Summary
OO frameworks, especially in the C++ world, have usually shipped with source. This is often highly educational and sometimes a life-saver. Until, Apple didn't ship the Cocoa source.

I have to confess up-front that I only have one substantial Cocoa project under my belt (so far). The scars healed a year or so ago.

I haven't had the time recently to do more than gaze wistfully at Apple's sample code (working in MFC is hard when you know the grass is greener) and there are a lot more good books out there than when I was doing Cocoa. There are probably fewer undocumented interfaces as well.

However, I'm still bearing a grudge - where's the damn source code! .

So, why did Apple do it?

• Arrogance of NextStep engineers with little respect for the Mac developer culture? I don't really believe this but there weren't many apologies floating around.
• Empowerment of Apple internal developers, free to hack the internals as much as they liked? But, hang on a minute, just how empowered are you if you are trying to keep the interfaces compatible so you don't bury your userbase in QuickSand?
• Commercial Necessity / Paranoia - don't give away too much?

I've been looking through some old PowerPlant code lately (yes, using ObjectMaster ) and delving deep into MFC source to debug some hairy problems ( shudder ) and it made me remember just how hard it was to achieve similar debugging on my Cocoa project.

Let's just call this a Neutrally Nostalgic posting.

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About the Blogger

Andy is a free-lance developer in C++, REALbasic, Python, AJAX and other XML technologies. He works out of Perth, Western Australia for a local and international clients on cross-platform projects with a focus on usability for naive and infrequent users. Included in his range of interests are generative solutions, software usability and small-team software processes. He still bleeds six colors, even though Apple stopped, and uses migration projects from legacy Mac OS to justify the hardware collection.