On Sep 11, 2006, at 12:48 AM, yvonne thomson wrote:
But what about all the little one man operations the Mac landscape seems to be crawling with? How do you ask one guy who's writing a really great programmers text editor that, the nonstandard text widget he's using may be superior in every way to the standard, but it kind of means that a Voiceover user can't see the text?
Good point. One thing we've got going is that the Apple tools and frameworks are very possibly the easiest way to an Apple application. And the free doesn't hurt either. Cocoa has been pretty broadly and wholeheartedly embraced. Mainstream Mac developers who don't use Cocoa or Carbon in one way or another are beginning to look obsolete. Further, there are a good number of "bridges" to Cocoa - allowing one to develop with pretty much any of the popular programming languages (though Cocoa's "native" language - Objective-C - is still often the straightest, safest path). There's always going to be the darned annoying process of sifting through good and bad applications (and accessibility concerns make that process a a few degrees more problematic) but Apple has at least, I think, improved the odds for more good, useable apps more of the time. At the risk of sounding breathless, I can tell you I still, some days, find it hard to believe my luck when it comes to the free Apple development tools and Cocoa. My developer life used to be a lot harder. I'm not the only developer thinking/feeling that way.
and I'll be discussing more productive things on here, I hope.
I, for one, thought this was a reasonably useful discussion...notwithstanding my previous, tedious treatise. *grin*
Joe
