At long last, Apple has rewritten Finder using its Cocoa development environment for Snow Leopard, according to a report.
(Credit: Apple)Apple has finally rewritten one of the most important applications in Mac OS X in its preferred programming environment, according to a report.
AppleInsider reports that Finder, the ubiquitous file management application in Mac OS X, has been rewritten using Apple's Cocoa development environment in advance of the release of Mac OS X 10.6, otherwise known as Snow Leopard. Finder remained a stubborn holdout tied to the Carbon programming environment as Apple encouraged internal and external developers to switch to Cocoa over the last several years.
Finder, as shown in Mac OS X Leopard.
(Credit: Apple)Apple hasn't released a ton of formal information about Snow Leopard, but it has emphasized that the operating system will mark the completion of Apple's march toward a 64-bit release. The company has also said that application developers won't be able to write 64-bit applications in Carbon, which seems like Apple's way of pushing Carbon holdouts onto Cocoa.
It's not that easy, however, to switch large applications from one development environment to another: Adobe Systems thought it would be able to write a Carbon-based 64-bit version of Photoshop, but had to delay its plans for a 64-bit version of Photoshop for Mac OS after learning it would have to switch Photoshop to Cocoa.
Snow Leopard is expected to arrive "about a year" after it was announced last June at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which gives Apple a lot of wiggle room to work out the kinks. The new version will also support the ability to create separate Mac OS X images on disk partitions or external drives, according to AppleInsider.
Apple may be looking at an open-source solution as a way to get around Adobe Systems' Flash technology.
Roughly Drafted was able to find a developer willing to talk about last week's Worldwide Developers Conference sessions, which are supposed to be confidential. But these things have a way of coming to light, and one session on Friday apparently covered a technology called SproutCore that could give Apple a way to get its Cocoa development frameworks into the hearts and minds of Web developers.
Web applications are big these days, and developers are continuously looking for ways to improve the performance and sex appeal of their applications. To that end, they often find themselves using frameworks like Adobe's Flash or Microsoft's Silverlight technology to save time and take advantage of flashier graphics. But once you choose to develop a Web application for one of those standards, you're essentially locked into the browser plug-ins for that one particular standard.
SproutCore gets around that lock-in by letting more of the Web application run inside the browser, rather than in the plug-in. Apple apparently used SproutCore to build the Web applications unveiled last week as part of the new MobileMe service, which replaces the aging .Mac service.
Check out Roughly Drafted or a similar article from Appleinsider for more details on how SproutCore works for Web developers; I'm not going to be able to do the topic proper justice without a few Web development courses.
But the basic idea would be that Apple and its software development partners could build richer "desktop-like" Web applications for Safari on either the iPhone or the Mac without having to license Adobe or Microsoft's plug-in technology. This could also allow Windows developers to create Web applications that resemble Mac applications.
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