[TheoCryst]

I'm a college sophomore interested in a future in programming, specifically for OS X. Over the past few months I've been learning Cocoa as quickly as possible, and I must say that I enjoy it a lot. Both it and the Objective-C language are very elegant and a pleasure to implement. However, I've been wondering recently if Cocoa will be enough for a Mac developer, of if I should go out and learn Carbon as well. I know that Carbon is older and fading in popularity, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I shouldn't be familiar with it.

I also ask this because I'm interested in a summer internship, and one of the places I'm interested in suggests a knowledge of both Cocoa and Carbon. Will I see this a lot in the work force?

[Chuckit]

Carbon includes a lot of stuff that Cocoa doesn't. It's definitely useful to be familiar with it.

[Catfish_Man]

In particular the FS* (filesystem operations), LS* (launch services), and CFPreferences APIs are ones that I have found useful.

[Chuckit]

Carbon is also the only way you can customize a menu, as far as I know. (Hopefully Apple will resurrect NSMenuView for Leopard, but I'm not holding my breath.)

[brokenjago]

Carbon, AFAIK is not fading in popularity, and, as is often thought, in support. It's simply an API that is much better suited for developing cross-platform applications.

I'm pretty sure that's the case.

[TheoCryst]

Blegh, okay. I guess I'll start picking up some Carbon once I get a better grip on Cocoa. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can best go about doing this? A quick Amazon book search revealed very few Carbon books, all of which had received abysmal ratings.

[Chuckit]

Just look at the documentation and code samples. That's the best I can think of. Carbon is a gigantic beast comprising several large frameworks, so don't think of it as just something that you'll learn. Take it a little bit at a time.

[©öñFü$íóÑ]

I wish i had the time to learn how to program at least in ONE language aside from HTML in my lifetime. It looks as if I wanted any kind of software with all the modern features available in OS 9, then I'd have to do it myself.

I mean, it'd be great to have at least the following available in Carbonized form for OS 8.6/9.x users:

• a decent BitTorrent client
• a back-port of Firefox
• or at least a faster and more compatible browser than iCab (which is the best so far)

[Chuckit]

There isn't a whole lot of money in the unwilling-to-upgrade-after-six-years market, and geeks and hobbyists all enjoy OS X programming much more, so OS 9 isn't really in a good place as far as software development goes.

[Thinine]

The only reason to even look at Carbon code for modern OS X applications is when you need functionality that isn't available through Cocoa. So there's no need to even know it exists unless you can't accomplish what you want with Cocoa. From what I've seen, filesystem operations and registering system hot keys are the two big areas you'd need to use Carbon for. Other than that, stay far, far away.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Carbon is also the only way you can customize a menu, as far as I know. (Hopefully Apple will resurrect NSMenuView for Leopard, but I'm not holding my breath.)

Customize a menu? What do you mean?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Customize a menu? What do you mean?

Put custom views in a menu item (see, for example, the Finder's color label menu item)

[Amorya]

You may be pleasantly surprised

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Customize a menu? What do you mean?

Like the volume menu, or the Spotlight menu, or the color labels in the Finder's File menu.

[arcticmac]

so, um... what are they using to draw the menus if its not an NSMenuView? couldn't one just subclass that, and then use posing to jump in on the action?

[Chuckit]

As I said, the Carbon Menu Manager is used for menus. NSMenuView is deprecated and not used for anything.