Re: Cocoa downgrade from openstep?
Re: Cocoa downgrade from openstep?
- Subject: Re: Cocoa downgrade from openstep?
- From: Scott Anguish <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 17:58:34 -0400
On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 12:08 PM, Eric Peyton wrote:
On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 10:45 AM, Erik M. Buck wrote:
I don't know how much you use Cocoa, but it is significantly
downgraded from
Openstep 4.2 in many respects.
Wow - as a huge Cocoa advocate, I had not noticed this. (blinded by my
own love for the platform? :-) )
Well, as much as I also love the platform, I can see what Erik Buck
is talking about... mind you, YOU (Eric Peyton) have more access than we
do.. :-)
Could you elucidate on which classes and what functionality has
downgraded for you?
From OpenStep 4.2?
- cross-platform is gone
- eof as a standard part of the system, gone
- pantone support, gone
- integrated inter-machine DO, gone
- a single unified method of development is now gone, with many
services not being brought to Cocoa classes, but instead being left as
much more complicated procedural APIs
- services are not universally available anymore
- NeXTime (lost it for a QuickTime procedural API only)
I have found that Cocoa has improved substantially since the OpenStep
days. The addition of things like NSTabView, NSDrawer, improvements to
NSApplication, the addition of CoreFoundation, NSDocument* and
NSWindowController, NSOpenGLView, all the new image support (via
Quicktime), NSSpell*, NSToolbar, etc. seem like a little more than
"some features".
NSSpell has been around for a while... I seem to recall that being
a "way back when" thing.
Yes, we have some new widgets, and the document classes are a
blast.. but.. we were told that there was a commitment by Apple to make
ALL UI bits that Apple uses available as GUI components.. many are still
missing
the new image support is very poor... we do get to load a good
number of additional file types, but we don't get to actually exploit
any of the additional stuff once they are loaded
we have the total goat seal of launch services, type/creator,
resource fork madness. Virtually zero support for this in Cocoa
directly, and some things like NSFileManager are totally busted with
respect to this support.
previously we had a pretty set standard of using TIFF for
everything. And that was great, since most every graphic program will
load and save them.. now we have CICN's, and without special add-ons
these aren't really creatable.. plus, there is no support for them in
NSImage, so you can't load/edit/save them trivially (you need to again,
resort to procedural APIs)
I also wouldn't consider CoreFoundation to be a Cocoa plus, if
anything, it's an indication of the state of things.. yes, there is the
bridging, but that's all.
That there are no Cocoa specific APIs that allow in-depth access to
things like QuickTime, Security Framework, Internet Config and such is a
real indication of concern... it's even more of a concern when you hear
people say that there are no plans to wrap this behavior/functionality
for Cocoa... even opening an URL is now split between NSWorkspace and
launch services..
yes, there are also performance issues... and things like sound,
HTML viewing (NSText's support is absolute minimal - we need something
substantially better),
there are also issues with the tools.. PB is great, but lacks the
level of integration that we had with InterfaceBuilder even more
recently than OpenStep 4.2... completion, auto-formatting, these are all
things that I'd come to rely on, yet are now missing (even if they come
back)..
Overall, I find that many areas are not providing the polish that
we got, even with NeXT (a miniscule company in comparison)... OpenStep
was a focus at NeXT, but here, it seems to be much less so. We can't be
sure that we'll get good, complete, proper integration of capabilities
into the Cocoa frameworks by default.
I'd love to know if Cocoa on 10.1 will have any support for SOAP
XML-RPC, or if it will strictly be procedural...
I don't want to rag on the Apple folks in the trenches.. they can't
make the choices.. just implement them.. but I'd like to see more
emphasis on this stuff...