Hi Joe
You mention that the Apple tools have made your life easier as a
developer. I'm a computer science student at the moment and am
frustrated by the fact that I, as a totally blind person, cannot use
cocoa's interface builder. I wouldn't care, except that there seems
to be no way to code an interface by hand like there is in most GUI
toolkits unless I write in Pascal--which I definitely do not want to do.
Am I wrong about this? Is there a way to design Cocoa interfaces
other than with the interface builder app? If so, I'd love to try it.
Also, there was someone--not sure who--on this list who said that
making XCode accessible was one of the improvements coming in OS X
10.5. Can anyone confirm this? Well, I should say making interface
builder accessible, as the main XCode application itself doesn't
really seem to present that many accessibility issues.
Later
On Sep 10, 2006, at 10:02 PM, Kafka's Daytime wrote:
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
