XCode is now £2.99 and weighs in at just over 4GB!

Isn't that due to the oxley wotsit thing rather than apple's greed?

About 75p per GB. Not bad then really, for a tool.
Shame it's not free anymore though.

Apple.. never letting a revenue stream untouched
They could of not charged or charged a completly nominal amount but they havent.

If you sign up to a free developer account you can get xcode 3 for free. But £2.99 is not bad at all.

http://developer.apple.com/programs/register/

if you sign up as a free developer, it'll cost you £2.99 (although you can still get XCode 3 free). if you sign up as a 'proper' developer( £99), you can download Xcode 4 for free.

OK, on principle the fact they're charging for it is a bit rum.. but three quid? I mean come on. Anyone bitching about spending 3 quid on a full fat IDE for two separate platforms needs their bumps feeling. You can't even get a decent sandwich for three quid these days. I'd say if you don't have the motivation to spend 3 quid on the tools, you certainly don't have the motivation to read the docs to figure out how to use them, so you're better off just not bothering at all. In fact, I'd say spend the 3 quid to get the 'diff-style' auto-update mechanism in the app store system. Having to download the whole sodding thing every time they patched it was/is much more of a pain in the arse than spending 3 quid to get it.

(btw, I think there's some debate as to whether the whole Sabine-Oxley thing was a scam; note for example they aren't billing people for the iOS 4.3 update for iPod Touches this time).

As to iOS 4.3, I can report the 'wifi tethering' thing works very well. Beyond that, I don't see a whole lot of difference so far.

Jon

It's only "2 days before [the] iPad 2 arrival" in the States.
We (in the UK) still have another couple of weeks to wait for it.

Mark

I think that Sarbannes-Oxley has to all intents being repealed, so they do not need to account the same way.

While I agree, it just seems really odd. £2.99, it's so small that they might as well have charged nothing...
When you see the likes of Aperture going for £44.99, is XCode not worth that much? It is so so cheap you wonder why on earth they are charging at all...

Well, before they were getting nothing from 'casual' coders. Maybe this means they cover their costs to supply it to them.
One thing that isn't really discussed in the 'MS and etc still give their IDE away free' line - the stuff MS give away is actually quite harshly licenced. The free stuff is pretty much 'own use only'. If you want to sell (or even give away I think) the code you write with Visual Studio, you're required to be a registered developer, much like Apple devs do, and buy a 'proper' copy of VS.

So basically -

Code for yourself : Apple £3 Microsoft £Free
Code to make money : Apple £99 Microsoft £709 (VS Professional + MSDN membership)

That shows some level of the different attitudes of the two to developers. It suggests Apple don't really want timewasters but do want to encourage small shop developers, whereas MS (I suspect) think if they can get people to develop the skills, they will inevitably want to make money off what they've learned later on and then they can cash in. Short term vs long term thinking, IMO. To be honest, I rather prefer MS's line.

Jon

now thats something I thought I would never see

oh, I'm not dogmatically anti-Microsoft. I work with their stuff every day after all. At this moment I have a Mac and a PC on my desk and both have MS mice attached to them. I've said before you'll only get my Intellimouse explorer bluetooth off me if you can prise it from my cold, dead hand . I just happen to think Windows and Office are a steaming pile of horse manure and I would no more have them in my house than I would poke a live cobra with a short stick.

Jon

I am a mac user but I do like Office. I find it much easier to use than iWorks or Open Office. Maybe that is primarily down to the fact that I have used it for years and so it is familiar to me. The other programs maybe excellent, but for me with my amnesia, the learning curves are too steep. I did how ever find the transition to OSX a doddle.

Unless there is 4.5GB worth of patches, I don't think XCode does 'diff-style' updating...Version 4.0.1 is out and I was thinking "Yeah, the update won't take long...", It estimating two and a half hours...