Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 75

@Alrescha Pointlessly locking down your developer tools, the very tools you want to make easy for developers to use in order to make your platform attractive, is *not* a good idea, at least if you want to be on good terms with the developer community. Apple does *not* sell Xcode. If they did, this would be a completely different matter. If it was obvious that, yes, you must pay for this, it would be fine.

@Alrescha And you can tell me all day that there's nothing wrong with Apple's business practices, and I still won't agree with you, because they'll still feel wrong to me.

On paper, they have done nothing illegal or outright morally wrong. What I'm saying, though, is that they're being somewhat shitty about a thing, and I'm on Mastodon to vent about it, because it annoyed me.

@Alrescha The thing is that the fee is not for the software...

Listen... I had a surprisingly unpleasant experience with Xcode today, and nothing can change that this experience was unpleasant, and that it felt wrong to me.

You can tell me all day long that sleeping with a hooker isn't so bad, but that will not cause me to feel good about sleeping with hookers.

You can also tell me that accidentally cutting yourself on a sheet of paper is actually pleasant, but that won't make it so.

An Ethernet configuration in Ubuntu now looks like this: A YAML file.

Hello, Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) and full confusion. The age-old configuration file tree in /etc/interfaces is gone, and now we have netplan.io.

@Alrescha If they explicitly stated this up front and framed it as a licensing scheme for Xcode, it would make more sense. "To use Xcode in a team, you will need to join the Apple Developer Program". But they don't frame it like that. They frame it as needing this membership only if you're going to _publish_ your app. It's not possible for a pair of teenagers without credit cards to use this for learning iOS development together, for example.

@Alrescha That profile is designed for use on your local machine, so it would make perfect sense to be able to use any bundle identifier you want with it, but nope, if you clone the same project to a different machine with Git, it complains. Apple doesn't lose a cent in revenue on that, yet for some fucked up reason they explicitly choose to block it.

@Alrescha I mean, you still can't publish to the App Store without paying the $99 per year, so what's the harm? The whole code signing thing in Xcode is fine when the purpose is to prepare an app for publication. What makes it stupid is the requirement to pay for this ability when you don't actually need it yet. In fact, I don't get why Apple checks if bundle identifiers are unique when you use the Personal Team profile at all.

@Alrescha The corporation doesn't object. It was approved by the management. The thing is, they offer Xcode itself for free, and it's in their interest to do so, since nobody can target Apple devices without it. Free development tools are par for the course in 2018 and everybody expects it. What nobody expects, except from Apple, is to pay money, not to enable a feature, but to remove a pointless lock that doesn't seem to protect Apple's interests in any way.

@Oct326 The irony of the situation is that, for the individual, the healthiest reaction to a problem you can't do anything about is to stop thinking about it so much.

@Alrescha We will need this account later, when it's time to publish an app, but in the meanwhile, we are paying to get rid of an artificially created problem...

@Alrescha It's affordable. It's not the price. It's just the need to pay for a service. I mean, we aren't using Apple's resources. It's literally just to unlock an arbitrary limitation they have placed on a piece of development software for no good reason.

@Alrescha To avoid getting an error message about different Apple accounts using the same bundle identifier during development, we have to pay $99/yr for an Apple Developer Program membership. Again, we are NOT shipping the app yet...

@Alrescha Their requirement is to have a number in an *American* business register. They're the only multinational company I've encountered that doesn't do a per-country lookup when collecting information about business customers. They most certainly could afford to do so.

In any case, it doesn't matter what you say, because it's still a shitty experience. I mean, we aren't even ready to publish the app. All we want is have two devs use Xcode on the same app...

@Alrescha There is also the European Business Register, which also contains our information. I hate being treated like a second-class citizen. To even check if you have a DUNS number, Apple makes you fill out this huge form... and then after you fill it out, you get an error message about the service being down...

@Alrescha Developers? Yeah, you're going to have to get a business number from Dun & Bradstreet, an American corporation that charges you hundreds of dollars to even view the information in their database. The number is free, but still feels totally unnecessary. We are already registrered as a limited corporation in Norway.

@Alrescha Basically, information that would make you perfectly legitimate in Norway is considered insufficient for Apple, yet they sell apps and hardware in Norway and their online store has been localised and translated for this purpose, and there are Norwegian speaking customer reps.

@Alrescha I understand the need, but the thing is that when you sign agreements as a business in Norway, they are typically satisfied your business number from the Brønnøysund Register Centre, and perhaps a sign-in with BankID for identity verification. Apple has a localised consumer presence in Norway. I'm very unimpressed with how poorly localised their process for *developers* is...

@quad @lanodan ...wouldn't want your customers to go and buy an alternative product...

@quad @lanodan It's also normal to put the kind of cheese somewhere. Your cheese may have a brand name, but there is usually, somewhere on the wrapper, a description of the type of cheese. They don't like to mention these things because it gets a bit too close to revealing trade secrets. That's probably also the reason for neglecting to mention the type of rice on the grøtris box.