Monday, July 7, 2008

Sunday procrastinating ...

YouTube is great when you feel like procrastinating ... it has so much contents that you can spend hours looking for (and at) videos on a subject that interest you, without feeling too guilty about how you should have been reading that Cocoa document instead ... For example Sunday, I found a video made by NeXT in 1992, which shows the advantage of NeXTSTEP over Sun. The competition is centered on 2 programmers building a business application from the exact same specs, one using NeXT solutions the other the Sun equivalent. Does it look rigged? Well no ... but the requirements sounds a lot like they were selected to showcase the capabilities of NeXTSTEP ... which isn't that un-fair for Sun since it all made sense in the context of the application. Needless to said, NeXT came out as the clear winner with the shortest development time and the most features completed. In fact, the developer had so much extra time that he implemented things that were not asked for, while the Sun based implementation was not even completed ... :-)

Here's the two parts of the video, for you viewing pleasure:






It's interesting to think that 16 years after, developers still use the same tools to build applications for Macs ... Now, I'm still not fully convince (yet) that using Interface Builder is the way to go. I like my UI done programmatically you see ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The question is, though, why do you prefer creating your user experience programmatically?

CocoaGeek said...

Hi Chris,

Well ... I guess in a way it's partly due to the fact that I'm used to do so on the various platforms I have worked on before. However, the main raison is likely that I like to be in complete control of how the UI is built. I found that knowing what do what and who talk to who is something important. I could be wrong, but I think that just by browsing at a properly documented source code can give some good insight to how it is working relatively quickly. Is that possible with IB?

I'm also concerne about font sensitivity and screen DPI. Here's I have no idea how it is managed in Cocoa .. but it doesn't look to me like this is something that is easy to manage from an interface builder ... or is it?