Cocoa mail archive
Re: How viable is Cocoa development?
FROM : Bill Cheeseman
DATE : Sat Jan 26 14:14:12 2002
on 02-01-25 9:09 PM, Gregory Weston at <email_removed> wrote:
> The truth is that both QDGX and OpenDoc were available for years with
> essentially no adoption before Apple pulled the plug on them.
It was refreshing to read this very important point. And the reason for the
lack of adoption should also be noted. Apple didn't make these and other
failed technologies an automatic-install part of the OS. They were optional
installs. There was an awful lot of complaining from developers at that time
that there was no money in developing for a technology that customers had to
be asked to install separately. LightningDraw GX proved it.
Cocoa is automatically installed as part of Mac OS X, so this particular
issue of developer economics need not trouble us. And Cocoa will obviously
continue to be an automatic install as long as applications which Apple
believes are important to its future are written in Cocoa -- iPhoto and so
on.
I am more concerned about the repeated assertion that Apple won't release
new Carbon technology in the form of Cocoa frameworks. Erik Buck, whose
pessimistic views are well known, isn't the only one who says so. I
certainly would hope that Apple will turn to producing more Cocoa frameworks
for Carbon technologies, like speech recognition and speech synthesis, just
as they did finally get around to producing improved Cocoa documentation.
But assuming they won't, I suggest that all Cocoa developers who need to
implement Carbon functionality in their Cocoa applications do so in the form
of general-purpose frameworks, then market the frameworks separately to the
rest of us as an additional source of revenue. Under licensing terms that
allow us to include the frameworks in our own application bundles, in order
to overcome the customer adoption problem for custom frameworks. The
versioning issues for frameworks in multiple application bundles are already
accounted for in the OS, according to the System Overview book. The marginal
costs of developing the frameworks ought to be modest for anybody who needs
to bring the functionality in from Carbon for their products, anyway, and I
would think the additional revenue would therefore be mostly gravy, even if
not a lot of it.
Waiting for Erik to call me naove....
--
Bill Cheeseman - <email_removed>
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook - http://www.AppleScriptSourcebook.com
Vermont Recipes - http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes
Croquet Club of Vermont - http://members.valley.net/croquetvermont
DATE : Sat Jan 26 14:14:12 2002
on 02-01-25 9:09 PM, Gregory Weston at <email_removed> wrote:
> The truth is that both QDGX and OpenDoc were available for years with
> essentially no adoption before Apple pulled the plug on them.
It was refreshing to read this very important point. And the reason for the
lack of adoption should also be noted. Apple didn't make these and other
failed technologies an automatic-install part of the OS. They were optional
installs. There was an awful lot of complaining from developers at that time
that there was no money in developing for a technology that customers had to
be asked to install separately. LightningDraw GX proved it.
Cocoa is automatically installed as part of Mac OS X, so this particular
issue of developer economics need not trouble us. And Cocoa will obviously
continue to be an automatic install as long as applications which Apple
believes are important to its future are written in Cocoa -- iPhoto and so
on.
I am more concerned about the repeated assertion that Apple won't release
new Carbon technology in the form of Cocoa frameworks. Erik Buck, whose
pessimistic views are well known, isn't the only one who says so. I
certainly would hope that Apple will turn to producing more Cocoa frameworks
for Carbon technologies, like speech recognition and speech synthesis, just
as they did finally get around to producing improved Cocoa documentation.
But assuming they won't, I suggest that all Cocoa developers who need to
implement Carbon functionality in their Cocoa applications do so in the form
of general-purpose frameworks, then market the frameworks separately to the
rest of us as an additional source of revenue. Under licensing terms that
allow us to include the frameworks in our own application bundles, in order
to overcome the customer adoption problem for custom frameworks. The
versioning issues for frameworks in multiple application bundles are already
accounted for in the OS, according to the System Overview book. The marginal
costs of developing the frameworks ought to be modest for anybody who needs
to bring the functionality in from Carbon for their products, anyway, and I
would think the additional revenue would therefore be mostly gravy, even if
not a lot of it.
Waiting for Erik to call me naove....
--
Bill Cheeseman - <email_removed>
Quechee Software, Quechee, Vermont, USA
http://www.quecheesoftware.com
The AppleScript Sourcebook - http://www.AppleScriptSourcebook.com
Vermont Recipes - http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/VermontRecipes
Croquet Club of Vermont - http://members.valley.net/croquetvermont
