On 9/2/00 11:38 PM, Peter Curtis [mailto:lemur@mac.com] wrote:
>I'd strongly advise against shelling out oodles of cash for MetroWerks
>CodeWarrior. The ProjectBuilder included in OS X is just as good, and (in
>many, many ways) much better. And it's included. Free.
Don't bet on that continuing.
It's included in OS X DP4 (DEVELOPER preview, remember) and possibly on
OS X Server. But I'd be surprised if it was included in the OS X
Consumer that actually ships. I'll be curious to find out if it's even
in the public beta.
If they include it free, they'll piss off Metrowerks and all the other
folks who create software development tools for the Mac out there. And
maybe even destroy them. Don't believe me? Look at what bundling IE and
OE with the OS have done to the vendors of alternative products. Folks
who make developer products are FAR more sensitive to fluctuations in
their marketshare...it's much smaller.
While Apple does give away MPW now (a pretty nice product, actually, but
dated), they don't give it away on the OS disks. And it's not as
up-to-date as CodeWarrior.
>Also, as someone who's used DP4 for some time, I have to disagree with
>Bill's suggestion that you ignore Cocoa. Cocoa is amazing. Following a small
>tutorial, I created an exact replica of the SimpleText app, but with more
>features (spellchecker!) using ELEVEN (11) lines of code. SimpleText took
>over ten thousand in Traditional/Carbon Mac OS development, and several
>hundred in REALBasic. Don't ignore Cocoa. Just don't.
That's very bad advice.
Cocoa won't go anywhere for years, if ever. While I agree it's pretty
cool....it's the wrong choice for years to come. Most current developers
for the Mac will not even consider it UNTIL the large majority of their
customer base is running MacOS X or later, since it ONLY runs on that OS.
That'll take many years. Remember - there's still a LOT of 68K Macs out
there almost a decade after the intro of the PowerPC Macs.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're apparently suggesting is that a
developer (especially a NEWTON-to-Mac/PC software developer) should write
software using a development environment that virtually no Mac user can
currently run....and when OS X ships, only those folks with OS X (i.e.,
not most Mac owners for at least a couple of years) can run.
So....the software would be USELESS to almost everyone.
Carbon, however, runs on OS X _AND_ on OS 9 and OS 8 with the Carbon
libraries. Which means it runs on the OS used by 99% of all Mac users
NOW and for some time into the future.
Carbon is the better choice - for now.
While you shouldn't ignore Cocoa forever...it's something you should NOT
write software using NOW.
On the other hand, something like RealBASIC even lets you write software
that works on Mac AND WINDOWS. Cocoa probably doesn't (although it used
to allow cross-OS development between NextSTEP and Windows when it was
part of OpenSTEP...but that won't help MacOS 8 and 9 users even it it did
still work, which I doubt).
RealBASIC is proving to be VERY popular and widely used for MacOS
development. For the same reasons VisualBASIC is on PC's. And as I
understand it, it's even somewhat code-compatible with VB to boot (so
long as you don't use Windows-specific plug-ins or API calls such stuff.)
And while I wouldn't recommend RealBASIC for every Mac development
project, considering that Brad's current Newton app is written in
VisualBASIC, it's the obvious correct choice if he's considering Mac
development or porting his VB program to the Mac.
(I should get the latest alpha of RealBASIC and see if it'll compile
Brads Notes2Notes code....no way I could test it though, as I don't have
an Exchange server to run Outlook for Exchange Server for Mac on.)
- Bill
_____________________________________________________________________
\\ /, "Ink Different" at Info-Newt, the site for Newton PDAs
`( Info-Newt Newton news & info web site: http://www.info-newt.com/
\ Newton FTP Software archive: ftp://ftp.info-newt.com/
= GOT A NEWTON QUESTION? Visit: http://www.info-newt.com/faq/
***************************************
NewtonTalk brought to you by:
EVOTE.COM -- the ESPN of politics on the Internet! All the players, all the news, and the hottest analysis and features (plus 'toons!) anywhere.... visit http://www.evote.com today!
***************************************
Need Subscribe/Unsubscribe info?
Visit the NewtonTalk section at http://www.planetnewton.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Sep 12 2000 - 00:00:07 CDT