Best to judge someone by their actions. The actions of the corporate person Apple are far less developer friendly of late than Apple ca. 2010. It's like Apple is turning into the Microsoft of the early 2000's. (Stylus tablet computers? Check! Foisting their own development environments on everyone? Check!)

Are you under the impression that you have to use Xcode to create Mac or iOS applications? Or do you just mean that Apple provides an IDE?

You pretty much have to use Xcode or Apple provided toolchain for building iOS apps.

You do not have to use Apple toolchain for building macOS apps, if you are content with the fact, that your binaries might be broken in future macOS releases. With point releases, even. For a case study, see golang.

I buy an iPhone. How do I create and publish an app for it?

Work gave me my first smart phone, an iPhone. I thought it was great at first. Then I started to use it, transfer photos, etc. Then I saw the number of hoops you had to jump through to make an app and get it on your phone. That was enough for me. It was a while ago, but I have my doubts that it was much easier. I try to steer people away from an iPhone if they don't have a mac. They just don't play nice with others. Development is the same. I never did make an iPhone app because I didn't have a mac.

My next phone was one I bought, a Nexus device from google. Want to get an app on it? Download the SDK and tools, fire up hello world, throw it on your phone and it works.

> Download the SDK and tools, fire up hello world, throw it on your phone and it works.

This is exactly how it is done on iOS too from iOS 7/8. You don't need a Developer Account anymore to put your own apps on your own phone. You need a Dev. Account only if you want to push the app on App Store.

Do you need an Apple machine to do it on?

For typical iOS development using Swift/Objective-C yes, you will need an Apple machine. Some people are using VMs instead but the experience is (usually) terrible. There are also cloud services where you can rent a macOS VPS, I never tried this approach.

Is there a way to create iOS applications without XCode and MacOS? I've been looking for a way to compile apps on Linux.

The original airport express cannot be managed by newer airport utility, and you cannot run the older airport utility on newer versions of macos. facepalm

Maybe a hint that it's an out of service obsolete product?

Is it really reasonable to expect users to buy a new router every 2-3 years? 50mbps 802.11g is still plenty sufficient for casual web browsing and streaming, especially considering the fact that most people still don't even have internet connections which are that fast.

My $20 TP-Link router that I bought around 2010 or 2011 is still quite healthy and providing more than sufficient service to my parents' house and is only now starting to fall behind their connection speed (their connection recently got bumped up to 100/5, after being 30/3 for close to a decade)

If you're still running 802.11g, please make damn sure you've turned down the transmit power as much as possible. It's a big waste of airtime compared to 802.11n, so please do everything you can to make sure your low-speed broadcasts aren't getting in the way of other wireless networks that have to share the 2.4GHz band with you.

How is the security patch situation with that router, though? One reason a router upgrade is necessary so soon is just that the manufacturer abandoned it that soon. And then you're part of a botnet before you know it.

The latest Airport Extreme was released June 2013 and the most recent firmware update for it was Dec 20 2016. That's a longer lifespan than most consumer routers, and I expect the Airport will continue getting firmware updates for quite a while.

I just finally got an AirPort Extreme like a year ago, it's a fantastic router. What new features am I missing out on?

The old airport utility for example could send the syslogs to a remote server, set the level of information to be logged and configure SNMP.

It's not a matter of 2-3 years. That product dates from 2004. It's very very very old. He's talking about the original Airport Express.

>Is it really reasonable to expect users to buy a new router every 2-3 years?

For the affluent Apple's end of the market, yes.

Sure. shrug It just feels like it would have been relatively trivial to carry over the management code for the older devices into the new application. The Airport Express was my favorite traveling companion back when wifi was harder to come by, and you'd better believe 802.11g is fast enough for most hotel internet connections :)

Option-clicking on most UI elements in the new Airport Utility gives you the more complex dialog boxes from the old version, not the new wizard/walkthrough ones.

Lots of debug/admin related stuff is hidden behind the Option key in macOS. Try clicking on the volume or wifi menu extras to see some examples of this.

Yeah I feel like I am playing "Where's Wally", randomly Option-key clicking various different things to see what I can do. I guess that's fun for some people, but in my opinion a Menu, is supposed to layout all the options.

The current version of Airport Utility straight up doesn't work with some of the older Airports. IIRC Lion or Mountain Lion won't let you install the older versions, so you have to muck around with the pkg installer to even get the app.

... and when you get bored of Option-clicking, give Shift-Option clicking a try. Pulls up even more debug choices in Wifi/Bluetooth among others.

I'm in the same boat. I have to keep Airport Utility 5.6 around in order to configure two of the Airports on my network. Fortunately, I have an old iLamp that I use for the task, and also as a media server.

How does one obtain an old version of these utilities? Do you mean you just have an old mac running old OS X somewhere?

You can download 5.6.1 from Apple:

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1536?locale=en_US

You will need to manually unpack it via pkgutil/tar. However, it will won't run under 10.12 since it requires an older version (Mountain Lion) of Apple80211.framework. Assuming you have a copy of the older framework, you can make it work.

Fortunately, someone has already done this work:

https://zcs.zyniker.org/airport-utility-v5-6-1/

you can just run the application if you have an old OS installation on another volume.

Quicktime 7 is one of the first things I install on a new mac because it still opens a bunch of files and does things that Quicktime X cannot.

Quicktime X can't even open a plain .mov file without "Converting" it.

I do too. However, the new one is significantly upgraded from its first version if memory serves - I recall new settings being added all over the place which didn't exist previously.

yeah, Gnome tends to do the same thing...which is really annoying as well. Why not just wait until you have feature parity until nixing the old versions?

I thought they were sunsetting Airport devices and would be surprised if they kept putting software development into them.