On Jun 22, 2012, at 12:07 PM, Luther Baker wrote:
Alex, at a certain point, your approach to all of this becomes reprehensible.
I can barely make it through your posts without coming across an enormous number of personal jabs and negativity. I can hear you screaming and it is ruining my day.
Then you're reading in to it too hard. It's hard to emphasize something in text while being able to satisfy everyone.
It's not reprehensible by any means, but the process is terribly over complicated and when something fails, the error messages are all too often completely lacking in helpful information. Apple's docs stop at Enterprise distribution saying "you can use a third party to do it", and then don't tell you who any of these third parties are.
If there ARE clear documents for getting set up to deploying and distributing, then they are lost in the mass of information.
Your problems seem plausible, but it is not fun to follow nor to read your immature diatribes. Maybe you can backoff the rudeness just a bit for this forum?
Well, hopefully, one or two people will enjoy the schadenfreud. If I am the only person who goes through this, then that's quite fortunate for everyone else.
Really, not trying to be mean - just trying to keep this forum readable.
I understand, but if someone doesn't outline what a mess this process can be there's going to be little impetus for Apple to improve it.
Look. How many revs of Xcode 4 do we have now? The quality of this product is not good enough and the dev to deploy process seriously stinks. (I prefer the honesty of me previous term.)
It was not so long back that simply doing a search in the Organizer documentation and clicking in the resulting text entry field would crash Xcode.
Doing an undo of duplicating labels in the storyboard could crash the app.
I used to make sure that an older IDE was good enough to ship because
people made their living off of it. Yeah, C is hard, I get that. But I'm shocked that Apple puts more impetus in putting animated panels into Xcode than in making Xcode stable and making the iOS deployment process smooth.
Wasn't there a release recently Xcode a find in the app would crash on search and replace? 4.3.2, in fact.
I'd hate to be in the situation of having to have to deliver an OS X application, if it's this bad for iOS.
It was also not so far back that we used Xcode 3 and it was nowhere near as messy as 4 is. I actually liked it.
If we all sit here and say nothing or say "this is awesome", then how will this app and our development/deployment experience get better?
Simply by outlining the mess of certificates and provisions and manifests illustrates just how convoluted the process is.
I had a new engineer waiting for his initial certificate yesterday and all the provisioning portal would display is this in the top left when he would upload the created certificate:
Invalid Certificate XThis doesn't help get a new developer up and running. Why wouldn't someone get angry at this?
It's only one step away from being completely useless in helping the developer find out why his certificate is invalid.
And that's the exact problem that I've had and tried to outline in the case where an iOS app install fails. In the three potential cases, there is nothing that says what the nature of the failure is.
This is why we have illustrative error messages, to help resolve a problem. And it's not acceptable for developers trying to deploy a product to have to deal with such an overly complex certificate/provision system with complete lack of illustrative error messages when things go wrong.
I'm not saying it's supposed to be a complete joy or even fun, but in Apple's own words used in the sound manager in 1991 we need it need the system to "suck less".
People earn their living off this app and process and so do companies. Wasted time is wasted money. Do you want the app and process to continue to be this troublesome and just deal with it or put some pressure on Apple to clean up this mess, streamline the process and actually provide clear paths to take when something goes wrong?