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selowitch · May 3, 2005, 09:31 PM

When composing a MacNN message, the cursor flutters and typing is ridiculously slowed/delayed since the site update. What's up with that????

ManOfSteal · May 3, 2005, 10:34 PM

Hmm, I'm not noticing that behavior.

tooki · May 3, 2005, 10:38 PM

If your CPU is under load, and you're using Safari, and you have MacNN set to show all the smilies, Safari's high CPU load for animated images can cause this.

tooki

selowitch · May 3, 2005, 10:40 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

If your CPU is under load, and you're using Safari, and you have MacNN set to show all the smilies, Safari's high CPU load for animated images can cause this.

tooki

Hmmm. Could this effect be evident under Camino as well?

tooki · May 4, 2005, 09:44 PM

Dunno, I've never used Camino.

But you could easily test this yourself by disabling the bank of smilies in your user options and seeing if it helps.

tooki

selowitch · May 4, 2005, 09:57 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

Dunno, I've never used Camino.

You should try it. Gecko/Mozilla engine, programmed in Cocoa! Definitely worthwhile.

legacyb4 · May 4, 2005, 11:01 PM

Yup, it's painfully slow in Camino as well.

I switched back to the basic editor option in the User CP and it works fine now.

Originally Posted by selowitch

Hmmm. Could this effect be evident under Camino as well?

sideus · May 5, 2005, 06:22 AM

Originally Posted by selowitch

You should try it. Gecko/Mozilla engine, programmed in Cocoa! Definitely worthwhile.

What is so great about Cocoa?

selowitch · May 5, 2005, 07:49 AM

Originally Posted by sideus

What is so great about Cocoa?

This review, while old, reveals a lot, as does the ensuing discussion. While it's not necessarily true that Cocoa is better than Carbon in every situation, I would venture that whereas Cocoa is more "native" under OS X than Carbon (the latter of which is really a system for adapting legacy code to OS X), an application written from the ground up in Cocoa may sometimes reflect greater care and intimate knowledge of OS X than something Carbonized. Firefox is a Carbon app and I think you can readily see how much better Camino performs, although FF is more extensible/customizable—that's something for the Camino programmers to work on!

tooki · May 5, 2005, 12:38 PM

The reason Firefox and the other "pure" mozillas have weird interfaces is because their interface is done in neither Cocoa nor Carbon: it's done in its own toolkit, which is great for cross-platform compatibility, but looks like ass. Performance problems indicate a need for performance tuning, no less, no more. Remember that, all else held equal, Carbon has higher processing performance than Cocoa. More likely some of the performance problems have to do with the Mozilla engine using QuickDraw to render, whereas a Cocoa app will generally use Quartz 2D graphics. QuickDraw's performance on Mac OS X is substantially below that of Quartz 2D. (Note that as of Tiger, QuickDraw is officially deprecated.)

Anyhow, you venture wrong: it has nothing to do with Cocoa vs. Carbon -- both of them are equally native on Mac OS X (since Mac OS X is a true hybrid of NeXT and Mac OS). Both produce quality, Mac-like apps. Both run deep into the system. They each have slightly different function sets, and each is slightly more adept at different tasks. Cocoa doesn't indicate a programmer's "intimate knowledge" of Mac OS X -- Cocoa just does a lot of that for you. A Carbon programmer has to do more work to provide some functions, so it's easier to forget to include some behaviors that the Mac user expects.

That said, I have been meaning to try Camino for a while now (the last time I tried it was before its name changed to Camino... what was the old name again?).

tooki

bradoesch · May 5, 2005, 02:42 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

That said, I have been meaning to try Camino for a while now (the last time I tried it was before its name changed to Camino... what was the old name again?).

tooki

Chimera.

If that got me any points, can you please bring back "View First Unread Post"?

selowitch · May 5, 2005, 03:01 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

Anyhow, you venture wrong: it has nothing to do with Cocoa vs. Carbon -- both of them are equally native on Mac OS X (since Mac OS X is a true hybrid of NeXT and Mac OS).

That's not what I was told, but I'm inclined to trust your perspective more. Thanks for the correction. It's all part of my ongoing education!

tooki · May 8, 2005, 03:05 AM

Originally Posted by bradoesch

Chimera.

If that got me any points, can you please bring back "View First Unread Post"?

Chimera, that's it!

Alas, other than begging for functions to be put in, I am in no way involved in adding features to the forum software. But those that are do read the feedback forum!

Originally Posted by selowitch

That's not what I was told, but I'm inclined to trust your perspective more. Thanks for the correction. It's all part of my ongoing education!

I mean, I guess it depends on what exactly one means by degrees of native-ness. If you mean how long (time-wise) the API has been around, then yes, Cocoa has been around longer on top of Mach. The Mac Toolbox has been in active use since about 1983, many years before Cocoa made its debut on the NeXT platform. But if you are looking at it from a "how deep into the OS does it hook" perspective, both are essentially peers. There are some differences, but they are effectively trivial, and are not the root causes of the problems people identify with Carbon apps.

tooki