Re: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
Re: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- Subject: Re: Apple and Cocoa (why don't they eat their own dog food?)
- From: James DiPalma <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 20:04:12 -0800
From: Philip George <email@hidden>
There are sufficient Cocoa/Carbon API's for rolling your own windows
and widgets.
And there is sufficient functionality in Objective-C and C to
completely rewrite all of Cocoa and Carbon. But, using Cocoa and Carbon
gives us a little bit of a head start.
Bottom line is that Apple clearly has enough engineering resources to
implement new widgets and to modify window styles to improve their own
applications and has not yet utilized those resources to expand Cocoa
to benefit all developers (internal and external -- interestingly, do
we know if similar widgets within Apple's applications are
re-implemented for each app?).
Going beyond Apple not providing support for its developers, Apple has
2 big problems going forward: consistency and a certain resistance to
change.
Consistency suffers when user interface guidelines are stretched as is
strongly justified in other threads (Gregory Weston suggests that
creativity would be stifled if Apple and others did not break away from
guidelines -- if this summary is erroneous or sanctimonious, I
apologize). Consistency also suffers when new (and often better) UI
patterns are incompletely applied to existing interfaces (two clear
examples are Safari's metal window resize widget and Finder's drag
cursors). Some of these new and better UI patterns will be
re-implemented by some (but not all) developers and may not accurately
copy Apple's original implementation. And since Apple has so visibly
inhibited consistency, how can we (as a developer community discussing
how to conduct ourselves as developers) successfully defend consistency
on any level?
If Apple developers go about rolling our own windows and widgets in
order to follow Apple's lead, does Apple lose its ability to change
Aqua in even subtle ways? I think so. Apple used to promote Cocoa's
ability to preserve consistency and adapt to new functionality when
Apple updated Cocoa; if developers go about rolling our own windows and
widgets, Cocoa suffers.
-jim
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