Re: How viable is Cocoa development?

FROM : John C. Randolph
DATE : Sat Jan 26 00:27:21 2002

On Friday, January 25, 2002, at 02:45 PM, Steve Gehrman wrote:

>> Actually, Apple is doing a *lot* of Cocoa development.  Come and
>> hear about it at WWDC ;-)
>
> Apple does Cocoa development, but the additional interface
> widgets and bug fixes they add to Cocoa have not been released
> to third party developers.

Actually, bug fixes get released with every developer seed. 
Check the release notes if you want to see which ones.

> We should be seeing new versions of Cocoa on a monthly
> schedule, every 6 months to a year isn't going to cut it.

That wouldn't work unless we were also releasing the OS every
month.  Imagine having to distribute the latest version of the
Cocoa frameworks with your products.

> My development is extremely hampered by either Cocoa bugs or
> lack of features.  Look at the NSToolbar, or NSBrowser, they
> both need serious subclassing to be included in a professional
> product.

The Toolbar is new, and may not be entirely finished, but
NSBrowser has been around for a long time, and it should be
quite solid.  What trouble are you having with it?

> Look at iPhoto.  Every button they use is non standard Cocoa,
> why can't I have access to those buttons.  Why can't I have
> brushed steel windows?

Well, you can,  but you'd have to do the same thing that the
iPhoto team did (like Don Yacktman and I did when I was with
IllumineX.)  IOW, the brushed-steel window isn't part of the
framework.  You might note that iTunes did it too, and iTunes
isn't a cocoa app (no, I don't know which group did it first.)

> Also I doubt iPhoto is using NSImageView to draw it's images. 
> The built in jpg/tiff imaging engines are very slow, too slow
> to create something like iPhoto.  Why don't we have access to
> this imaging code.

You do.  Just use OpenGL, and let the hardware help you.  If you
look closely at iPhoto, you'll realize that it's not an image
editor, it's an image *organizer*.  The trickiest bit of image
processing in there is the red-eye removal.

> I still love Cocoa, but developer need more, and they need it
> now. Cocoa is still beta in some respects.  New objects should
> be continually released and old ones should be continually
> enhanced.

I'm always glad to hear that people want more Cocoa ;-)

-jcr


John C. Randolph    <<email_removed>>  (408) 974-8819
Sr. Software Engineer, Cocoa Evangelism
Apple Worldwide Developer Relations