A NFN article shows the issues developers face in choosing between Cocoa and Carbon for their Mac OS X applications. "Apple has been slow to promote the advantages of Cocoa, instead touting Carbon as a swift development route with little re-coding required."
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Its a great way to have a program work in both environments. They should abandon cocoa altogether.
I'm an old school Mac programmer, been using Cocoa for a few months, and it's like when I first started working with the Mac. "You mean that stuff that always took so much code--it's now that simple?"
About both environments... maybe, except who cares about OS 9 anymore? Not me. In another year, who is going to care about OS 9?
Just the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people who don't have the cash or the time to replace all their hardware and programs...that's all. Not much of a market there, I guess.
'Course in FIVE years it'll be another story. Maybe even in three years. But for now, lots of us are sticking with OS 9.
Development time in Cocoa is an order of magnitude faster than in Carbon.
If you add to that the fact that it can be programmed in Java and that you have access to the full J2SE API, Cocoa is unbeatable for new apps.
Abandon Cocoa? Not going to happen. Carbon will become all the more obsolete as OS 9 gets older and older. As a developer, I was hesitant to use Cocoa and it's ObjC environment (can't teach an old dog....), but once jumping in, I would really like to never have to look at carbon, or OS 9 again. Cocoa rocks, and Carbon can be almost impossible for some programming projects (like utilities).
MacNN and NFN are the same company. Nice.
It's funny about that Real Basic comment. I am struggling with an fantastic app called SpamFire that was written in RB. It SHOULD have been written in Cocoa. SpamFire is a great concept, but
1) Is a CPU vampire when doing nothing
2) is a bit slow and clunky
3) The look of the GUI is not as good as Cocoa apps.
4) Mystery crashes
Carbon can be used to develop anything that doesn't require cocoa, and the only things that require cocoa are Preference Panes and Menu Tools. For experienced programmers, there should be no greater effort to accomplish the same thing is Carbon or Cocoa. For less than experienced developers, Cocoa is the way to go because it "covers the basics" for the programmer. Anyway, the NFN article didn't really say anything significant (what was its point?).
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Joined: Jul 2001
carbon
I like using carbon.