Re: How viable is Cocoa development?

FROM : Erik M. Buck
DATE : Sat Jan 26 05:50:57 2002

> It is sad, but the right solution does not always make it in the market
> place. That being said, the problem with GX, as Gregory mentions above,
was
> not that GX was lousy technology, it was that developers didn't adopt the
> new technology. That is what killed GX.
>

And how is that different from Cocoa within Apple ?
I love Cocoa.  I want Cocoa to survive and thrive.  I would love it
everybody used Cocoa.
The reality is that "nobody" that Apple cares about uses Cocoa just like
nobody that Apple cared about used OpenDoc or GX.  A certain OpenDoc
application once won Apple choice awards in the same category as a certain
Cocoa application... Apple spent years saying that OpenDoc was THE future.
They said GX was THE future.  Apple used OpenDoc and GX internally to the
extent possible.  Apple spent much more money on OpenDoc and GX than on
Cocoa.  Apple made stronger public commitments to OpenDoc and GX than to
Cocoa.  Hell, until the most recent Mac world, (and to a lesser extent the
last WWDC) Apple hardly mentioned Cocoa let alone advocated it. And OpenDoc
and GX are just two of the many things Apple has dropped.

Apple has already reneged on Cocoa related promises:
Where is cross platform Cocoa/YellowBox (after years of promisses) ?
Where are the free or inexpensive runtimes for Windows ?
Where is Objective-C EOF ?
Where in NeXTtime ?

You get the idea.  Apple is already dropping parts of Cocoa.  Is it such a
stretch to see them drop it all (at least publicly ?)

There is a trust and credibility issue with Apple regardless of any
technical merit of any technology that Apple might be half heartedly pushing
this year.