Reaction vs MUI (as what concerns the API)

[nicholas]

ReAction is the official AmigaOS GUI, this applies to both 3.x and 4.x.

Strange you should say that as just this very evening I booted up a NOS Escom A1200 with Workbench 3.1, which had "MUI-AT" drawer with a readme that said "MUI 3.2 Amiga Technologies Edition".

No Reaction in sight........

Karlos was here with me and can confirm this as it was he who noticed it first.

[nicholas]

By all respect to the fact that MUI is in many fields superior to other GUI toolkits - especially from  the coders point of view, your "benchmark" is of course ridiculous.

I've just been on the phone to one OS4's developers and he claims that the PPC native version of MUI 3.9 they ship with OS4 is actually FASTER than the version of Reaction they ship with it.

I shall try to get him to post here ASAP.

[nicholas]

You had other choices like IBrowse and Voyager.

Reason why ClassAct/Reaction never really took off is they never understood what made MUI so popular.

 http://www.psi5.com/~silva/afilter/#ox

[nicholas]

Hmmm, well Cocoa is more lovely than either MUI or Reaction... But that wasn't the question, to which the answer is MUI

puke

[nicholas]

Where are your Cocoa apps then? I'd assume you did not write any - easy to bash something you don't know. No Amigaoid toolkit comes close to the Cocoa classes in terms of features, completeness, documentation, etc.

I prefer C++ to Obj-C.  Cocoa provides a very nice set of classes but Obj-C is from the devil.

I type this from my 17" Macbook Pro 4,1 (and looking over my shoulder at the 3 Cocoa and 2 Obj-C books on my shelves.)

It's easy to bash someone you know nothing about.

[nicholas]

You puked at Cocoa, not Obj-C.

Hence the wink.  Matt knows I like to tease him about his passion for coding for Cocoa in ObjC, you apparently don't.

Then again, Obj-C's method invocation is actually pretty close to BOOPSI - just replace [] with DoMethod and use : to separate arguments rather than , That makes it easy to switch to Obj-C/Cocoa when you're a MUI programmer. At least it took me far less time to learn Obj-C & Cocoa than to learn C++ with its imho obscure GUI toolkits like Qt or MFC.



Wrong:
http://dreamolers.binaryriot.org/fuhquake/
http://iconsole.pl

That has *what* exactly to do with you bashing me despite knowing nothing about me??

[nicholas]

For me it's all about the right tool for the job... When doing low-level microcontroller work, I want C++... When doing high-level application development I love Obj-C, though I admit that over 60% of Obj-C's appeal comes from the maturity and elegance of Cocoa (really OpenStep).

Due to the rigid enforcement of design patterns in Cocoa and Obj-C programs can still be understood if the code has been ignored for nearly a year!
C++ offers too much freedom, I look back on a project written in C++ and spend a good deal oftime trying to figure out what I did and why, the comments only help so far :-/ (this is my limitation not C++).

The Amiga misses a tool as powerful as Interface Builder, also I don't know if any of the Amiga toolkits have a common inheritance from a single UIview class like cocoa does... That is a very important design advantage!



I really need to get a Cocoa book, I rely too much on learning from examples, often I'll not realise there is already a class/protocol/method that does what I want

When doing high level application development I use very expensive proprietary tools. As you say, each job requires a different tool.

For good Cocoa books you could do worse than these http://www.bignerdranch.com/books
Very well written and informative they are.

[nicholas]

The very same books recommended to me by my (rather more successful) iPhone developer friend

I have two of them and they are a joy to read, I just feel "uncomfortable" writing ObjC.  To me it similar to blonde hair and white skin on a woman, does nothing for me.

Ain't choice great?

[nicholas]

My tastes in women depend on the woman in question... I've been with my current girl friend for nary 3 years and she's Chinese!

My wife of four years is a very "exotic" mix: Jewish/English/Argentinean Native/Italian/Spanish/Black Brazillian/Portugese and she grew up in Iran during the war with Iraq.

It's always amusing when she has to fill out a form and it asks her what ethnicity, "too many" is a common answer. lol
 

I really understand where you are coming from with Obj-C! I totally hated it, I just couldn't get used to the syntax and the odd terms for things. But I realise now that my biggest problem came from thinking too low level, I didn't like being forced into MVC and Delegate patterns, I didn't realised Obj-C has runtime features I'm not used to in Asm and C++, frankly I just couldn't understand how my classes fitted into the anatomy of a program... It was only after forcing myself to plough on with it (I had to make an iPhone app, failure was not an option) that I got it... I'm by a long way a much better coder for learning the rules that Obj-C demands

You want to try coding big apps in the stuff I've used professionally since '97. Nothing like ANYTHING you've ever seen before and seriously head mashing.  I hated it for a long time and then one day I fell in love!

[nicholas]

Actually, if you know how to use design patterns, this is never a limitation. You can wrap an observer mechanism around absolutely anything that needs event handling to be decoupled from the event source, no matter how old and retarded it is.

Kitab al-Karlos