On 7 Nov 2010, at 9:35 AM, eveningnick eveningnick wrote:
>> You seem to be trying to find ways to use the frameworks in ways that are
>> not intended. Why are you not using NSApplicationMain in the normal way?
>>
> Just for the sake of my own understanding. There's nothing extraordinary i
> am doing there, but for example, i need to "delay" the launch of my
> application and registering all the observers/event taps before the "master
> application" starts
You are understood: You want to learn how the high-level application and event
API works by trying to recreate (or at least explain) it using lower-level API.
You can't do it. At least not in general.
To provide the high-level functionality, Apple uses the published low-level
API, but it also uses unpublished API, and adds functionality that isn't in any
API, and the whole thing relies upon undocumented interactions between all the
APIs it uses. Apple can do this because every time it revises the high-level
calls, its engineers know what the low-level and private calls in the same OS
release will do.
You don't know what Apple knows, and the whole idea of a high-level framework
is that you do not have to know, and you should not know. You can rely on what
the documentation says the high-level API does, but you can't rely on (or,
usually, accurately reproduce) how it does it. Anything you try, to duplicate
the high-level functionality, is only a partial guess.
The way to understand Cocoa is to use Cocoa as it comes to you. Using Cocoa
means trusting it to do its job even though you can't see inside it. That is in
the nature of any modern application framework.
I programmed for the original Mac, in C. It had an API that could be fully
documented in well under a thousand pages. It was implemented in code that was
easy to disassemble and read. I could explain what was going on inside every
call I made. I wrote my own event loop, and handled my own interrupts. Those
days are gone, and it is horrible to think of going back to them.
For your more-specific question, I found many promising leads by googling
"cocoa application modal progress bar".
— F
PS: Yes, you can — when necessary — substitute notionally lower-level API (ex:
Core Foundation, Application Services, BSD) for many things that are in Cocoa.
(I say "notionally lower-level," because that API is sometimes implemented in
terms of Cocoa, and not the other way around.) In this particular context of
learning Cocoa and duplicating the core of NSApplication, that's a bad approach.
_______________________________________________
Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com)
Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
