there is another who seems to get it about cocoa being abandoned, though he suggests XUL like mozilla has.
He's an (infrequent?) visitor here but has done some reading at least Except he's confusing Cocoa and Aqua. There's not one line of Cocoa in Firefox or XUL. Lots of Carbon. And it gets you Aqua (Aqua via XUL comes with just about as much extra work to make things "right" on the Mac as with any other cross-platform toolkit (well, maybe except vcl ).
Though XUL does have the advantage of properly supporting Mac modifier keys (assuming people program their apps correctly and don't blindly write for ctrl- and alt- instead of accel and meta...).
Aside from incrementally reorienting and extending vcl (like the NWF stuff Ed and Dan did), replacing the toolkit with one that is designed with explicit cross-platform utility in mind seems to be the best (only?) way of assuring a better Mac OS X experience.
Smokey
BTW, I'm glad to read/see that Apple sponsored Florian Heckl's attendance at WWDC (I assume "sponsored" means gave him a big discount); that was a good choice on Apple's part, and the X11 port is better for it. _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 10:49 pm Post subject:
Problem was that back in the early 90s when StarOffice was starting, there really was no cross-platform toolkits available...so they wrote their own. And it's not proven to be the best of designs. If anything, the VCL/svx toolkit isn't anywhere near as mature. The goal of Star became StarOffice (and eventually, OOo)...not selling widget toolkits.
It is my opinion that there's now too much stuff built on top of the VCL/svx toolkit (e.g. the whole application) that shifting it to something completely new is just impractical, at least without a very large infusion of resources. Defnitely not feasible for a part time team of just a handful.
It is my opinion that there's now too much stuff built on top of the VCL/svx toolkit (e.g. the whole application) that shifting it to something completely new is just impractical, at least without a very large infusion of resources. Defnitely not feasible for a part time team of just a handful.
And from Sun's POV, it's an unecessary expense of time and resources; vcl is "just fine" for the platforms Sun cares about
I do wonder, though, how much of a role the availability of Neo/J played in helping Sun secure the deal our friend from the UofT mentioned the other day (i.e., what proportion of their users are on the Mac, or what proportion of key users, etc.)?
(And completely off-topic for this thread, but is StarOffice really the most popular alternative office suite [aka #2] on Windows? I would have thought that was Corel/WordPerfect Office, or whatever it's called these days....)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 1:38 am Post subject:
Actually, isn't it more likely to be MS Works as this is generally shipped with low-end PCs much like AppleWorks is?
OpenOffice.org may be no.2 because of all the governmental organisations that have switched to it, away from Office, perhaps? _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Tim Bray's "follow-up" to his post that began this whole issue (said post was picked up by Daring Fireball in the link at the beginning of this thread).
The post is even more evidence of why vaporware announcements of OOo Mac versions are deadly serious and terribly dangerous--especially to end-users who want something that works (and, well, quacks like a duckâ„¢ ).
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Tim Bray's "follow-up" to his post that began this whole issue (said post was picked up by Daring Fireball in the link at the beginning of this thread).
The post is even more evidence of why vaporware announcements of OOo Mac versions are deadly serious and terribly dangerous--especially to end-users who want something that works (and, well, quacks like a duckâ„¢ ).
You got that straight and I was almost sucked into the vortex....
It appeared that this project was more complete than it actually is. I don't wish maveric and the rest of the crew ill wishes and would actually like to see a Cocoa version, but lets work together rather than as two teams fighting against each other. I agree that X11 is NOT the way to go with a Mac version. Right now, Patrick and Eds efforts are the best Mac version without breaking the base OOo. What I don't what to see is a version of OOo for Linux/Windows/OS2/etc. that is several steps ahead of a purely Mac version.
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Except he's confusing Cocoa and Aqua. There's not one line of Cocoa in Firefox or XUL. Lots of Carbon. And it gets you Aqua (Aqua via XUL comes with just about as much extra work to make things "right" on the Mac as with any other cross-platform toolkit (well, maybe except vcl 
