CoreDate (was: [Biococoa-dev] WWDC2005)

[John Timmer]

My guess is that those stats are an over-estimation of the rate for the
people we'd be writing software for.  People who buy Omni products are those
who care about their software, which means they're more likely to update
their OS.  Their target market doesn't include the "set it up and leave it
alone if it isn't broken" population, and based on my rough survey around
where I've been working, that group is over-represented in biology.

That said, it should be possible to create a "modern" branch of our classes.
Given the number of changes I think we'd have to make, I'd say we'd need to
keep that a separate project, or we'd ifdef things beyond readability.  The
other thing I'd say is that we should just target it at 10.4 using CoreData.
The big difference in 10.3 was the addition of bindings via key/value coding
and observing.  By targeting CoreData, we get both of those, plus object
storage and undo management for free.

And I was disappointed to see that CoreData's still NDA'd beyond what's
here: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/
They'd started giving details on a bunch of things like Spotlight and
64-bitness, and I'd assumed they'd done one for CoreData as well.  There's
enough there to say a couple of things, though.

The key phrases in that description are: "Cocoa can manage your data objects
themselves through the power of Core Data, providing automatic undo/redo
support, additional user interface synchronization, and data consistency,
correctness, and speed enhancements when it's time to write to disk."
And: " A high-performance, SQLite-based database file format"

As these indicate, CoreData should allow you to treat a database as an
object store, meaning if you can write a database query that will produce a
specific object or list of objects, you can just send that query into the
CoreData store to get all the objects out.  This should mean that you no
longer have to pass specific references to objects all over your
application, and can bind to them painlessly.  The trick is that, to make
the queries and bindings work, you have to make everything you store
key/value coding compliant.  We'd need to do a lot of work to get there.

There's other issues as well, but there's not enough in that short
description to allow me to bring them up here.

John


>> Also, I think (might be wrong here) that by now 90% of the people run
>> 10.3.
> 
> Here are some interesting statistics:
> 
> <http://update.omnigroup.com/>
> 
> 
> Jim

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