Give Me a Word Processor
2001.02.14 -
In one and a half months, Apple is going to launch their most
important product since the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984: The
operating system known as Mac OS X.
Native OS X apps (carbon and cocoa) are slowly appearing on Versiontracker. Every once in a
while I check out the word processing section, but there's nothing
worthwhile there, only some very basic text editors that are more
suited for coding than for writing.
This is really strange. I mean: word processing is the number one
thing we do on our computers, but not a single software house or
programmer has yet thought of building a decent one. There are ports of
complicated games, high end graphic stuff, complete database servers,
Apache, you name it - but not a simple little lean word processor.
Well, in the fall we'll get that very expensive elephant-like
program called Microsoft Word, a
piece of software that despite its millions of lines of codes still
isn't able to print backwards (last page first, a useful feature with
lots of inkjet printers) or remember the cursor location (handy in
almost every situation). Of course there will be AppleWorks, but that
is very incompatible since they removed the translators. It won't even
allow you to do a simple save as RTF. You'll need MacLink 12 for
that.
According to an article in Mac Addict (February 2001), building a
word processor in Cocoa is a piece of cake, as long as you know
objective C. It made me start thinking about learning a bit of the
language myself, but I'm just to clumsy for programming stuff. I even
made a mess of my Commodore 64 BASIC apps. Anyway, isn't that what we
have real programmers for?
According to what I have read, Cocoa will allow you to build a Quark
XPress-like app with two programmers in an old garage within a couple
of weeks. So I guess if someone starts coding a word processor with
WriteNow-like features, he or she'll be finished in a week.
I'll gladly volunteer to do some beta testing!
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