Cocoa developer tools downgrade from openstep?
Cocoa developer tools downgrade from openstep?
- Subject: Cocoa developer tools downgrade from openstep?
- From: "Erik M. Buck" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 21:20:13 -0500
In terms of the Cocoa developers experience, another huge downgrade from
Openstep has been the tools and system integration.
I learned how dependent on Digital Librarian I was :(
Here is a list of faults/downgrades that make Cocoa development less
satisfying than
Openstep development in no particular order:
1) Searching in ProjectBuilder is poor.
2) HelpViewer is useless as many have commented.
3) Sherlock is frankly useless in OS-X and it is certainly not in the same
league with DigitalLibrarian.
4) Installer is no longer ubiquitous or dependable.
5) Documentation is missing.
6) Objective-C++ is gone. (but hopefully will return soon)
7) ProjectBuilder has lots of bugs including frequently showing the wrong
pointer which is inexcusable in a Cocoa application since Cocoa takes care
of that.
8) Many of the NSRect functions just don't work.
9) The standard print, color, font, page-layout, and file panels are
downgraded.
10) Frequent need to resort to procedural APIs for essential application
functionality.
11) NSWorkspace downgraded
12) No automatic fax support (for anything that can printed)
13) No reliable standard pasteboard type for vector graphics or images.
14) Degraded integrated debugging in Project Builder
15) No GUI indication of "Main" window vs. "Key" window vs. other windows.
16) Integrated class browsing in NeXTstep 3.3 -> Openstep 4.2 -> Rhapsody
DR2 -> Mac OS-X has come and gone and come and gone.
17) Cocoa applications must link all of Carbon (which expands the API that a
developer must encounter and degrades the resulting application for no
apparent
benefit)
18) Something is wrong or different with application profiling (the numbers
do not add up)
19) Many optimizations in FoundationKit class clusters are presumed missing.
The big one is that many advantages of immutable classes are gone.
20) The "portable" is missing from PDO which diminishes the usefulness
21) NSHosting is gone (which makes remote debugging hard)
22) The spell checker (built in dictionary) sucks
23) The standard font is ugly and hard to read (I liked Helvetica and Olfs)
24) I can't use Cocoa for daily work because it is not cross platform
On the up-side:
1) I like QuartzDebug
2) I like InterfaceBuilder's guides
3) Glyph and Font handling are greatly improved
4) I Like Quartz a lot, but I was puzzled at WWDC by the Apple OpenGL guys
wondering publicly why Apple did not just use OpenGL for 2D graphics. I
suppose the lack of device independence and good font support did not occur
to them.