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Author Topic: When will Cocoa be stable?  (Read 12092 times)

VTwin

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #15 on: April 07, 2019, 01:01:22 am »
Just wondering how we qualify something as "working" (I mean that as a serious question).
Do we mean "it works" even though it may not look right for the given OS/widgetset?
Or should it be fully compliant with the OS/widgetset?

Interesting question. I assume the trade off for easy cross-platform development will be accepting some generic non-OS controls. If I run Inkscape or Gimp, for example, I'm not expecting fully OS compliant controls. That never bothers me, as long as they are recognizable and work within a common expectation. My audience is mainly scientists, university students, and workers in applied science. I doubt they care too much about a rigorous adherence to the "look and feel" advocated by Apple. If buttons, comboboxes, etc., work pretty much as expected, that is probably fine. They do like stuff to show up properly in task bars, etc., though, and are mostly not command line geeks. A fine line I guess.
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Akira1364

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #16 on: April 07, 2019, 06:04:39 pm »
Should Cocoa also be set to "working" on the roadmap? "In progress" makes it sound like it is still unusable.

jwdietrich

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #17 on: April 07, 2019, 06:35:43 pm »
Should Cocoa also be set to "working" on the roadmap? "In progress" makes it sound like it is still unusable.

IMO we should have a special category "partially working" for development stages of this kind.
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VTwin

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #18 on: April 10, 2019, 05:29:28 am »
I agree that the Cocoa widgetset is very close to production ready. I am already using it as such, as Carbon is no longer a viable option for me. However, the Cocoa IDE is still lacking some fundamental capabilities. I have posted comments and bug reports.

I give my wholehearted and sincere thanks to the developers, primarily Dmitry as I understand it. A few things, however, still need to be fixed before the Carbon IDE can be finally left behind. I'm sure bounties or donations would be appreciated.
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skalogryz

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #19 on: April 10, 2019, 07:09:05 am »
as a note. I've a side project happening right now. so I've minimal time for Cocoa.
The project started last October. Obviously the same time as Cocoa updates stopped.

dbannon

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #20 on: April 10, 2019, 07:53:45 am »
IMO we should have a special category "partially working" for development stages of this kind.

Maybe "Functional except for...." type of statement ?   There is no doubt Lazarus on Mac made a heap of progress recently (thanks Dmitry and martin_fr) , but not perfect. But capable of supporting many project right now. We could say same about Lazarus on other platforms, nothing is ever perfect.

For example, I'm bugged by the SystemTray Icon component. It was, at one time 'perfect' on Linux, but recent Gnome based releases of Linux (eg Fedora 28 and 29) no longer support it. So, we could also say the same "Functional except for..." on Linux too. As long as people are informed of the limitations they can plan accordingly. Better than telling people "not yet", "come back later" .....

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VTwin

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #21 on: April 10, 2019, 03:25:36 pm »
as a note. I've a side project happening right now. so I've minimal time for Cocoa.
The project started last October. Obviously the same time as Cocoa updates stopped.

I wondered if that might be the case. Many thanks for your excellent work on Cocoa. Best of luck with your project!
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VTwin

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #22 on: April 10, 2019, 03:49:52 pm »
Maybe "Functional except for...." type of statement ?   There is no doubt Lazarus on Mac made a heap of progress recently (thanks Dmitry and martin_fr) , but not perfect. But capable of supporting many project right now. We could say same about Lazarus on other platforms, nothing is ever perfect.

Fine by me, I run into a few Cocoa interface glitches, like some strange behavior with ShowModal and PopupMenu (I have not isolated it yet), but the Carbon widgets also had some odd behavior.

I have been using the Cocoa IDE successfully for some time, but there are still a few (reported) issues which new users would likely find difficult to accept. I'd say that where it is now (2.0.0 fixes) probably a new user should use the Carbon IDE and compile for Cocoa. I'm hoping that will change by 2.0.2, but that may be coming too quickly. Perhaps 2.0.2 could be released with that in mind?
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AlexTP

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #23 on: April 18, 2019, 09:40:33 am »
I made to Dmitry 2 donations, he a) fixed painting of selected item in ColorListbox, b) added painting of circle mark for RadioItems.

Hansaplast

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #24 on: April 18, 2019, 11:08:36 am »
Awesome!  :)

VTwin

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #25 on: April 19, 2019, 02:01:19 am »
Dmitry fixed the TUpDown control as well. His Patreon blog explains the process. I signed up as a patron to show my support for his past and continued work.
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Wallaby

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #26 on: April 25, 2019, 05:20:37 am »
I have been recently paying Dmitry directly for fixing outstanding Cococa bugs.

Good work so far and it should eventually result in a stable widgetset.

VTwin

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #27 on: April 25, 2019, 09:15:24 pm »
I have been recently paying Dmitry directly for fixing outstanding Cococa bugs.

Good work so far and it should eventually result in a stable widgetset.

That is great, I'd love to see him able to test on Mojave. :)

Just a thought, but I'd love to see the Cocoa fixes merged into the 2.0 fixes branch. At the moment it looks like they are only going into trunk. Releasing software compiled on trunk might not be a good idea, but I assume 2.0 fixes is stable.
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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #28 on: May 06, 2019, 10:38:50 am »
Since I have been tinkering more with Cocoa, the question;
What will the minimal macOS version/SDK Lazarus will support?
Or is there a mechanism to "choose" what SDK to use.


The reason why I ask, is that I tried to use a few functions that require more recent header translations.
Example; NSOperatingSystemVersion
This requires 10.10+ SDK, and returns an array of 3 integers with the macOS version (seems to be hidden in 10.9 as well).


Having said that;
I'm just an amateur developer, so by far an expert on things.
I did however do a few conversions that I've gotten to work.
For example some Apple stuff DiskArbitration, etc. and the headers for libarchive.


I'm not sure if anyone would be interested, and I'm pretty sure there are a few things I may or may not have done entirely right - I'm ready to learn .  :D

Frank

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Re: When will Cocoa be stable?
« Reply #29 on: May 17, 2019, 12:02:36 pm »
Unfortunately, the Cocoa widgetset isn't an official project of the Foundation.

Just a question from an un-informed, why is this so?

Apple has clearly marked 32bit apps (Carbon) as on their way out and that leaves 64bit (Cocoa)...

But Lazarus widget set Cocoa is not "official"?

 

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