Re: Cocoa downgrade from openstep?
Re: Cocoa downgrade from openstep?
- Subject: Re: Cocoa downgrade from openstep?
- From: Gerard Iglesias <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 16:40:54 +0200
Well all of this discussion depends on the field where you are working.
Some people are presenting the past as the golden days of NeXT, in the
reality NeXT was a company that was slowly dying, step by step they were
abandoning a lot of things to focus to WO, IB was very buggy for
example, DPS was the same after 6 years, resizing YB windows under NT
was a shame when compared with Windows API based application,and so
on... And we were forced to work with PC hardware.
When you have embraced NeXT for the novelty, the graphics and the
hardware it was not funny at all.
There has been technologies axed from OpenStep, the 3D capabilities,
even if Kennet C.Dyke made public a very useful work he made at
Electronic Arts (I used it at Titus interactive :-) ), in the same vein,
NeXTTime was not a big priority for NeXT in 1996. For some people like
me it was the same as for some people now regarding the EOF tragedy.
The priority for NeXT at this time was Database and Web technology.
IMHO in 1996 NeXT was a dead company, they were not doing anymore funny
technology and it was the time to go back to Apple (I bough a 5400 in
October, my first new Mac for 5 years), and by surprise Apple bought
NeXT at the end of the 22 December (for the record, I was so happy that
I brought 2 bottles of Champagne at work to drink them with the R&D
department, they were thinking I was completely crazy :-) )
I was developing a Video annotation system with the YB under NT, and I
had to use the Quicktime C API and MediaPlayer activeX, We can see that
the need to interface with C API is not new.
I agree that the worst happened for people using WO, now they are forced
to work with Java ;-)
As you can see, I am one of the people that think that what happened at
the end of 1996, was the best thing it never happened to NeXT for a very
long time, I even don't speak about the pleasure to see the top NeXT
management taking the power at Apple :-)
From the point of view of the technology, we are in a dev mailist :-), I
think that a lot of fantastic things happened to Cocoa development :
1/ ObjC, it is alive and well
2/ Quartz, OpenGL, Quicktime (need still some work)
3/ A complete new Project builder, not mature enough for now(help,
index...), but has a lot of promise
4/ A lot of new functionalities in IB with a lot of debugging, and the
promise to see new things quicker than before
5/ ObjC++
6/ Applescript
7/ Integration with great Graphic Card natively
8/ the iceBook : I am writing this under the trees (Cyprhs, Pin, Chjnes)
in the parent's garden in Provence (near Aix en Provence) in the south
of the France where I am for my holidays, while MP3 capturing and 3DKit
programming with Cocoa. Too much fun (and don't say that it would be
possible with a Dell computer, I never spent and will never spend my own
money for a PC hardware)
9/ An ObjC Cocoa API alives and the promise to get it bigger and better
with each new release
Like others I have some concerns
1/ Cross platform, but gnutsep-base will resolve all my needs, I am
lucky...
2/ ObjC API to all the Graphic/Media technologies
3/ Better performances
4/ hardware targeted to small industrial company that need good hardware
not too much sophisticated at a good price
Have fun.
Gerard