Praise for the many AppKit enhancements
Praise for the many AppKit enhancements
- Subject: Praise for the many AppKit enhancements
- From: "Erik M. Buck" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 13:30:48 -0500
I just want to take a moment to praise Apple's Cocoa developers for the
many enhancements to AppKit. See the release notes for a list:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/ReleaseNotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html
Many long standing issues/oddities/inconsistencies/inefficiencies and
missing features have been addressed.
In addition to the biggest addition, a new set of classes that support
the controller layer of the MVC architecture, many smaller but
important additions and changes have been made:
NSView's -setHidden: I personally think that it is a bad practice to
hide and show views without using one of the user-recognized metaphors
such as tab views, drawers, etc., but it is good that Apple has
provided a standard safe way to do it so that there will not be a bunch
of applications that bungle the job of hiding views. Simply doing it
right may reduce my objections to doing it at all.
A bug in which color wells send their action even if the color did not
change has long annoyed me. That is fixed.
scroll views can now automatically hide the scroll bars. This alone
will remove 20 lines of code from almost every Cocoa application ever
written :)
There are many many great changes, but best of all: My long time
complaint with the way AppKit calls -drawRect: and the way dirt
rectangles were coalesced has been fixed. I described this problem in
the context of optimizing drawing within Appendix B of "Cocoa
Programming." I also had opportunity to discuss the issues directly
with the responsible Apple engineers who were already aware of the
issues. The -setNeedsDisplayInRect: method is now an excellent way to
identify the rectangles within a view hierarchy that needs to be
redrawn. The bottom line is that almost every Cocoa application can
now relatively easily become much more efficient with drawing and we
can expect a general speedup of all Cocoa applications. Using Quartz
debug with Cocoa applications no longer has to be so embarrassing ;)
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