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Ask HN: What frustrating things do you wish someone would solve?

8 points by buss ↗ HN
What frustrates you about your day-to-day development process that you would like someone to solve?

What tools or processes get in your way instead of making life easier?

8 comments

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makecheck
What gets in my way...I think "Xcode 4" sums it up. Almost everything Apple did to that once-great IDE has created endless frustration and slowed me down considerably (not to mention making my 2nd display practically useless). It was apparently designed by someone who doesn't do much programming, or at least someone who doesn't know how to multitask.

I can still use Xcode 3.x and Interface Builder for now, but I'm sure their days are numbered. So what I need (again) is a decent set of high-level Mac development tools. If I could open-source Xcode 3.x and start from that, I would.

Note that I've never used an IDE exclusively (I use makefiles and terminal-based text editing for instance), but basically Xcode is no longer suitable for the things that an IDE was useful for.

buss
That's really interesting. I haven't done any mac development (I'm almost entirely *nix or web dev), so I'm not aware of the difficulties with Xcode. I'm generally only using vim, but I've struggled through Eclipse (and its roughly weekly crash cycle) when doing java development to know the kind of problems IDEs can introduce.

I've been meaning to do some iPhone & OSX development, so I will check out Xcode with a toy application and see what gets in my way.

Thanks for the suggestion!

glimcat
Crappy documentation.
buss
Yeah, I feel you. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to tackle this without a fundamental shift in the development community. Self-documenting code is practically a fallacy, and people forget that we're supposed to write code primary for other humans to read, and only incidentally for computers to execute.

I wonder if a marketplace for documentation development would help the problem. This might not work, however, since writing documentation requires a good amount of familiarity with the code base.

dholowiski
Paypal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) api just about had me in tears last night.
buss
Oh jeez. It's been years since I've dealt with paypal, but if it's still as bad as it was then there's a ton of room for improvement. I've heard great things about stripe & fee fighters but I haven't checked them out yet. Maybe they've missed something...
jamieandrews
Everything about Paypal must die. For a B2B customer experience I don't think they could perform more badly.
dividebyzero
Quickbooks. Integrating an online store with quickbooks can be a nightmare. And their pay structure (single user, multi user) is extremely frustrating. I really wish someone could make a good web solution with a nice API that destroys this massive headache.