On the subject of Windows I have an interesting perspective because prior to 1998 I worked at Alias.
At that time Alias believed that Windows would be the dominant platform going forward and there was a lot of talk about using Mainwin (or one of the other Windows emulation frameworks available at the time) on IRIX to ease the burden of cross-platform development. The only saving grace was that Maya was designed to be cross-platform so even if we had switched to say Mainwin it wouldn't have locked the product into a single platform. I am saying this because in 1998 computing was dominated by Windows/Microsoft and the decisions made by Softimage made perfect sense. (and I could imagine making similar decisions if Maya's development had started a few years later when Windows PCs took over from workstations) COM is a different thing and it is a shame it has become synonymous with Windows. Rather COM is a set of rules and conventions designed to support interface-based programing in C++ since the language does not have direct support for this built-in. OOP got one thing fundamentally wrong in that it was overly concerned with code reuse through inheritance. Inheritance in retrospect turned out to be a bad thing because it mixes the two (unrelated) concepts of interface and implementation. The end result is usually code that is harder to maintain and change since changes in low-level classes have a tendency to ripple outwards to many parts of the system. (something we call "tight-coupling" in the programming world) The reality is that most code in a large application is not reusable and reuse generally only happens with low-level libraries that are carefully crafted and designed to be reusable. A COM interface is a black box designed to separate interface from implementation and different objects can implement the same interface in different ways or masquerade as other objects using the magic of interfaces. This helps limit the scope of changes in the system and gives developers more flexibility at the application level. An interesting example that comes to mind is the quaternion fcurves in Softimage which are COM objects that masquerade as regular fcurves. As a result very little code needed to be modified to display or interact with them since most of the system *sees* them as regular fcurves. So in summary Windows bad, COM good. ;-) -- Brent From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Emilio Hernandez Sent: 14 February 2014 17:17 To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Re[2]: Survey - how would you do this? It is really a shame that Autodesk when bought Softimage, instead of starting the migration from the COM/OLE platform, just took the guts outs of Softimage. The Dev team. To insert it in Maya, which, IMHO is sitll basically the same from those days. I have not seen any "super development" of Maya as it would be expected by such corporate strategy... If by now, Maya had the functionality, beauty, elegance, design, and workflow of Softimage, the story would be different. I am married to Softimage until "death tear us appart". Maybe it is not Softimage's days the only ones that are counted... Autodesk has been loosing market lately, and has been unsuccesful of driving the "small" but solid Softimage user base to Maya. And when the time comes, my perception is that the mayority of us, at least in the film/vfx industry is looking to other platforms rather than Maya. They betted to the wrong horse, again imho. Maybe I am wrong. But only time will tell. [http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/8965/erojamailpleca.jpg] 2014-02-14 10:15 GMT-06:00 Angus Davidson <angus.david...@wits.ac.za<mailto:angus.david...@wits.ac.za>>: For historical perspective, you need to know that we were owned by Microsoft in 1998, and there was no indication that SGI or the Mac would come back from the dead. The company began to consider the Film industry as "legacy" and that games would be the future. The product was named after the name of the game exchange format to subtly suggest that. Max also had taken the Windows NT jump, with huge success. Well Microsoft hasnt gotten any better at predicting tech since. Smart phones, tablets, pretty much anything internet based ;)= <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width:100%;"> <tr> <td align="left" style="text-align:justify;"><font face="arial,sans-serif" size="1" color="#999999"><span style="font-size:11px;">This communication is intended for the addressee only. It is confidential. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately and destroy the original message. You may not copy or disseminate this communication without the permission of the University. Only authorised signatories are competent to enter into agreements on behalf of the University and recipients are thus advised that the content of this message may not be legally binding on the University and may contain the personal views and opinions of the author, which are not necessarily the views and opinions of The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All agreements between the University and outsiders are subject to South African Law unless the University agrees in writing to the contrary. </span></font></td> </tr> </table>
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