Re: State of Cocoa adoption
Re: State of Cocoa adoption
- Subject: Re: State of Cocoa adoption
- From: Greg Titus <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:31:44 -0800
On Sunday, March 16, 2003, at 03:18 PM, publiclook wrote:
There has been a lot of discussion (in this thread) about projects
that aren't being done with Cocoa because of missing database access
features (EOF) and substandard tools (limited auto-text expansion in
PB).
I miss EOF. But "substandard tools" is a little much. One limited
feature does not a substandard toolset make, especially when other
parts of that toolset are best-of-breed (Interface Builder, for one
example).
What IS the state or rate of Cocoa adoption ? What IS being done ?
I don't think anyone can answer that question authoritatively. We can
make guesses, we can treat these as survey questions and give our
individual responses, but I doubt even Apple has hard numbers.
100% of our new development is Cocoa, if that means anything, but
coming from someone at Omni, probably not. I say new development,
because porting PC games is obviously not Cocoa work - but where it
requires new code for various pieces, we almost always write Cocoa code.
How many people are working on freeware, shareware, or traditional
commercial Cocoa software ?
There are 2,774 members of our macosx-dev mailing list at the moment,
which is almost entirely Cocoa focused. (See
http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-dev). Make your own
estimate of the percentage of members that aren't really working on
Cocoa software (my guess: very low), and the percentage of Cocoa
developers that don't know about or don't care to be subscribed to that
mailing list (my guess: possibly pretty high).
Are custom vertical applications being written with Cocoa ? (sounds
like the answer is mostly no)
Depends on how custom and and how vertical counts in your accounting.
To take last year's Apple Design Award winners as examples: is
animation a vertical market (Toon Boom Studio), is salon and spa
management (STX)?
We are or have done consulting work on a couple of custom vertical apps
that are quite a bit narrower niche than these two examples, but they
aren't public. (But then, we did the development on STX, so again we
may be the exception.)
Are games being written with Cocoa ?
Freeware and shareware games, sure. Just check versiontracker. Shrink
wrap games? You might find a couple of those too, but most game
developers can't afford to restrict themselves to such a small
potential market. All of our game ports link against Cocoa because they
end up having some Cocoa components. The line "written with X
framework" can really be quite blurry, especially with games, since
they nearly always sport completely custom interfaces and event
handling code.
What are the obstacles to using Cocoa for new projects (besides
missing EOF and limited auto-text expansion in PB) ?
Come on. Does lack of auto-text expansion in Project Builder
significantly limit your ability to use Cocoa for new projects? Are you
really saying that that might be the basis for a decision for or
against using Cocoa for some project?
The primary obstacle has nothing to do with the technology. The primary
obstacle is market size. Doing your project in Cocoa restricts you to
selling only to those people running Mac OS X. (And yes, I know about
GnuStep. And it isn't really done (on the AppKit side) and it doesn't
significantly alter the equation here.)
Are there any substantial new projects or is the who Mac OS X software
field too mature and or stagnant for substantial new projects ?
Anyone with a substantial new project is really unlikely to announce it
until it is near (or entirely) complete. And how could the OS X
software field possibly be "too mature" or "stagnant" when OS X itself
is so new?
Can I expect the new paradigm shifting killer-app to be a Cocoa
application ?
If anyone at all knew what the new paradigm shifting killer-app _was_
they might be able to answer this question.
Is cross-platform support an issue ?
Of course. See previous comments on market size and GnuStep.
- Greg
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