Whats the difference between a cocoa and carbon app?

[hdsalinas]

With all the speculation about 10.6 dropping support for carbon apps, I wonder, what are the diferences?

From an end user non progamer point of view what are the main diferrences between these to apps (user interface).

What are some examples apps?

 

[robbieduncan]

There are no visible differences at a UI level. Or at least there don't have to be. Many major third-party apps including all of the Adobe Creative Suite applications and Microsoft Office are Carbon applications. Most new-ish Apple applications and many smaller third-party applications are Cocoa.

As an end-user you should not be concerned at all. Carbon and Cocoa are simply 2 different ways for programmers to get the same out. Some will like Carbon, the rest of us know we're right and use Cocoa 😛

 

[NAG]

Cocoa gets a few built in things easier like the Services menu and the spell checker as well as the special character pallete, I believe.

Basically the end user has no real need to care at this point in time.

 

[agentphish]

This will mean another "complete rewrite" of Adobe's Creative Suite, and major delays in release and having things work properly with Adobe.

 

[NAG]

This will mean another "complete rewrite" of Adobe's Creative Suite, and major delays in release and having things work properly with Adobe.

That is assuming 10.6 drops carbon completely. We have no clue what is really going to happen here so spreading FUD is counter productive.

 

[tersono]

With all the speculation about 10.6 dropping support for carbon apps, I wonder, what are the diferences?

This is highly unlikely as there are a number of industry-standard applications that require the carbon API (Adobe, Quark etc). I suspect that Apple are aiming simply to re-write the remaining parts of OS X that use carbon to use the cocoa API instead.

Don't get me wrong - carbon IS going away, but it's a little too soon - Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot.