. Two Kinds of Programs: Cocoa and Carbon Mac OS X was supposed to make life simpler. It was supposed to eliminate the confusion and complexity that the old Mac OS had accumulated over the years | . Two Kinds of Programs Cocoa and Carbon Mac OS X was supposed to make life simpler. It was supposed to eliminate the confusion and complexity that the old Mac OS had accumulated over the years and replace it with a smooth simple solid system. Someday that s exactly what Mac OS X will be. For the moment however you re stuck with running two different kinds of programs each with different characteristics Cocoa and Carbon. The explanation involves a little bit of history and a little bit of logic. To take full advantage of Mac OS X s considerable technical benefits software companies must write new programs for it from scratch. So what should Apple do send out an email to the authors of the 18 000 existing Mac programs suggesting that they throw out their programs and rewrite them from the bottom up At big companies like Microsoft and Adobe such a suggestion would wind up on the Joke of the Week bulletin board. Instead Apple gave software companies a break. It wrote Mac OS X to let programmers and software companies choose precisely how much work they wanted to put into compatibility with the new system. The various levels include Update the existing programs Carbon .If software companies and programmers are willing to put some effort into getting with the Mac OS X program they can simply adapt or update their existing software so that it works with Mac OS X. The resulting software looks and feels almost like a true Mac OS X program you get the crash protection the good looks the cool-looking graphics the Save sheets and so on but behind the scenes the bulk of the computer programming is the same a sit was in MacOS 9. These are what Apple calls Carbonized programs named for the technology Carbon that permits them to run on Mac OS X. Examples of Carbonized programs include AppleWorks Photoshop versions before CS3 FileMaker Microsoft Office 2004 and believe it or not the Finder itself. Most Carbonized programs don t offer all of the features available to Mac OS X .
