, OS X is his future.

Well that would be option B from my original post: "inventing new uses for existing English words."

Then you need to look up the definition of legacy and heritage. It is a valid use of the word.

>Especially when you have 1/10 as many customers.
SO GET 10x AS MANY PEOPLE IN CUSTOMER SUPPORT! GEEZ! DOESN'T TAKE A GENIUS TO FIGURE THAT OUT! ACTUALLY, AN IDIOT CAN COME UP WITH IT! I'M AMAZED MICROSOFT HASN'T!

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Anonymous wrote:
Imagine that, apple can spend more individual time with each of the 10 mac software developers than Microsoft can with each of the 10,000,000 windows software developers. It's a big news flash!

Pathetic trolling effort. Really, you need to try a bit harder than that.

"Why am I forced to use Objective-C instead of C++ to use the Cocoa framework"

Actually, you're not forced to use Objective-C at all. You can use C++ and just write all message expressions as function calls using objc_msgSend() and related Obj-C runtime functions.

Of course, that would be a really stupid thing to do, but since you're a C++ bigot it should be exactly what you'd enjoy doing.

Quote

Guest wrote:
Dear Apple,
Why am I forced to use Objective-C instead of C++ to use the Cocoa framework?

The same reason as to why you can not code Java EE applications in Pascal, or use Ruby on Rails with C#.
Cocoa is a framework that is built on paradigms that is not available in C++. It is by choice, by giving up the mainstream language of C++, Cocoa can take advantage of what Objective-C has to offer. Instead of being "yet another framework", it can be truly great at what it do.

You Mac people remind me of Boston Red Sox fans... Always comparing themselves to the Yankees. When there's really no comparison. I'm NOT a Yankee fan or a Boston fan or even a baseball fan. It's just that when you compare the two franchises OBJECTIVELY, there is absolutely no comparison. The Yankees have won something like 26 world series and the Red Sox have won two... Uh... 26 to 2... please...

Mac people have an inferiority complex. Maybe this is what drives them to have a really good product.

Let's see how their customer service is when they have as many customers as Microsoft....

More is not always better