Exactly. Apparently Apple still finds enough idiots who perform that dance, but they've lost me. I can only hope others will follow and xtool looks like it can help.
Don't worry, those "idiots" are doing perfectly fine with great salaries and a nice developer experience who apparently figured out using archaic hardware for developing newer devices is practically pointless even if there were software support.
I don't use Xcode anymore in practice (Vscode+React Native here) yet back in the ObjC+storyboard days I loved storyboard and general expressiveness of Objective-C.
Sure it had quirks (codesigning issues, weird errors from underlying C-level calls, ObjC "primitives" bot playing nicely with C primitives without boxing etc.) but I generally loved the experience especially around WYSIWYG of storyboards.
It's a matter of taste then. As a fullstack dev I still end up loving how Xcode cleanly represents things visually even though I'm not using it much other than building step anymore.
I already could jump to other stuff if I didn't like it, the reason I kept using it because I simply liked the experience, at least to my personal taste of seeing things.
If you think having a different personal taste is "stockholm syndrome" I don't have much else to say though.
Good salary for sure but as for the developer experience, the iOS tooling is one of the worst you can have in the modern era. I'd even pick the nodejs anarchy over xcode and that says a lot.
I'd argue it's not about my opinion. What my parent comment describes is a recognizable pattern that Apple has been pulling for over a decade now. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me ad nauseam again and again — well...
I daily every os for 2-3 years and then switch. There are lots of benefits to OSX. Stability, perfect Standby and battery runtime to name a few. This would not be possible if they would support older Hardware. As long as windows and linux is unable to archive similar metrics, they prove apples point about this topic.
Just look how fast everybody transitions to M Processors including the software developers. There is no point to stay on old hardware with apple.
Most of us get compensated to do it and the hardware either paid for or tax deductible. Whatever positions you take as a developer, there is strong end-user demand for software on iOS and to a certain extent macOS so there will continue to be people who'll do that dance.
CodeTyphoon and U++ are 2 valid alternatives to LiteCode+wxWidgets.
You can cross-compile with all 3 of them, but most importantly, you will only see the advantages of using them in the long run (rather than Visual Studio)
It's hard to explain until you try yourself doing a big C# project, in the short term it seems so convenient and such a good idea (same as with Unity, or Embarcadero)
I tried to use it to make an invoice system:
wanted to convert plain-text CSV (description,amount,cost) --> to Markdown tables --> to PDF.
But I was unable to align the following 2nd table with taxes: cells are all over the place and it does whatever it wants. And there is no information online to be found about it.
(I eventually gave up long time ago and still to this day manually do them in LibreOffice Writer adding taxes with a calculator)
Except this, it's a really neat piece of FOSS software!
I was thinking the same thing: I would use HTML as an intermediate, targeting PDF through weasyprint.
In fact I quite often go .md -> .html with pandoc, but write the .md in such a way that, when translated, it is the kind of html that weasyprint will be able to turn into the PDF that I want.
I use pandoc quite often - but I wish the intermediate, internal pandoc format was a little more expressive, exactly for things like this. I also tried making an invoice.
I just recently put together something for invoices that wound up being Jinja2 + data -> HTML-> weasyprint -> pdf. Was quite straight forward, all in all.
User maven29 already mentioned the NumWorks open source calculator, and the new OS fork, but here is a video to better appreciate some of the features:
Or "Geany IDE" on desktop environment (while waiting for lapce.dev to get better), I tend to stay away as much as possible from VS Codium, but everyone else seems to love it and already forgot about Atom, few seems to realise how Microsoft really is.
Maybe the plot twist is that you have to accept in your heart that "writing text on anything, is the real IDE", and transcend to writing on nano!
A rich text-based UI feels like it has all the downsides of a GUI while substantially lacking the upsides.
For example, Tilde. It seems nice and maybe it has nice features, but what about these features is so highly dependent on being accessible through a "menu"? Do you reach for the "menu" all the time? Or are there fancy "dialogs"?
This feels like Vim, but with some strange plugin that provides a "menu". I'd think why not just jump ahead and ditch the quasi-GUI and just learn some shortcuts?
Honestly not trying to be difficult here. I want to understand the mindset, because you are definitely not alone.
it asked me to update Xcode;
Xcode asked me to update the OS first;
and the OS asked me to buy a new 1300$€ MacBook hardware (with similar specs, the one I was using wasn't even that old/slow).
So to quote Rick and Morty i though: "That's just subscription with extra steps!" - and made a windows program and an Android app.