Re: Cocoa stripping resource forks: does Jaguar fix?
Re: Cocoa stripping resource forks: does Jaguar fix?
- Subject: Re: Cocoa stripping resource forks: does Jaguar fix?
- From: Kirk Kerekes <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 23:46:07 -0500
On Wednesday, July 3, 2002, at 09:45 PM, email@hidden
wrote:
From: Cryx <email@hidden>
[snip]
Apple created an island for
itself and judging from "our" market share, the world has passed "us"
by. To play catch up, Apple has to make some tough decisions.
Believe me, resource forks are _not_ the reason that Apple has a small
market share.
The historical reasons have a lot more to do with previously high unit
prices, a perception of weak performance, and the difficulty of
cross-platform development.
Believe me, Cocoa does little to alter this mix. It is mostly useless for
mainstream cross-platform work, and will remain so until Apple releases the
yellow box. That won't happen so long as Apple can use the threat of the
yellow-box to keep Microsoft developing Office/Mac. The idea that Cocoa is
some marvelous cross-platform system died the moment that features like
Quartz and AppleScript were embedded in it. Yes, it is possible to pry them
out again, but it isn't happening.
Now if OpenStep actually ever goes anywhere (IE, is able to create good
apps that will run on the average user's unmodified PC system) then we'll
talk.
Macs, largely due to resource forks, have been terrible network
citizens. To claim otherwise is naive.
This is not at all true. To claim otherwise is hysterical. Most of the
opposition to Macs on networks has been political, not technical. If
opposition to OS's was based on technical grounds, wintel would be banned.
I'm relucantly glad that Cocoa
is ditching forks. I look forward to the day of everyone using
something akin to xml wrappered file formats.
Are your customers glad?
Do you _have_ any customers?
How many customers are you going to have when your software silently
discards their data, because they dropped a resource-bearing file into your
NSTextView, and blithely and reasonably assumed that they could get it back
again?
You don't understand the concept of being a good network citizen. It's
got nothing to do with web servers and email attachments playing games
with file encodings. It's got everything to do with being able to mount
and export filesystems to or from any other system.
Frankly, I am not as concerned about being a "good network citizen" as I am
about having happy customers.
BTW, what kind of "good network citizen" is it that supports an bizarre
concept like a file object that looks like an application at one end of the
network, but magically transforms into a directory at the other end... and
a directory with a file-extension, no less.
"What an incredibly squirrelly idea -- must be one of those crazy Apple
things, right? Better keep _that_ off our network."
The Mac can no longer afford to be an island to itself, in the sense
that it can only transparently interact with same-system peers via
proprietary protocols. Try supporting Macs in a heterogeneous
environment of Windows and various Unices. For central file servers,
forks and encodings cause nothing but problems and grief.
Not those run by competent people.
It is time for Cocoa to 'get with the program'.
Apple is making tough decisions in order to secure future growth.
No. They are making STUPID decisions because their top technical people are
fundamentally Mac-ignorant, and have no sense of loyalty to the existing
millions of Mac users. They adopting the fallacy that they would rather get
new customers than keep old ones, ignoring how expensive new customers are.
The
market has already spoken by throwing Macs off the office networks.
Macs will only reappear in IT-ville when they are as difficult and
job-security-enhancing to keep running as a wintel box. Politics trumps
technology anyday.
Apple and Cocoa ARE with the program. For Apple's sake, you should be
too.
No, Cocoa has neglected the issue of legacy files, an issue that is not
going to disappear quickly. It will take at least several _years_ for the
majority of apps in use on X to be Cocoa apps -- not even Apple's own
X-apps are all Cocoa yet. During that transition period, it is totally
unacceptable for Apple to not have a system-level solution for this problem
-- not to enable developers will continue to use/abuse resource forks, but
to enable customers to not lose data.
I would be satisfied (ecstatic, in fact) with:
1. An OS update that automagically hotwired the carbon resource-manager
calls to see a special class of file-package as a file with a virtual
resource fork. This has to transparently work with existing applications,
and has to be back-revved to OS9.x. Regular resource forks would also be
supported. This really shouldn't be too hard. Carbon already has some of
this in place, but not the Whole Deal. There would have to be a special API
created that bypassed this mechanism, of course.
And...
2. A utility that would automatically cruise the hard drive, converting
files with resource forks into file packages with resource/data files.
The key to this scheme is that even Classic apps would be able to use these
new-format resource file-packages, and once the system update was installed,
new resource files would _always_ be created in the new format.
It would be cool, but not necessary, if even classic apps themselves could
be automatically converted into the new format.
This would actually _hasten_ the demise of resource-forking, without
shafting the paying customer.
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