Crazy Apple News Site

At first, it just doesn’t make sense. Apple is selling, selling XCode, that amazing—and previously free—programmer’s delight of an IDE that is the gateway to the riches of putting your programs in the App Stores.

Don’t get me wrong, XCode 4 is a massive improvement on the previous versions, with everything integrated into a single window, a massive improvement on the previous versions’ tendency to spread windows over your entire desktop and eventually into other Spaces, just because there are so dang many of them. The new debugger is faster, more intuitive, gives you good stack traces, even on multiple threads, and actually tries to trace your local variables and display them in a way that makes sense to humans, again something at which XCode 3 struggled.

So many of us purchased XCode 4 from the app store, telling ourselves that, considering how much Windows developers pay for Visual Studio we were getting off easy. And we downloaded the 4.5 Gigabyte file, and we ran the installer, and everything was good. XCode 4 was installed! Life was happy. Blithely we deleted the Installer file that the App Store dropped into our Applications folders and started tinkering around with all the new features, like Git integration and a useful timeline view of code changes and whatnot.

Then, a few days later, Apple released version 4.0.1 of the app. Well, we had noticed a few things that were kinda buggy with the initial release, so that’s to be expected. We go into the App Store, expecting an upgrade notification and…nothing. The App Store says we haven’t installed XCode 4. But look! It’s running right there! Lo and behold, deleting the 4.5 Gigabyte installer file from our Applications folder is what told the App Store that we no longer had XCode on our drive. So we download the new version—all 4.5 Gigabytes of it—and reinstall. The awful truth dawns slowly: we have to keep that stupid installer file to get our “convenient” automatic updates.

This, I feel, is too coincidental. It is clearly a joke, played upon the Apple developer community and their ISP’s. Apple is too smart to saddle their developers with a gigantic dead weight file and massive downloads for every patch release. Fortunately, they’ve given us some clues. Look at the version number: 4.0.1. Does that suggest anything to you? Looks a lot like 4/1, doesn’t it? Yep, it’s an April Fool’s day joke.

Okay, Apple, you’ve had your fun. Now let’s make with version 4.0.2 getting rid of the annoyance factors. I’ve got better uses for that huge chunk of hard drive space. Thank you.

While the “Chuck Norris Facts” thing is generally recognized as over, new research suggests that Mac users got away from the craze earlier than Windows users.

“It is suspected that Mac users are more up to date and urbane than their windows using counterparts,” noted John Hopkins of Johns Hopkins University, adding, “So Mac users wouldn’t say something like ‘Chuck Norris ordered a Big Mac at Burger King, and got one’ at the end of a quote like this.”

“Oh come on!” replied Paul Therott, “Everyone still loves Chuck Norris facts. Look: I just made one up: ‘Chuck Norris can upgrade directly from Windows 95 to Vista’ See? Hilarious!” Steve Ballmer was similarly incensed. “Chuck Norris-based humor is a major cornerstone of all modern operating systems. Windows 7 won’t boot up, it’ll be roundhouse-kicked into functionality instantly.”

John Gruber, however, felt that the findings of the study “were exactly what I expected. I mean, no one is going to laugh at something like ‘ Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch, HE decides what time it is.’ Heh. Hee hee hee. Hmph. Hmmm. Excuse me. Nor are we impressed to hear that ‘Chuck Norris counted to infinity – twice’. We’re urbane, busy, intelligent people who have to argue about what Apple is going to name 10.6.”

Others in the Mac world have taken a different tack, seeing now as a perfect time to capitalize on the Chuck Norris wave by attributing hyperbolic attributes to their favorite media icon.

“David Allen doesn’t read books, he just puts them into his inbox until they are filed under @home @read,” writes Merlin Mann, who admits that his “David Allen facts” are a long way from being T-shirt worthy.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Linux users were seen hoarding Chuck Norris references against a time when they would be funny again, as they have done with other web memes.

Apple was contacted for a comment, but all they would say is that their favorite fact is:

Chuck Norris has the greatest poker face of all time. He won the 1983 World Series of Poker, despite holding only a joker, a Get Out of Jail Free Monopoly card, a 2 of clubs, 7 of spades and a green 4 from UNO.