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Tue, 13 Oct 2009
The big bang: Tk-Cocoa integration complete
Today's a milestone: the migration of my applications to Tk-Cocoa is complete, and I'm releasing all of them on the same day. A couple of years ago, when Apple announced that Carbon was going to be deprecated, I worried about the future of my software business. My toolkit of choice, Tk, was built on Carbon, and no clear roadmap for integrating Tk and Cocoa existed. Would I have to abandon Tk and rewrite my applications from scratch in Cocoa or another toolkit? Happily, two years later, those fears have proven to be unfounded. Apple itself sponsored the porting of Tk to run on top of Cocoa, and Daniel Steffen, the maintainer of Tcl/Tk on the Mac, capably handled the port. As I've written before, Tk-Cocoa offers many improvements over its previous Carbon-based incarnation: better native integration with the OS's UI guidelines, more UI polish, and (most of all) better performance, because it is 64-bit capable. I've done some UI freshening of my applications, and have fixed numerous bugs in them, but the major feature is simply their migration to Tk-Cocoa. All of my Tcl/Tk applications are fully 64-bit, and their performance is notably better. Because of some issues with Python's application deployment tools, my Python applications are hybrid 32-bit/64-bit (the Tk part is 64-bit, the Python part is 32-bit), but I anticipate this will be fixed in the near future. In every case, the applications have more UI polish. Every release is now a version upgrade (2.0 to 3.0), not just a point release (2.0 to 2.1). Despite the improvements, I'm holding the line on prices, so my applications are a better value than ever. I'm very grateful to Apple and Daniel for bringing Tk on the Mac to the next level. Tk-Cocoa will provide a stable platform for my applications for years to come, and I am very near the day when I can focus exclusively on application features and not banging against the limitations of my chosen toolkit. In turn, I expect this will lead to more and better application development, and growth of my software business. I'm so excited! If you want to celebrate with me, check out the applications, and let me know what you think... |
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