This effectively means that, if you have a machine running Snow Leopard that can run Lion, but not Mountain Lion (and there are quite a few of those perfectly good Macs, including two 2006 Mac Pros in my own family), you can no longer purchase Lion from Apple.
At least not through the Mac App Store.
J.D. Hildebrand and Andrew Binstock (via Hacker News):
Burt is devoting significant resources to code quality this year. “We’ve sent multiple teams of five developers into the Coverity logs,” he says. “They track down the warnings and fix hundreds and hundreds of minor coding issues. We’re cleaning up little things that have been there forever. The goal is to ship a release with zero defects.” This isn’t just a matter of tools, Burt acknowledges. Team and management support are essential because they must remain committed to QA every day. “It doesn’t matter what tools you use,” Burt says. “If your team doesn’t support it, if they’re focused on adding features, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t want to use a tool like Coverity to track down defects, that’s fine—don’t use it. But if you say you want it, then you’ve got to commit. The payoff in code quality is tremendous.”
Multiple teams of five just to clean up code? That’s quite the contrast with Apple’s app teams.
Notice that
selfis explicitly referenced inside of the block.selfcan also be referenced implicitly by accessing an instance variable. By default, blocks capture variables read-only, and objects are retained. Thereforeselfis retained, and we’re in a retain cycle situation.
That API was simpler with garbage collection.
But since iTunes Connect doesn’t have an API, all of these reporting tools need you to give them your developer Apple ID and its password, and they need to store it forever in their databases.
That’s why I never tried any of those services. However, he notes that you can give them a different login with limited privileges.
Smart Folders in the Finder can be extremely useful. (I’ll leave for an other time my discussion of why I think Apple’s unnecessarily limited a feature that casual users will never use) Here’s a few really useful ones I use that you might like.
I love the idea of smart folders, but in practice I rarely use them. Every once in a while I create a one-off one to do a complicated search. Most files that I want to access together are already grouped in a BBEdit or Xcode project or in an EagleFiler library.
I would love to write a Scrabble game for people who love Scrabble. Get a great designer who loves words (Neven Mrgan would be choice one). Imagine how awesome it could be! But I’m not going to write that game, or any other.
It’s completely an issue of trust here. If Apple hadn’t changed the rules already (they didn’t require sandboxing initially), I wouldn’t have this attitude. But since they did, then I won’t buy an app that couldn’t exit the app store gracefully if push comes to shove. The biggest barrier to such an exit is iCloud.
For my recipes, I use EagleFiler and Dropbox on the Mac and GoodReader on iOS.
When we talk about the importance of backing up, we often say that it’s a question of when, not if, your hard drive will fail. With the Mac App Store, it’s nearing certainty that if you haven’t yet been stymied by the impact of one of Apple’s Mac App Store rules, you will be soon.
