Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!lll-lcc!pyramid!voder!apple!lsr From: lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: MacApp Sources... Message-ID: <375@apple.UUCP> Date: Thu, 11-Dec-86 19:32:53 EST Article-I.D.: apple.375 Posted: Thu Dec 11 19:32:53 1986 Date-Received: Sat, 13-Dec-86 23:01:07 EST References: <364@apple.UUCP> <20@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu> Reply-To: lsr@apple.UUCP (Larry Rosenstein) Organization: Advanced Development Group, Apple Computer Lines: 71 Keywords: MacApp Professional Developers In article <20@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu> dtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Duane Williams) writes: > >I don't understand why "professional" developers need MPW and MacApp and >"kitchen-table" developers don't. No third party products provide the high >level of support for the Mac user interface as does MacApp. If the >"professional" needs this level of support, then why doesn't the "kitchen- >table" developer? Is it that the "kitchen-table" developers are smarter, >better programmers? Or is it that Apple just doesn't care about them, >because they are less likely to directly help Apple sell Macs? "Kitchen-table" or "weekend" developers need as much help (if not more) in producing their applications. In general, they don't have the time to spend learning about the details of Inside Macintosh. MacApp tries to solve this problem. It is equally true that Apple is in the business of selling machines, and that the vast majority of users care about the commerical software that is available. Therefore, Apple devotes most of its limited resources towards commerical developers, because they are the most likely to ship products. Apple does care about "kitchen-table" developers. We helped APDA get off the ground, for example. As David Goldsmith mentioned, there is no fee to become a Certified Developer, which provides for discounts on equipment and E-Mail Technical Support. (You do have to convince the Developer Relations people that you are serious about shipping a product.) MPW was targeted towards "professional" developers because there seemed to be a lack of third party products in that market. I am not very familiar with all the development systems on the Macintosh, but I don't think any of them offer the expandability of MPW. Also, MPW supports multi-language development. The goal of making MPW run on a minimal hardware configuration was not a high priority. MPW was tested, however, on a 512Ke with 2 800K drives, but compiling large programs simply requires more memory. The main goal of MacApp was to produce a framework that could be used for commerical applications. Once again, there are already similar products that are designed to make development easier. From third parties there is MacExpress (not to be confused with DiskExpress from the same company), and the Pascal/C Extenders. In the public domain/shareware category are TransSkel (and related things). As was mentioned above, none of these systems (as far as I know) address as broad a range of features as does MacApp. Some of these features (e.g., memory management, error handling, printing) are very important and very difficult to do. Adding all these features increased the size of MacApp. Off hand, I can't think of many features that could be eliminated from MacApp in order to reduce its size. We could eliminate support for the clipboard, for example, but that means either you would have to implement this all yourself or leave it out of the program altogether. It might be true that the MPW Pascal compiler makes inefficient use of memory, and that a different compiler would be able to compile MacApp programs in 512K of memory. As far as a hard disk goes, I don't think you can implement a very large application on a machine with 2 800K drives. Even if you don't have the hardware to run MPW and MacApp, you can get a printed MacApp listing from APDA and get some benefit out of studying the source code. I will gladly describe any of the techniques used in MacApp, so that other people can incorporate them into their applications. -- Larry Rosenstein Object Specialist Apple Computer AppleLink: Rosenstein1 UUCP: {sun, voder, nsc, mtxinu, dual}!apple!lsr CSNET: lsr@Apple.CSNET