[bentoon]

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16577

[siMac]

Awesome!



Edit: Now if Apple would just write the damn Finder in Cocoa...

[slava]

Originally posted by siMac:
Edit: Now if Apple would just write the damn Finder in Cocoa...

...then it would be even slower than it is now

[rhythmicmoose]

Originally posted by slava:
...then it would be even slower than it is now

Huh? Really? Why? From everything I've seen, Cocoa apps run a ton more smoothly than Carbon ones. Why would this not be so for the Finder?

(Note: I'm interested in the really detailed explanation).

[BlueIce]

I know I've heard that statement before somewhere that Finder would run slow if written in Cocoa, but I'd like a detailed reason why that would be the case as well. It seems counter-intuitive to Apple's whole development of Cocoa in the first place.

[holygoat]

With appropriate caching of selectors and so on, I imagine the Finder wouldn't be a great deal slower in Cocoa.

Furthermore, there's a lot of shared back-end, IIRC, between Cocoa and Carbon, so hey

[slava]

Originally posted by holygoat:
With appropriate caching of selectors and so on, I imagine the Finder wouldn't be a great deal slower in Cocoa.

Furthermore, there's a lot of shared back-end, IIRC, between Cocoa and Carbon, so hey

Or, better to say, Cocoa uses lots of Carbon behind the scenes.

For a pretty dated yet still accurate representation of my thoughts about Carbon vs Cocoa, here's a link to the article in our blog: http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000024.php

This said, I am not intending to start a flame war here. I love Cocoa. It is slower just because that's that way ObjC works. But Cocoa advantages often outweight that minor issue anyway. We can always buy a faster Mac, right?

[rhythmicmoose]

Originally posted by slava:
Or, better to say, Cocoa uses lots of Carbon behind the scenes.

For a pretty dated yet still accurate representation of my thoughts about Carbon vs Cocoa, here's a link to the article in our blog: http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000024.php

This said, I am not intending to start a flame war here. I love Cocoa. It is slower just because that's that way ObjC works. But Cocoa advantages often outweight that minor issue anyway. We can always buy a faster Mac, right?

Very interesting. Thanks, slava.

[holygoat]

I hope this doesn't double-post...

Originally posted by slava:
Or, better to say, Cocoa uses lots of Carbon behind the scenes.
This said, I am not intending to start a flame war here. I love Cocoa. It is slower just because that's that way ObjC works. But Cocoa advantages often outweight that minor issue anyway. We can always buy a faster Mac, right?

Which is actually a very good summary of why the Finder should not (or, contrarily, should!) be rewritten to use Cocoa.

1) Cocoa provides faster development time and easier reuse. Thus, if I were writing a new file manager, I would use Cocoa — the ability to write it more quickly would outweigh any performance gain from using Carbon. However, the Finder already exists and works. Rewriting it doesn't make business sense, especially given a minor performance loss at the end!
2) The counter-case is that it might be becoming hard to maintain, is lacking certain features, etc., in which case future extension and modification might be made simpler by rewriting. Faster Macs will, indeed, come into play!
3) The tipping point, of course, is that Carbon allows you to do some things (like unload bundles) that Cocoa simply does not. I expect the Finder uses some of these.

In short, things are the way they are because they're the way they are

[Catfish_Man]

I would argue that faster development time means more time can be spent on optimizations, and that choice of algorithms almost always outweighs choice of API...

[siMac]

Originally posted by slava:
...then it would be even slower than it is now

Hmm, I didn't know that - in which case we need an alpha value equivalent for Carbon apps too. Or for this feature to be integrated into WindowShade...

[rhythmicmoose]

Originally posted by siMac:
Hmm, I didn't know that - in which case we need an alpha value equivalent for Carbon apps too. Or for this feature to be integrated into WindowShade...

I recall hearing about a possible future WindowShade feature that would turn all background windows transparent, and leave the foreground window opaque.

Sounded awesome to me.

[siMac]

Originally posted by rhythmicmoose:
I recall hearing about a possible future WindowShade feature that would turn all background windows transparent, and leave the foreground window opaque.

Sounded awesome to me.

Yup. I was one of the people who requested it. Would still love to see it happen (nudge, nudge)!

[holygoat]

Originally posted by Catfish_Man:
I would argue that faster development time means more time can be spent on optimizations, and that choice of algorithms almost always outweighs choice of API...

That's certainly true for many situations; however, I would argue that the Macintosh file manager is extremely well-understood, in which case API performance becomes paramount. The amount of exploratory development in the Finder is very low, and there is already a large amount of "legacy" Finder code, so Carbon is a much better choice.

For new applications, though, you're definitely correct --- even more so when you switch to "cost" rather than "performance", in which case the amount of time spent by developers is the main thing.

[slava]

Originally posted by siMac:
Yup. I was one of the people who requested it. Would still love to see it happen (nudge, nudge)!

We remember. I actually also was going to add a new optional widget to the window title bar with a transparency slider in it. Cannot give a timeframe for this feature though.

[siMac]

Originally posted by slava:
We remember. I actually also was going to add a new optional widget to the window title bar with a transparency slider in it. Cannot give a timeframe for this feature though.

Awesome.

[bentoon]

Slava,
You're the man !

[AveTenebrae]

GeekBind can do that on all windows type (cocoa and carbon) in an easier way plus some other cool stuff