The Desktop Fishbowl
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Tuesday, 27 August 2002

Spent the afternoon at Apple's OS X Tech Talk. Highlights of the afternoon were: The Quartz Extreme demo. Transparent terminal window overlapping with a semi-transparent animated 3d demo, over a running QuickTime video. Composite that, inferior operating systems! The new zoom feature in Jaguar's accessibility panel. Sometimes the simple things are pretty impressive. The explanation of why Java 1.4 is delayed. Apparently, the current OS X Java GUI (both Swing and AWT draw themselves using as much of the native kit as they can get away with) is Carbon-based. They hit a speed-bump, so they've been busy rewriting everything in Cocoa. The American's silly pronounciation of “Jagwar”, and the Australian server-guy's insistence on saying “authentification” The whole thing made me want to do a lot more Cocoa programming. I've done some hacking with it before, and it's way cool. After beating my head against Swing a few times, putting GUIs together in Cocoa was an absolute joy. I even have a grudging acceptance Objective-C 9:51:05 PM