On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:48 AM, I. Savant <idiotsavant2...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Erik Buck <erik.b...@sbcglobal.net> wrote: > >> Where did the fetish for installing every single application on the local >> hard disk come from ? Isn't it insane to have 35 installed copies of >> OmniGraffle using up disk space just because you have 35 licenses ? Why is >> MS Word on every disk instead of just the server? > > ... because network interruptions (especially intermittent ones) can > wreak havoc on your running apps. :-) That's my main reason.
I was rushing off to a meeting, but I wanted to expand on this a bit. Most complicated applications won't be loading all their resources when they're launched (if they're worth a damn, that is), so consider what would happen if, as happened today at my place of employment, a wide-spread electrical problem caused all the internal switches to randomly go up and down for half the day. What if I were performing a function in such a server-hosted app which needs to load one or more resources? Would the app handle the situation properly? Probably not. If "properly" can include throwing an error and dying, well, okay, many apps are developed carefully enough that this situation would be handled, but when there are network issues, the app is pretty much not usable when these issues are going on. At least if it's local (as are the temp files it may create) and you're working on a local document, network be damned. Let's face it, though, most of us couldn't claim with absolute confidence that our application would handle network interruptions gracefully if it were being run from a network volume. Sure, if I can't load a NIB or some other vital resource, my apps throw errors and quit (refusing to save changes because in some cases that could be dangerous), but it takes a lot of development effort to be sure that the sudden inability to reach a resource on disk is handled well in every case. The fact is, I don't have much faith that many apps out there do so. -- I.S. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
