What's missing in Cocoa? [closed]

Question

If you could add anything to Cocoa, what would it be? Are there any features, major or minor, that you would say are missing in Cocoa. Perhaps there is a wheel you have had to invent over and over because of an omission in the frameworks?

Answer 1

A way to specify copy/retain properties that are automatically released in dealloc. Perhaps

@property (nonatomic, copy, dealloc) NSString* name;

And RegexKit of course.

Answer 2

@property (..,copy) support for mutable type classes (NSMutableArray, NSMutableDictionary, etc.). Currently, if you assign a value to property for a mutable type class the object created will be non-mutable (due to the copy).

Answer 3

Proper support for web services.

Answer 4

A way to flag entire Core Data entities as transient. This would be particularly useful for implementing Bonjour sharing.

For example, let's say I've got an iTunes-like model, with Playlist and Song entities. Currently, to implement Bonjour sharing, I create two additional NSObject subclasses, TransientPlaylist and TransientSong, which implement all of the same methods as their Core Data counterparts.

I shouldn't need to double the number of model classes just to have transient versions of my objects – not when I want them to behave exactly the same, sans persistence.

(Yes, the other option is to have an in-memory persistent store which houses all of the entities you want to be transient. Either way, it's unnecessary overhead)

Answer 5

• Good regular expression support
• Layout managers in AppKit. Autoresizing just doesn't cut it for complicated GUIs.

Answer 6

Certainly a reasonable interface from manage object contexts to SQL database servers'd be pretty cool.

I'd like to see better examples of writing custom views with programatically created cells, all autoscrolling nicely.

Also, there seems to be a real gap in IB's support for complex multi-paned windows with working splitters. I suppose they're working on this?

And whatever happened to resolution independence, huh?