[radii_22]

Why the majority (or at least a lot) of applications for the Mac OS X are developed in Carbon? (Macromedia's Suite, MS Office, Adobe's CSuite, etc.)

Is that difficult to make them in Cocoa? Would Photoshop be better in OS X that in Windows if it was developed in Cocoa (using, for example, Core Image)?

Thank you.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by radii_22:
Why the majority (or at least a lot) of applications for the Mac OS X are developed in Carbon? (Macromedia's Suite, MS Office, Adobe's CSuite, etc.)

Because Carbon is a C API, and C (or C-compatible C++) is the language that all of those programs are written in. Cocoa is primarily written in Objective-C, which is basically used for nothing but Cocoa. Carbon is a better fit for these programs the way they are designed.

Originally posted by radii_22:
Is that difficult to make them in Cocoa? Would Photoshop be better in OS X that in Windows if it was developed in Cocoa (using, for example, Core Image)?

Photoshop would almost certainly be worse if Adobe decided to remake it using Cocoa, because then they'd lose all the work they've done. Also, Core Image is not part of Cocoa.

It's been said 5 million times, and I'll say it again: Cocoa and Carbon are two frameworks that developers can use to make programs. From an end-user perspective, it doesn't matter which one the developer used as long as he did a good job.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by radii_22:
Is that difficult to make them in Cocoa?

Yes.

[cpac]

basically, because Carbon allowed you to use your existing code, rather than starting from scratch. (i.e. to write an OS X compatible version of Photoshop, they didn't have to completely rewrite the whole program - just a few parts).

That's why apps that were originally written in the pre-OS X days are generally carbon.

-------------------------

As for difficulty/time of development, people have differing opinions, but I believe people think Cocoa is generally faster and may be easier for development if you're starting anew - which is why most new applications are written in cocoa.

As for whether photoshop would be "better" were it cocoa - it might be - things tend to be better when they've been rewritten from scratch, but then you'd have to consider the years of development it would take to build up all the code to do the things Photoshop does.

That said, somebody might write a basic competitor more along the lines of Photoshop Elements (to the extent iPhoto doesn't already fit that description)

[saddino]

Another thing to keep in mind, aside for the excellent answers above, is that many professional applications are written to run on multiple platforms. That is, the underlying "engine" is likely in C or C++ and the UI is typically a C++ abstraction layer that is targetted to Mac and Windows.

In other words, not only is most of the code already in C/C++ and thus readily able to "Carbonize" to get to OS X, but rewriting the entire application in Cocoa would make it much harder to target the same code for Windows.

In short: "throwing out" Photoshop's code base means getting rid of two products for Adobe.

Legacy application with a huge code base in C/C++ are not going to be ported to Cocoa anytime soon. The economics just don't work.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by saddino:
In other words, not only is most of the code already in C/C++ and thus readily able to "Carbonize" to get to OS X, but rewriting the entire application in Cocoa would make it much harder to target the same code for Windows.

Not entirely true, it really depends on the codebase in questions. Cross-platform frameworks suck, and you can leverage a properly abstracted core implemented in C/C++ implementing the GUI in Cocoa as needed on OS X.

Legacy application with a huge code base in C/C++ are not going to be ported to Cocoa anytime soon. The economics just don't work.

But why do you care? It shouldn't make a difference to you.

[saddino]

Originally posted by Angus_D:
Not entirely true, it really depends on the codebase in questions. Cross-platform frameworks suck, and you can leverage a properly abstracted core implemented in C/C++ implementing the GUI in Cocoa as needed on OS X.

Good point, and you're right. But most of these cross-platform solutions from the 90s are not properly abstracted.

...why do you care? It shouldn't make a difference to you.

Oh, I don't care in the least bit. I was just responding to the original poster: the fact that many legacy apps are going to stay in Carbon due to economics is apropos to his question.

Anyway, given that all the apps I write are in Carbon, it wouldn't make sense for me to care about the whole Cocoa v. Carbon thing

[Millennium]

Originally posted by radii_22:
Is that difficult to make them in Cocoa?

It is easy to write new OSX-only applications in Cocoa. However, if you have a non-Cocoa codebase that you want to hold onto, or if you're trying to use your code in a cross-platform manner, then things can become much more difficult.

Would Photoshop be better in OS X that in Windows if it was developed in Cocoa (using, for example, Core Image)?

CoreImage isn't part of Cocoa, though Cocoa can use it. As others have noted, Adobe would have to throw away a good portion of their codebase -probably not all of it, but enough that it would hurt a lot- in order to perform the rewrite.