[MWeinstein]

I am a software developer in the Seattle area and have recently moved from the Windoze platform over to the Mac and have several observations that I would like to make. Please understand that I am not flaming Apple (or anybody else for that matter), but it makes it much easier to understand why software developers don't flock to develop for the platform.

1) I have been a software developer for a little over 20 years, and never in my life have I seen such poor documentation. I have attempted to work with Cocoa, Carbon and even WebObjects and have found that any documentation that I have found that was even worth reading was not from Apple. In addition to the quality of the documentation, it is nearly impossible to even find anything more than quick samples here and there. If people are being actively recruited as developers, why arent they getting any support or training out of the recruiter?

2) Now, I admit that I am not a strong C programmer, but I can certainly get by. I have started to work with Cocoa and found that in general, it seems really nice and stable. What I find annoying is that there is no documentation on the very few frameworks that currently exist for Cocoa. I have been scraping help off of a few web pages here and there, but I certainly don't have enough information to build a full application. I have searched Apple's web site and tried to go through their sample code, but have found few Cocoa samples that did me any good.

3) Is Carbon a permanent or temporary technology? I ask because while I want to develop applications for the Mac, I do not want to use Carbon if time is not on my side in the long run. In addition, the majority of the sample code on Apple's site is still built in CodeWarrior! I have been working with and learning how to use Project Builder and Interface Builder from every bit of documentation I find! Why are code samples still being distributed in CW?

4) How long will it be before we actually see Cocoa frameworks for the applications like Quicktime? I have a client right now that wants some software developed to process video and due to the lack of documentation and support that I have been able to find, I had to refer back to the PC. Nobody hates doing this any more than me, but I didn't really feel that i had an out.

Again, I do understand that migrating to a new technology like OSX can be frustrating. I would love nothing more than to literally throw my Windoze boxes out the window, but until I can successfully develop a useable application on the Mac, I am stuck with it.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for me, I would love to hear them and am very excited about being a new member of the Mac community!

Mark

[starfleetX]

Carbon is not going away any time soon. If you're waiting for everything to go Cocoa, you may be waiting forever. In fact, Mac OS X 10.2 is supposed to help bring up matching feature parity with Carbon and Cocoa and optimize many bits of Carbon. Carbon and Cocoa are meant to be peers.

I suggest you check with the Omni Group, Stepwise, Cocoa Dev Central, SourceForge, O'Reilly, and even Apple's developer mailing list if you need help. There are plenty or resources available; you may have simply not found the right ones for you just yet.

[Rickster]

I can sympathize with some of your frustrations, and maybe I can provide helpful answers for a few of them...

On the subject of Apple Sample Code: the last time I looked around that part of the developer site, I found that pretty much anything that would be helpful to my needs (understanding Carbon-style C APIs on Mac OS X) was in ProjectBuilder, and the stuff that was in CodeWarrior had a tendency to not be helpful at all. So perhaps you can just ignore it.

Is Carbon a permanent or temporary technology? ... How long will it be before we actually see Cocoa frameworks for the applications like Quicktime?

*sigh* There seems to be a common belief among some developers that Mac OS X applications have to be either "pure Carbon" or "pure Cocoa", that one developing a Cocoa-based app has to (or should) shun all non-Objective-C API.

The reality is that most of the stuff in /System/Library/Frameworks isn't supposed to be classified as "Cocoa API" or "Carbon API". It's all Mac OS X API. QuickTime isn't exclusively a Carbon framework, it's a QuickTime framework. Granted, its architecture follows design patterns from the Mac OS <= 9.x world, but there's nothing prohibiting you from using it in Cocoa applications. (In fact, NSMovie and NSMovieView provide a good basic bridge for getting QuickTime content into a Cocoa user interface.)

If the division between Carbon and Cocoa extended through the entire Mac OS X development landscape, Apple wouldn't be moving forward, because they'd have to spend all their time developing two ways for developers to access OS features. Look outside AppKit and Foundation and you'll find that there are lots of useful APIs that can be used in both types of applications -- some of them follow BSD/POSIX programming paradigms (NetInfo, Mach), some of them are descended from Classic Mac OS code (Speech, AppleScript), some are cross-platform APIs with architectures entirely their own (OpenGL, Kerberos), and some of them are plain-C APIs written with an almost ObjC-style architecture in mind (CoreFoundation, SystemConfiguration). The last kind is getting increasingly common, actually.