Talk:QuickDraw GX
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[edit] QuickDraw GX vs PostScript
I had the impression that the purpose of QuickDraw GX was to create an Apple-controlled version of PostScript. Does anyone know more about the strategy? This would be a good addition to the beginning of the article. Tempshill 19:46, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
- I have added a History section that covers just this question. Basically it appears it did not start out this way, but definitely turned into it by the end. At least it's safe to say that TrueType was an attempt to kill PS. There's a famous incident at some large show (Siggraph?) where TrueType was announced and Warnock was almost in tears when he claimed they were blowing smoke. He responded in fine fashion though, opening the Type 1 format and thus killing off TT's major r'aison de etre.
- How the rest of GX developed is still something I'm trying to track down. I believe the broad strokes I have outlined are fairly accurate, but details are seriously lacking. I'm going to exercise some of my e-mail contacts and see if I can't get a better timeline going.
- Maury 15:18, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Questionable assertions
“Out of the text management architecture came the TrueType Specification and out of the color management architecture came the ICC International Color Consortium specification.” GX extended the capabilites of TrueType, but it existed (and was specified) earlier, so that seems to be bogus. I was under the impression theat ColorSync was seperate in origin to GX, but I’m prepared to be corrected on that. -Ahruman 17:42, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
- Me too actually, this needs to be explored. Maury 15:18, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
System 7 (released 1991) included TrueType support. QuickDraw GX was released four years later. QuickDraw's font handling extended easily to include support for scalable fonts, so the statement "critically the font system was based on bitmaps instead of outline fonts" from the "Problems with QuickDraw" section is flat-out wrong. The second and third paragraph of that section are IMHO *entirely* bogus. The QuickDraw state was not "a series of arrays" at the top of the application address space, but rather a few hundred bytes of global variables in the application's global variable area (which was, incidentally, near the top of the application's memory partition, right blow the jump table and the application parameters). Having global state in this place makes the QuickDraw API badly suited for multithreading, but it is NO PROBLEM for multitasking, as every application has its own, independent copy of the QuickDraw state. Apple's late adoption of preemptive multitasking and memory protection are rather be blamed on other system components that did *not* handle their global state like QuickDraw did. 85.125.216.188 01:24, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] "Rocket Science"
In the statement:
- Cary Clark was the architect and technical lead. He was an early member of Rocket Science and WebTV.
To what does "Rocket Science" refer? — The Storm Surfer 20:10, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
It refers to "Rocket Science Games". I've updated the text and added a link. ows 17:20, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
