> To me, it's not that you'd have to write all the code from scratch that makes > Core Data concerning, it's the fact that the format is undocumented.
> If Apple published a complete specification for the format, I'd be willing to > use Core Data, but as it is, the prospect of having > one's own file format as a black box is a huge turn-off to me. Thanks for tip, I was unaware of that. Sure I can see how it's nice to use the Core Data API, but one would have to be completely out of one's tree to save end-user documents in a completely undocumented format, even if it were cross-platform. I lost what would have otherwise been a really lucrative, really fun consulting gig in which I would have been able to use my Physics degree. I'm afraid that I made it clear to the hiring manager that I considered him an idiot for even asking me whether I knew Core Data. I didn't come right out and say so, but I sure did make it clear that I considered him ill-advised. Just now I'm about to register a KickStarter project that would compensate me for completely reverse-engineering the Core Data formats. However I need to set a fixed price goal, as well as a finite delivery schedule. One only gets money at all from kickstarter if both goals are met. That kind of project estimation, in my own experience, is an as-yet unsolved problem, not just for me but for every software engineer. If you claim you know how to estimate software development time and cost, I don't believe you. Don't even _think_ about suggesting that such reverse-engineering is illegal. Reverse-engineer is specifically protected under the law. If you have some proprietary method you want legal protection for, that's what patents are for. Trade secrets are used either when the invention is either not "novel", or not "unobvious" and so not legally patentable, or when one hopes to maintain the secret for longer than the patent's twenty-year term, such as the secret recipe for Coca-Cola. There are only a very few, very trusted people who know what all the ingredients are. Had they patented it, the recipe would have been placed into the public domain a hundred years ago. I know this very well. I've reverse-engineed a whole bunch of different kinds of things. That resulted in a Senior Engineer position at Apple itself in the mid-90s, where in my role as a Debug Meister for the Traditional OS Integration team, I reverse-engineered a great many third-party applications that were found by QA to stimulate crashes in new builds of the Mac OS System. I worked on 7.5.2 and 7.5.3. For example, I once supplied Microsoft with the exact byte offset in the Word 6 binary, at which they started a one-shot timer, then after it fired, reset it, so it would tick continuously. Unfortunately, the Classic Mac OS didn't have any really clear concept of a process - some other Apple engineer once described the System as just "a bunch of subroutines", so under a very heavy paging load, that timer would fire well after Word's executable code had been overwritten with some other data. My very first consulting gig when I hung out my shingle in April 1998, was to reverse engineer the Movie Magic Scheduling database format, so that Graphical Planet's handheld devices could interoperate with Movie Magic. Graphical Planet did ask the Movie Magic people to interoperate with them, but they refused, so they hired me. In just three weeks I fully documented the format, just by making lots of databases with small variations between them, then comparing hex dumps of pairs of them - the single letter "A" in just one field, compared to "AB" in that same field, as well as "A" in one field, then just "B' In some other field. I also wrote a C program that dumped a human readable text file of the whole database. Graphical Planet's acceptance test was for my C program to dump the project management plan for a full-length motion picture. Movie Magic even had a form that enabled one to schedule the appearance of potted plants on the set. If I can do that, surely I can reverse engineer Core Data. And yes, many of my best friends still work for Apple. I don't mean anyone at Apple any ill-will, other than the miscreants who make such decisions as to convince all the developers to depend on undocumented formats for their livelihood. The people I actually met when I was at Apple, the ones that I know that work there today, are not that way. Mike Crawford mdcrawf...@gmail.com http://www.goingware.com/ <-- Down, but back up Real Soon Now. Portland, Oregon _______________________________________________ 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: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
