Re: How viable is Cocoa development?
Re: How viable is Cocoa development?
- Subject: Re: How viable is Cocoa development?
- From: "Erik M. Buck" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 14:29:55 -0600
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We have worked a lot of with PowerPlant but always felt that it takes
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too long before new OS developments are incorporated. Cocoa in that
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sense seems very attractive. However, we are concerned that Apple
Cocoa is not particularly attractive here. New features are primarily added
to Carbon and only exposed to Cocoa if and when Apple gets around to it and
it is very low priority for them.
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will pull the plug out of Carbon or Cocoa at some point to reduced
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development costs. It did so with MacApp so why not with either
I am not sure, but I think that MacApp is still available as source code
from Apple. You may be able to maintain it and bring it forward yourself.
I might add that Apple has abandoned many more APIs than just MacApp. They
have stranded many developers over the years. Don't even start on QuickDraw
GX...
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Carbon or Cocoa. As the majority of the large software companies seem
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to go for and depend on Carbon it does not seem very likely that that
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plug will be pulled any time soon. While Apple would like us all to
Carbon will exist as long as Apple exists.
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move to Cocoa we have the impression that there are very few major
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vendors building Cocoa applications, so it seems that plug may be a
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lot less firmly fixed despites Apple's current rhetorics.
I think the odds that Apple will abandon Cocoa before they abandon Carbon
approach 100%.
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So my questions to you as Cocoa developers are:
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1) Whether there are any "big names" depending on Cocoa right now?
Apple themselves are doing a little bit of Cocoa development. There are
many small companies including mine that do Cocoa development. Our
applications may be "big", but NeXT and Apple have seemingly done everything
they could to keep our companies small. Dropping proven cross platform
support was unforgivable.
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2) Why we should move to Cocoa if we want to do OS X only development
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and optimally exploit the potential of OS X?
Using Cocoa is a joy. Cocoa is technologically far superior to almost
anything else I have seen. Carbon is the stone age of programming compared
to Cocoa (IMHO). Cocoa/Openstep/NeXTstep have existed for > 12 years and
are well proven. There are many stories of applications that would not
exist without Cocoa and its predecessors including Improv,
Virtuoso/Freehand, Diagram/Visio/Glyphix, and my company's high end
animation development tools. Cocoa is the best technology available for
building Mac OS-X applications as long as you only consider technical
issues. I would not start a large new Cocoa project today. The
non-technical aspects and risks are too great.
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3) Why Apple will "never" unplug Cocoa
Ha. Ha. The next time Apple has the slightest crisis, Cocoa will be gone.
Look at their history. After Apple drops public support of Cocoa, they will
continue to use it for a while internally until they abandon any of their
own applications that need it, but they will screw any outside developers
without the slightest twinge of conscience.
Here is an exercise: List all of the technologies that Apple has SHIPPED to
developers and claimed that they were the future of the Mac OS and would be
supported "forever". Now list the ones still available from Apple. It
gives a reasonable person a bit of doubt why they develop for Apple at all.
Many of the abandoned technologies were used more extensively within Apple
and consumed more of Apple's marketing and development budgets than Cocoa.
How many times do developers have to be screwed by a company before that
stop going back and asking for another ?
My bottom line advice is to not ask Carbon vs. Cocoa. Ask Apple at all vs.
other platforms.