Tuesday
Dec302008
Lack of Control in OS X development
Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 05:49AM
Yes this post contains a small rant.
First though I have to say that I do love developing in Xcode / Objective-C and for the Mac in general. It is a lot of fun, and frankly the results can be sexy as hell, however some of the challenges are just plain "bang you head against a wall" with no saving throw, madness.
[Rant on]
Need proof, well it is sort of hard to explain without detailed examples, but in general the greatest weakness I see is the lack of solid control development.
For example: The delivered control for a Treeview (NSTreeController) quite frankly is probably (don't really have it working yet) one seriously powerful control. However it is a real bear to setup, use, code against, etc. Well in the PC world there are certainly corollaries, but the solution there is a provider, or super talent, wraps the power filled tool, in an easier to use control, and typically either gives it away for free (when they want Fame) or sells it (when they want fortune), but the gist is that the problem gets solved and a wider audience of developers can code applications against this.
[Rant Off]
This type of control level coding isn't a void in the mac world. I have found a couple, my favorite so far is:
Brandon Walkin @ http://www.brandonwalkin.com
He seems to be in the category of doing it (for Fame) rather than (for Fortune), but seriously there needs to be like 1000's more like him rather than 1 or 2 scattered around the net.
Here is hoping that these spawn up like wildfire, so that all developers don't have to dredge through the details. If I can find time I think I will work a simpler Control for NSTreeView as a Sourcelist backed by a Core Data store, that is simple to utilize.
First though I have to say that I do love developing in Xcode / Objective-C and for the Mac in general. It is a lot of fun, and frankly the results can be sexy as hell, however some of the challenges are just plain "bang you head against a wall" with no saving throw, madness.
[Rant on]
Need proof, well it is sort of hard to explain without detailed examples, but in general the greatest weakness I see is the lack of solid control development.
For example: The delivered control for a Treeview (NSTreeController) quite frankly is probably (don't really have it working yet) one seriously powerful control. However it is a real bear to setup, use, code against, etc. Well in the PC world there are certainly corollaries, but the solution there is a provider, or super talent, wraps the power filled tool, in an easier to use control, and typically either gives it away for free (when they want Fame) or sells it (when they want fortune), but the gist is that the problem gets solved and a wider audience of developers can code applications against this.
[Rant Off]
This type of control level coding isn't a void in the mac world. I have found a couple, my favorite so far is:
Brandon Walkin @ http://www.brandonwalkin.com
He seems to be in the category of doing it (for Fame) rather than (for Fortune), but seriously there needs to be like 1000's more like him rather than 1 or 2 scattered around the net.
Here is hoping that these spawn up like wildfire, so that all developers don't have to dredge through the details. If I can find time I think I will work a simpler Control for NSTreeView as a Sourcelist backed by a Core Data store, that is simple to utilize.
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