Take Off The Blinkers.

Look I’m not going to say that I’m above rabid fan boy-ism. In fact there are multiple occasions where I’ve made up excuses for some of my companies of choice (notably Bioware and Sony) but I usually at least take the time to find out all the facts before disregarding them completely. Mostly I do this so I can use my opponent’s position against them, much like I’m doing in a fledgling tweet battle with one of my friends, but if I come across a hard line fact that I can’t get across I’ll do the requisite back flip and change my position on the matter. Like I did when the iPad sold like hot cakes.

However the latest storm comes from none other than the fan boys of that company. A couple days ago Apple released their latest version of their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Xcode 4. Personally I wasn’t excited about the release since if I had my way I’d do everything in Visual Studio (and it means yet another 4GB download, eurrgh) but some of the features piqued my interest. The integration of Interface Builder into the core Xcode application is a welcome change as well as the improvements to the debugger and an intelligent error detection engine. I haven’t yet had a go with it but the reviews I had read so far are positive so I’m sure it will make my iPhone coding life a little easier.

However Apple made the controversial move of charging $4.99 for it through the Mac App store (it’s still free to developers who are paying $99/year). Whilst the barrier to entry for Xcode is well above that thanks to the Apple hardware tax it still pissed a good number of enthusiasts off since Apple doesn’t ship a compiler with OS X, leaving many to either go without or go the dark route of installing GCC themselves. Personally I didn’t care either way since I’m already well over $4000 in the hole just for the privilege of developing for iOS but what got my goad up was when people started comparing it to Visual Studio’s pricing.

Now since Visual Studio is aimed at corporations its pricing is, how would you say, corporately priced. The cheapest version you can find on the site is $549 a whopping 110 times the price of Apple’s offering. Now whilst I could argue that the value of Visual Studio is well worth the price of admission (and it is, even if it’s just for the debugger) you’d have to be a loon to pay that price if you just wanted to develop apps for a single platform. The reason behind this is because Microsoft offers up special platform specific versions of Visual Studio for free under the Express line of their products. There are 4 different versions on there currently and combined they cover pretty much all types of development on the Windows platform. Apple does not offer Xcode free in any form anymore so realistically the comparison to Visual Studio is apples to oranges, as one is either 110 times the cost or reversed its infinitely more expensive (literally).

Perhaps I’m getting too worked up over an issue that in reality means nothing, since most people who are retweeting this nonsense are probably not developers. But still when people show a blatant disregard for simple facts (hell even a simple Google search) it gets me all kinds of angry. Couple that with a complete lack of other inspiration for today’s post and you get this ranty, nigh on pointless post about Apple fan boys. I probably shouldn’t be so angry at those people who are simply retweeting the nonsense but it’s this exact kind of me-tooism that causes the kind of zero-value blogging that’s reducing the signal on the Internet to be nigh on indistinguishable from the noise.