Re: Cocoa, a complete Mac OS X API?
Re: Cocoa, a complete Mac OS X API?
- Subject: Re: Cocoa, a complete Mac OS X API?
- From: "Dennis C. De Mars" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 20:50:36 -0000
Jorge Salvador Caffarena <email@hidden> said:
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The feeling I have about Cocoa right now is that it is a superb API,
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with a excellent IDE (PB & IB) but that is lacking some key features for
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common Mac apps. I have read some examples of this in this list, as the
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"AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges" lack of features, the Aqua
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Interface Guidelines about NSBoxes and its titles and the actual
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implementation inconsistence, the inexistent API for getting the list of
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running process, and one of the most annoying things about Cocoa for me
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is its total lack of support for resources forks.
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Almost all this things can be done using Carbon calls (making a Carbon
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wrapper is one thing I do not have any idea on how to do) buuuuut, I
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thought that Stevie told to us that the state-of-the-art API for
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developing Mac OS X applications is Cocoa, and Carbon is just to make
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the Mac OS 9 leap. But it turns out that Carbon is more feature rich
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than Cocoa, in terms of Mac friendship.
Cocoa has some deficiencies in spots which I am sure will be addressed. Right now Apple
is devoting most of their energy to strengthening the foundations of the system, but
when that effort is complete I am sure they will devote more attention to adding Cocoa
APIs and sprucing up the existing ones.
On the other hand, I am sure Carbon is there for the foreseeable future, and some of
those capabilities may not be provided in Cocoa for quite a while, as nice as it would
be to have an object-oriented interface to some of that stuff.
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So the fact is that I started learning Cocoa, and realized that most
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ideas for applications involved accesing to resource forks, but this
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cannot be done with Cocoa. I have to use Carbon. Maybe it is time to
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spend some more bucks in "Learning Carbon" :-P
One thing I will make a prediction about, I would bet that there will _never_ be
significant support for resource forks in Cocoa. You'll have to go to Carbon for that.
I'm curious as to why you need to access resource forks...if you are programming Cocoa
then you are writing OS X only software, so you might as well eschew resource forks in
favor of bundles. You can't even have resource forks on some file systems that OS X can
use (namely UFS).
- Dennis D.