Re: Cocoa's Popularity
Re: Cocoa's Popularity
- Subject: Re: Cocoa's Popularity
- From: "Erik M. Buck" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 15:06:32 -0600
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Lee" <email@hidden>
[deleted]
>
Not only are many of the new apps free or cheap (and some even quite
good), there seem to be quite a few programmers happy to share their source
code (JewelToy comes to mind, but there are plenty of examples). Does
anyone know if there is a similar culture among Windows shareware and
freeware programmers? I wouldn't be surprised; I'd just be interested in
hearing about how it compares.
I would say that there is a lot more activity in the Windows world (probably
about 20 times as much) but the average quality of shareware and freeware
(with or without source code) is lower. The quality issue may have many
causes including the absence of good inexpensive developer tools.
Nevertheless, with so much more activity, gems do get produced. They are
just harder to find in amongst all the sh*t. Visual Basic, Visual C++,
Active-X controls, and MFC are very hard to use for anything besides simple
data presentation apps IMHO.
>
>
> I've been watching this sort of
>
>thing since 1990 and the old info-mac days, and I have *never* seen this
>
>degree of glut of new apps for Mac.
>
>
It's nice to hear this from someone who can make a first-hand comparison.
There is a lot of new talent starting to use Cocoa. Many of the people
coming to Cocoa bring baggage with them (bad habits, bad attitudes, bad
legacy code, etc.), but many see elegance, simplicity, and power in Cocoa
and embrace it. I suppose "we" can not expect everyone to share "our" taste
in development technology. [At last year's WWDC, eavesdropping gathered
many negative comments about Cocoa] I also suppose that comments along the
lines of "why now ?" after Cocoa technology has been available to Mac users
for almost 5 years (Rhapsody DR2 in ~April 1997) and available to anyone
with a Windows NT machine for 7+ years are not likely to provide useful
replies.
On the other hand, why now ? Anyone who was even slightly interested in
this stuff could have been learning and developing with it years ago.
[deleted comment about free tools]
>
I think this is a huge factor in developer enthusiasm. The tools are free
and good, and there is a common shared lore about how to develop Cocoa apps.
Also, all the experienced NeXTstep programmers out there are a gold mine of
enthusiasm and knowledge that people outside the Cocoa community may
underestimate.
The old ftp servers full of Openstep and NeXTstep application source code
are an untapped gold mine too.
>
>
I wonder if discussions like we have on this list are qualitatively
different from discussions among Wintel developers. To me, it's downright
fun to talk about Cocoa and to read the issues people raise. A petty part
of me hopes we have *more* fun that developers on other platforms. ;)
Discussions here are very civilized compared to other places (rants about
standard BSD sockets, hiding controls, etc. overlooked). Most people in
this forum and similar forums are here because we enjoy Cocoa. I estimate
that 90% of the people posting to this forum are hobbyists rather than
professionals who use Cocoa in their day job. As far as I can tell, there
is little market for Mac programmers of any kind and less market for Cocoa
programmers. I have been looking for contract work doing Cocoa programming
for a long time without success. There is a little Web Objects work out
there. I end up doing a lot of C++ for Windows and Java work in spite of
being a "Cocoa expert" with 12 years experience.
And finally, just to inject my trademark rant: Apple is doing NOTHING to
encourage Cocoa use as far as I can tell. Apple has been sitting on Cocoa
technology for 7 years and with the exception of a few neat UI elements like
Drawers, Apple has done nothing but diminish the technology. It is slower,
buggier, and has overall fewer features than it had in 1996 IMHO. (List the
frameworks that have been dropped, the loss of cross platform, DPS->Quartz
is a downgrade in some respects, missing and/or degraded tools (PB,
DigitalLibrarian, Text Edit code and services, Terminal services, The Finder
is horrible...), loss of PDO, loss of Active-X and Java bean integration
that was demonstrated in 1998 through 2000 and then disappeared, etc.)
Ah, young whippersnappers, if only you could have seen the golden years...
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