Re: CoverFlow

FROM : glenn andreas
DATE : Wed Nov 21 18:36:21 2007

On Nov 21, 2007, at 11:21 AM, Jaime Magiera wrote:

>> That said, if you use undocumented APIs you have to have your guard 
>> up
>> (unless you're a big company like Adobe or Microsoft) -- you'll get
>> zero support for using private APIs and your app could well break 
>> with
>> an update.

>
> I've spent the past two months replacing/updating/etc. third-party, 
> non-standard and private API code in an app that I recently took 
> over. It has been nothing short of a nightmare. Relying on private 
> API seems to be a *bad* thing.
>


Its worse than that - it bad for the long term appearance of 
stability, and ultimately long term platform lifetime.

Suppose a bunch of apps use a private API, and Apple needs to change 
that API to support some great new feature (or fix a critical bug). 
They can either break all those apps, or not add in the feature (or 
otherwise end up hamstringing it).  You can see how this is bad.

Alternately, third party apps can break, which then gives the 
appearance of "don't update to x.y.z because it's buggy and breaks all 
these apps", causing people to think the OS is buggy when it's the 
fault of third party programmers (and it doesn't help that there are 
examples of programs  that used private APIs which broke when updated 
and they then whined how "Apple broke our program").  So now people 
aren't updating to the latest more stable and secure OS because of 
this misperception.

In this particular case, however, there's an answer - take a look at 
the CovertFlow example, which shows you how to implement a coverflow 
like view without any private APIs...



Glenn Andreas                      <email_removed>
  <http://www.gandreas.com/> wicked fun!
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