Hi Rup:
Well... I am going to assume this was a serious question, even though I
suspect you were simply trolling...
Microsoft Office is a Carbon application.
No, the behaviours were not "recoded" manually. The File... Dialogs in
Microsoft Office are all Operating System dialogs: they're just called by
the Office applications: what you're looking at is pure Carbon version 1.0.
Why not just use Cocoa? Welll.... There's something like 30 million lines
of code in Microsoft Office. Re-writing it all in Cocoa would raise the
price a little. Say: to something in the order of a hundred thousand
dollars per copy (seriously!).
That's why
To keep the price down, they re-use existing Mac Office code
if at all possible. They call Apple system code where possible. They use
as much Office PC code as possible. They only re-write stuff when they
absolutely have to to make a change to the way it behaves.
There have been software companies that have adopted a different approach,
re-writing their application every time anything substantial changed in the
market. I don't think any of the ones who did this are still in business.
The cost and risk is just frightening: and there's no possibility of making
an extra profit to pay for it all.
Yes: Word does chat away to the printer: it's an intended behaviour which
enables it to get its WYSIWYG accurate. If the printer is responding, it
happens in milliseconds and you will never notice it.
I wish reality were different. I wish my bank would give me free samples of
their product too. But Software is a "business" not a "Charity".
Cheers
My experience of Microsoft Word is that it has *always* had this
strange behaviour with printers, on opening and saving files, ever
since very early versions of Word, pre-Windows I mean (Word 4 and 5).
This has always been a sign that the Word program is strangely coded.
Things have got worse with Windows, and those problems have been
carried over to the Mac.
Thry this, for example (off subject) : in Excel, menu File/Open, in
column-presentation (neither icons, nor list). In the Finder, when the
last (or another) column is too narrow, you can double-click on the
handle (bottom right, used to resize the column) : this automatically
resizes the column to the right size (max length of file names in the
window). Try this in Excel : no result.
This shows that the behaviour has all been recoded manually. So much
work : why not just use Cocoa ?
Thanks for reading me, off subject.
Cheers,
Rup
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John McGhie <
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Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
