Re: How viable is Cocoa development?
Re: How viable is Cocoa development?
- Subject: Re: How viable is Cocoa development?
- From: Stefan Jung <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 13:39:55 +0100
OK. My comment.
Cocoa is cool, but there only a few people out there that buy a
computer, because it offers a cool technology. Most people buy computers
to solve some problems. To do that they need application software. There
is already a lot of applications available/buyable. A lot of knowledge
and work was put into this software. Starting from zero is a big effort
for a really big application, because away from the straight road there
lots of little paths to go. These little paths you have to go to solve
very specific problems, are the really big effort that was invested in
the very large applications. And while the straight road is a really
broad and comfortable highway in Cocoa it is very hard to guess if the
smaller paths are equally comfortable. Why? Because applications like
Photoshop are really really big and also no one (I haven't counted it)
in this/these companies has lots of experience with Cocoa. Result: No
big applications were ported to Cocoa. Apple had to create Carbon or
suffer all major application software suppliers. To make something
useful out of this they had to make Cocoa and Carbon work together, for
example the clipboard, but there is much more. To make it work they
created the Corefoundation and IOKit frameworks. ObjC code is not
callable from a C++ or C program (now we have ObjC++ though) so it was
necessary to change that. The Carbon programs like Finder and ITunes
were made to show "Yes, Carbon is mature, start porting" and "Were are
comitted to Carbon for a long time, because we surely won't deliver
MacOS X without a GUI". So I think Apple had not that much of a choice.
Why exactly they dropped EOF...? I don't no, but conclude from that that
there must be a little man (maybe Steve Jobs) at Apple that rolls a dice
to see what technology is killed next... come on.
Stefan Jung