@Scott: How is this possible given Cocoa and related framework provide functionality which don't have counterparts in cross-platform toolkits? Core Animation is one obvious case. AppleScript, Spotlight, and QTKit are others.
Not all applications need or even benifit from all these technologies. If you absolutely need one of these, there's no doubt about it, Cocoa will be pretty much the only way to create your application.
But while for instance Core Animation is cool and pretty easy to do great stuff with, it's still possible to do equivalent stuff with other toolkits. It will require more work and attention to detail though, which is what I meant with It just takes some effort. The obvious benifit is that the application can be deployed on other operating systems too. The obvious downside is that integrating with the operating systems you're deploying takes more time.
by Lieven — Mar 22
Not all applications need or even benifit from all these technologies. If you absolutely need one of these, there's no doubt about it, Cocoa will be pretty much the only way to create your application.
But while for instance Core Animation is cool and pretty easy to do great stuff with, it's still possible to do equivalent stuff with other toolkits. It will require more work and attention to detail though, which is what I meant with It just takes some effort. The obvious benifit is that the application can be deployed on other operating systems too. The obvious downside is that integrating with the operating systems you're deploying takes more time.