Re: Cocoa friendly Quicktime APIs?
Re: Cocoa friendly Quicktime APIs?
- Subject: Re: Cocoa friendly Quicktime APIs?
- From: publiclook <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2003 09:30:12 -0500
I think part of the reason some people might want a Cocoa API for
Quicktime is that the current Quicktime API has to be the ugliest most
over complex C API ever produced. Many people identify the Quicktime
API as Carbon because all of the interfaces to it require Carbon opaque
types like FSRef, OSType, Handle, Ptr, GWorldPtr, PixMapHandle,
FSSpec, GraphicsImportComponent, GraphicsImporterComponentType,
ComponentDescription, ImageDescriptionPtr, Component, MatrixRecord, and
OSErr.
Did anybody ever use NeXTtime ? Was is cleaner ?
Quicktime includes some great technology. The fact that Microsoft was
able to create nicer APIs for their competitor says a lot about just
how complex and ugly the Quicktime API is. Of course, I am making
aesthetic judgments and many smart people will certainly disagree with
my use of terms like "ugly" even if they don't object to "complex".
Everyone should consider my comments in light of the fact that I think
almost all of Carbon is ugly. Function naming is inconsistent,
conventions depend on the "manager" involved and often that seems to
have been arbitrary. The whole world seems to be able to live with FILE
and streams, but Carbon has to have FSSpec...
On Saturday, March 8, 2003, at 12:44 AM, Ryan McGann wrote:
Actually, Apple ported many of the Mac-specific data structures you
speak of to Windows for QuickTime.....FSSpecs, GrafPorts, etc. Many
people actually rumored that QuickTime's port to Windows was Apple's
attempt at porting the Mac OS to run on the x86 architecture.
But on the issue of Cocoa QuickTime APIs, there's NSMovieView. On top
of that, use the QuickTime C APIs. People always seem to deem any
non-Objective-C framework as being Carbon. Not so. And people are
always asking Apple to write Cocoa (Objective C or otherwise) wrappers
for every new framework they introduce. I'd _much_ rather see the
Cocoa Frameworks team at Apple fix outstanding bugs and implement new
features rather than spend their time writing wrappers around already
compatible functions.
QuickTime, over time, will include more FSRef and CF-based functions,
with perhaps some CoreGraphics functionality tied in. But I wouldn't
expect anytime soon that Apple will start providing functions in the
QuickTime framework that take NSURL's and display NSSavePanels.
Especially now that Apple has implemented the Carbon-from-Cocoa
compatibility in OS X for Jaguar.
Ryan
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