Re: CMSDA
Re: CMSDA
- Subject: Re: CMSDA
- From: Chilton Webb <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 11:03:30 -0600
Classic MacOS programming wasn't that bad. Frankly I think Cocoa is a
much nicer, easier, better way to do similar things, but the real
strength of MacOSX is that it is a combination of NeXT and the Mac. They
both had their strengths.
For the NeXT guys who weren't around the Mac before the two worlds
collided, the MacOS had some great technologies, which we still have
today in one form or another.
Casper, aka voice recognition, was for awhile a true pioneer in speech
recognition. The Mac is still the only operating system with an embedded
speech recognition engine, and while it is somewhat tricky to get it to
work all the time, it is fairly easy to access from within an app, and
gives your software instant speech recognition with very little
development effort.
TTS - Text To Speech. Some people claim there are better TTS engines out
there, but frankly even the best I've heard are still as computer-like
as those on the Mac. The higher quality voices are actually quite nice,
even though there are now artifacts in the language that didn't exist in
Classic.
V-Twin was not just an indexing system, it was *the* indexing system.
Apple routinely reported on its speed, superior indexing capabilities vs
other methods employed by other companies, and talked up how its
relevance ranking system was second to none. And I have to agree with
the hype. As an illustration, I used it to index 3.4Gb of source code
for the old MacintoshDeveloper.com site. You could search through every
file for a chunk of code, or a few system calls, and find what you
wanted based on some kind of magic relevance score that was often quite
eerily correct. It took me two days to hook it up to a CGI, and I had
the entire site searchable via a cgi call. (This was a few days before
CMP decided the site wasn't something they wanted, and we went our
separate ways). And yes, as soon as I've rewired it to work with Apache,
that engine will be back online on another Mac site. But since seeing
those results first hand, I have always wondered why Apple didn't use
V-twin to index the developer docs. It would beat the HELL out of the
Googoid thing they're using now, and use Apple technology. Don't get me
started. The Find-By-Content engine had other useful parts, such as the
ability to summarize text, but it's been awhile since I delved into it.
There's an excellent DoctorDobb's Journal article on it in their
Operating Systems issue of a year ago this month.
Drag and Drop permeates the OS. While it does require that the developer
put it into practice, it's there. It originated with text. Drag and drop
text from one part of a document to another. I hesitate to say it, but
the first app I recall seeing it in was Microsoft Word. When Apple
implemented system-wide DnD, it really changed it from a useful concept
to a vital one. As for the differences between NeXT and MacOS DnD, I
think Apple realized there had to be a decision made about this, and
that Mac users were more likely to have a fit about the loss of ability
to specify a drop location than the NeXT users were, and there were more
Mac users, so they opted to satisfy that camp. But I should point out
that in many apps, you (used to be able to) drag a graphic to the
window's titlebar, and it would drop into where the insertiion point
was. This wasn't a universal thing though, as that kind of functionality
had to be written into the app intentionally. Ondra, I agree with your
assessment. In most cases, I think that the NeXT way of doing things in
that regard was better. But that would be a discussion for the HIG
list...
I was very much looking forward to some of the killer technologies NeXT
was bringing to the table. I don't know much about Digital Librarian,
but I know it did things 'damned right' as far as those who knew it were
concerned. And I wanted to see at least some kind of simple web page
development tool in the standard OS release. Guess that was too much to
ask. And some form of database or complex data storage system is a
necessity in any programming language. Cocoa was definitely crippled by
removing this.
At their best, each operating system had complimentary, powerful
technologies. At their worst, each operating system had questionable
design decisions. The whole MacOS X we have today is far superior to the
sum of the parts I expected. The next generation of killer apps will
likely take advantage of both worlds, mixing the Mac's ease of use with
the power of Unix, and will likely be programmed by mixing a combination
of Cocoa *and* Carbon technologies. I'm pretty sure I read that on a
bumper sticker.
-Chilton
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| | >Re: CMSDA (From: Ondra Cada <email@hidden>) |