Apple has released the free iOS 4.3 update for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, goosing Safari's JavaScript performance, adding a handful of new features (not available on all models), and providing a flurry of security updates, all two days before it's set to appear on the iPad 2. Cupertino also rolled out Xcode 4, the …

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Thursday 10th March 2011 12:13 GMT Anonymous Coward

XCode

$4.99 is not a lot of cash for a professional development environment. As it happens I'm a registered developer so it's $99 for me. I easily make that with the Apps that I develop with it.

Compare the price of MS development tools. No serious developer uses the free versions....

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1. Thursday 10th March 2011 13:07 GMT Charlie Clark
  
  Not just for developers
  
  Quite a lot of stuff on MacPorts requires xCode to build - anything that uses Coacoa I think. Obviously, we're not supposed to be using none-Jobsian tools, though I for one like up to date posix stuff (openssl, etc.).
  
  USD 4.99 probably just covers billing for this so it's difficult to work out the logic behind it - just enough to piss people off so that the servers are not hammered or part of a more elaborate strategy around building up the garden walls. Are the days of `make install clean` on Mac OS numbered?
  
  After banning other runtimes are other GUI toolkits next on the list for Mac OS X?
  
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  1. Thursday 10th March 2011 13:43 GMT Ommerson
    
    The compilers are open source
    
    The tool-chain itself is either GCC or Clang - both of which are open source. You can always go and get them the old-fashioned way.
    
    Similarly MacOSX platform headers and libraries are where they always used to be - and where GCC and its ilk will be expecting them to find them, so you don't actually need to use the platform SDKs that come with XCode - but you won't be able to build for specific platform versions. This is probably fine for open sourcers.
    
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Thursday 10th March 2011 12:14 GMT Andy E

It's a disaster!

I upgraded to iOS 4.3 on a 3GS iPhone and it all seemed to work OK. For some reason it's optimising my photo's at the moment which makes the MacBook Pro's two CPU's run at 100%.

Despite all the new features seeming to work as it should, it is a personal disaster for me - Monopoly has been trashed and all the menu items are being shown in a hieroglyphic font or something similar to Microsofts Wingdings.

For the first time I had actually managed to get ahead and put up two hotels. Now the game is lost and the app unplayable. I'm heartbroken.

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Thursday 10th March 2011 12:25 GMT Mark .

Free?

For a moment I thought they'd open sourced it. I get free updates on my Nokia all the time, not really news.

I did tethering on my 6 year old cheap feature phone. Unless it means turning the phone into a Wifi router, but I thought that was common on high end phones these days too.

I can't remember the last time I paid for a development environment. I think it was AMOS on the Amiga 15 years ago. (And good it was too - though I still think that the official SDKs should always be free, whether it was the Amiga back then, or Windows, Linux, Symbian and Android now.)

DyXym: "In the short term it probably makes no difference since Apple is sitting on top,"

I agree with your post, but this isn't true - Apple aren't on top. They're about 5th place in phone companies, and 3rd by "smartphone" OS share. The reason it makes no difference is because of the large companies that will churn out Iphone apps no matter what, whilst ignoring the more popular platforms.

Spongibrain: MS give the Express versions away for free. And Qt for Symbian, and whatever SDK Android uses, are free (and open source).

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Thursday 10th March 2011 14:32 GMT Dave 142

FORTRAN

XCode still doesn't have a FORTRAN compiler though.

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Thursday 10th March 2011 14:32 GMT hexx

f***k you o2!!!!

so yeah, great feature that personal hotspot, apart from the fact that f****g o2 wants you to buy data bolt-on. what for???? i already pay for data allowance, it's part of my package. why the hell do i need to pay extra?

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1. Thursday 10th March 2011 15:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: f***k you o2!!!!
  
  Seriously?? You didn't see this coming?? When it was first outed in the US on Verizon the word was that it was operator opt-in.. If it's that important to you, pay the £7 odd a month (and get the extra 500Mb of data) or jailbreak it and get MyWi..
  
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  1. Thursday 10th March 2011 16:09 GMT hexx
    
    re:
    
    'If it's that important to you, pay the £7 odd a month (and get the extra 500Mb of data) ' - i already pay for 500MB why do i need to pay for another 500MB I won't use?
    
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Thursday 10th March 2011 21:27 GMT Wintermute

4.99 is infinitely more than Zero

If we had never had free dev tools on the Mac, then we'd have no reason to complain. But even for a few bucks vs zero pisses me off, and I'm probably not the only one who feels this way.

Does Apple really want to fragment their developers, with some people opting to stay with the older and free V3 while others use V4? That's possible but not in Apple's best interests. And who's to say that 4.99 in the developing world is manageable? Argh.

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Friday 11th March 2011 13:31 GMT ratfox

What terms?

Is it $4.99 per installation on a Mac, or $4.99 per developer?

I don't really get the need for this. This must really be a drop in the ocean for Apple as far as revenue is concerned...

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