Re: Moribund Carbon...any thgouths

On Oct 29, 2007, at 1:13 PM, Jeff Hobbs wrote:

What is unrealistic about this picture of the future? Carbon  
developers have already needed to use Cocoa in their Carbon  
applications to provide certain functionality and now it's only going  
get worse. As a result of the announcements at WWDC lot of Carbon  
developers are deciding to port their applications to Cocoa, which  
leaves even fewer Carbon developers for Apple to accommodate. Fewer  
to accommodate means Apple will do even less in the future to  
accommodate them, and the obvious end of this cycle is that Carbon  
ceases to be a viable technology for building competitive Mac OS X  
applications. Eventually Apple will explain how supporting Carbon  
just doesn't fit into their long term vision because so few people  
are using it, and none for what they consider "top tier" products,  
the ones the Mac needs to be a viable platform.

> Apple's changes over time need to be followed, but from reading  
> various
> articles, even Cocoa users weren't spared in Leopard,

But at least Cocoa users haven't been told that Cocoa is going to be  
allowed to die off, or that future development is going to focus on  
something they aren't using.

Apple's internal struggles have been more political than anything  
IMO. Most of the powers that be at Apple, such as Steve Jobs and  
Bertrand Serlet (and Avie Tevanian before him before him) are NeXT  
people, and in my experience the NeXT people consider Carbon  
developers irrelevant. They see Apple and the Mac as nothing more  
than a way to make their beloved NeXT operating system and software  
the successful consumer product it failed to be under NeXT Computer.  
I suspect the only internal discussions were about how long they  
needed to keep stringing the Carbon developers along before deciding  
they weren't needed anymore.

> In the end, Apple made the hard choice instead of the easy one.

I don't know how hard it was for them, but it was certainly  
unethical. Apple had been telling Carbon developers for years that  
Carbon was a viable option for Mac development. A "first-class  
citizen" as Steve Jobs put it. They enhanced it in ways that required  
Carbon developers to redesign their applications (composited  
windows). They got Carbon developers to convert their old dialogs to  
Carbon nibs. They promised 64-bit Carbon right up until the moment in  
WWDC when a bullet point made it clear they had reneged on that  
promise. Now their official stance has changed. As evidence of their  
view of the Carbon developers who done so much to provide software  
for Mac OS X, Interface Builder will not convert Carbon nibs to Cocoa  
nibs, and Apple kept the decision to kill Carbon 64 secret until  
WWDC, even while some Carbon developers were working hard to get  
their Carbon applications ready for 64-bit Carbon. That decision was  
*not* made on the eve of WWDC. Boo Apple.

> I think it will pay off, though the short-term consequences could  
> be pretty grim.

It will work. I don't know if it will be a big "pay off." If Apple  
had invested the resources they put into modernizing and updating  
Cocoa for Mac OS X into Carbon, I think you'd still have as many  
compelling Mac OS X applications. That is, I honestly don't think the  
average Mac user would see a significant difference. The biggest  
difference might be a lot less weekend wonder Cocoa applications that  
in my experience aren't that impressive anyway.

> After all, just look at how long it's taking to get an
> Intel-native version of Microsoft Office for the Mac.

The biggest delay in getting an Intel version of Office was probably  
the process of porting their CodeWarrior projects to Xcode, which was  
delayed even more than normal by the fact that Microsoft initially  
found Xcode to not be up to the task, so they had to wait for Apple  
to addresses some of the issues they had with it, and they were not  
trivial issues.

> Should we expect a
> 64-bit Cocoa version in, say, 2012? And I have no idea what Adobe's
> going to do about 64-bit versions of its products.

The biggest problem for Adobe is plug-ins. Even if they had a Cocoa  
version of Photoshop today a lot of Photoshop users wouldn't buy it  
because none of their third-party plug-ins would be compatible with  
it. I seem to recall hearing that internally they have a Cocoa  
version of Photoshop, but the plug-in issue is a show stopper for the  
foreseeable future.

Just my $0.02.

Larry

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