Malcolm J. Currie wrote:
> Investigating via Google, I see Cocoa is some environment for Mac OS X,
> not some flavour of FITS. Is Cocoa purely intended for Mac OS X? I'm
> reluctant to tie ourselves to one platform again, but clearly Mac is
> coming to the fore. What advantages does this environment offer over
> Java-based tools (e.g. an image-display tool) for the Mac user? Assume
> I know nothing about Macs (not far from the truth).
Cocoa is an application environment that's designed for developing OS X native
applications. It's more of a framework or API that allows you to reference
various OS X-specific things, like Rendezvous (the zero-conf networking) and
Quartz (the 2-D display system). The API is available in Objective-C and Java,
but you can apparently use other programming languages (like C or Perl) that
integrate with the Cocoa frameworks. I guess it's something like .NET on
Windows, where you can use various languages (like C# or VisualBasic) within
that infrastructure to be able to access the OS-specific things.
Apple has fairly extensive documentation on nearly everything at
http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/. Especially useful for rookies like us would
be
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaOverview/index.html
I would imagine that for an image display tool you'd make extensive use of the
Cocoa API to Quartz, as it provides all of the image handling code for you.
One advantage I can see outright is that image display and manipulation would
be extremely fast, as Quartz is designed for extremely fast 2D image handling.
Cube handling might be fun as well, as if you wanted to rotate the cube
through 90 degrees to view slices through another plane, you could use Quartz
effects to do the rotation for you and provide nice eye candy. :-) My desktop
switching application, Desktop Manager, takes advantage of this so that my
virtual desktops are on faces of a cube, and when I switch desktops the cube
rotates around its central axis. Al and Norman and Tim probably know what I'm
talking about...
> I've learnt one can combine drinks, and mix Java and Cocoa objects.
It's actually that you're using Java within the Cocoa environment.
> CamelBones presumably alludes to the cover of "Programming Perl", and is
> for integrating Perl scripts into Cocoa.
Exactly. I imagine that it's kind of like doing Perl/Tk, but you'd use Cocoa
to do all of the graphics handling and user interface stuff instead of Tk.
Brad.
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