[Big Mac]

John Nack on Adobe: Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe's 64-bit roadmap

This news should not come as a shock to anyone who previously heard about Apple's decision not to create a 64-bit version of Carbon.

[MacosNerd]

Of course so now instead of updating their carbon modules, Adobe needs to port PS to the Cocoa framework. A much more intensive operation. You cannot blame adobe on this one, since apple promised 64bit carbon at WWDC and then changed their minds

[Big Mac]

True dat. But I imagine we'll never see a Cocoa Photoshop.

[peeb]

Originally Posted by MacosNerd 

Of course so now instead of updating their carbon modules, Adobe needs to port PS to the Cocoa framework.

now? You mean, like, a decade ago, right? They've know that carbon was a short term fix for the best part of ten years.

[voodoo]

Screw Adobe. Even Quark has been ported to Cocoa with QXP7 and it wasn't even strictly necessary for QXP, they just realized that there was no future in Carbon and since they're here to support the Mac for years to come, the only logical thing is to port the flagship to Cocoa.

Adobe chose not to, for whatever reasons. To screw Mac users? To pragmatically save money in case they'd abort their support for the Mac?

The end result is just that Adobe is shown to have as lousy judgement of the Mac market as always and that they won't be able to sell us 64-bit PS CS4, but they'll still sell us PS.

[MacosNerd]

never mind

[Big Mac]

I found this comment interesting. Any developers care to respond to these claims? This guy seems to be credible and apparently speaks from experience, but what he's saying flies in the face of what [I think I] know of Cocoa development and the quality of Cocoa apps.

Originally Posted by Nathan Duran

Nathan Duran — 10:49 AM on April 03, 2008

This is one of the very few areas where I simply cannot fault Adobe management in any way. To the general public, and to younger Mac developers who jumped on board after the iPod, it may seem as though they've been dragging their feet all this time, but the reality is that Apple has hasn't expressed much interest in supporting the efforts of third-party developers since the NeXT buyout, and Adobe engineers had every reason to reject the grossly inferior tools they were being offered every step of the way.

First they killed CFM in favor of Mach-O; not because it made any sense at the time, but because Avie stood to profit from Mach-O's adoption. Remember how CFM had all that multi-ISA support in there? Wouldn't that have come in handy during the Intel transition? I personally thing it might have, but I'm not in a position to look at Rosetta's code and offer anything resembling an educated opinion--just uneducated speculation.

Then they gave Mike Ferris free reign over the amount of turd polish that would be applied to ProjectBuilder before it was slyly passed off as a "Mac product." Mike Ferris doesn't like IDEs, doesn't like writing new code, and he really doesn't like comparisons to CodeWarrior. As a result of his refusal to respond to feature requests (even internal ones) with anything other than anger and inaction, ProjectBuilder/XCode is still quite poorly suited for managing large projects spanning thousands of files; it barely handles subprojects, and its buggy-as-hell text editor can't even keep up with my typing speed on a 2GHz machine--something CodeWarrior was able to do effortlessly on a 100MHz Performa more than 10 years ago. XCode's support for shell scripts is used as an excuse for never adding any new features under any circumstances, and Adobe had every reason to resist its adoption as long as they did. During my brief employment at Apple I found that the majority of its own engineers did the same, opting to wrestle with traditional makefiles over dealing with that flaming heap of failure. I mean, this is Apple. Where are the ridiculously experienced UI engineers spending all of their golden time? Certainly nowhere near the 1988 time warp that's engulfed the developer's tools team. Sure, 1.0 was rushed, but 3.1 doesn't look much different once you scratch the veneer.

Adobe would have been flat out nuts to waste time porting Photoshop to Cocoa in 2000. At the time it was little more than a collection of wrapper classes that sat on top of Carbon, and while you could certainly write a fully-featured QuickTime movie player in 5 lines of code, doing anything useful invariably involved finding ways to sneak around behind Cocoa's back in order to get some real work done. Things have improved considerably over the years, and Cocoa is great for small apps that do small things, but it's not a coincidence that Apple's more complicated flagship products never adopted the framework. Cocoa makes life very difficult for anyone who needs to update UI elements outside the main thread or do anything fancy with event handling for example.

Maybe the 64-bit issue will end up forcing Cocoa to achieve the level of maturity it should have struggled for over the past 8 years, but I have my doubts, and my fond memories of PowerPlant's unbridled source access. PowerPlant wasn't perfect, but the fact that it wasn't enshrouded in an utterly pointless veil of secrecy meant that you could fix bugs yourself rather than file a Radar report no one will ever read. If you couldn't figure out why something was happening, all you had to do was hit "Step Into" from the debugger and there was the answer. No disassembling, no DTS incidents; it was right there and you knew exactly what to subclass and overload to work around it. Hell, I spent about two days mangling PP into something that would load (and work!) at INIT time, letting me throw up all manner of fully managed windows and dialog boxes during the boot process. It now takes me longer than that to figure out what stupid thing NSTableView is doing to spin the cursor today.

And then there's the non-standard installer issue that Adobe always gets criticized over, usually by people who don't realize that Apple's PackageMaker is completely undocumented and unusable. It has so many bugs in it that you can easily spend an entire day trying to figure out how to coax it into putting a particular file in a particular location reliably. Try building one or two exceptionally complicated installers for several hundred components, and it becomes immediately obvious that your time would be better spent writing your own installer from scratch--kind of like what Adobe did.

Adobe might be too diplomatic to point any fingers publicly, but their engineers would have to be crazy not to do so in private. Yes, it IS their job to adapt and deliver, but Apple is actively making the situation much more difficult than it should be by hanging on to so many marginally competent NeXT expats who refuse to do the same. My hat's off to anyone who can deal with all of the crap that comes out of Cupertino and still put out a usable product of this size, 64-bit or not. Bypassing ColorSync at printing time alone is a genuine accomplishment these days.

[peeb]

Big Mac, I have no idea about that post - it could be true, but if so, why is only Adobe having issues with this? Surely there are other large, complex apps that should be running into the same problems if this is the case?

[Wiskedjak]

Adobe vs. Apple ... clash of the egos

[MacosNerd]

I've said this before and I'll say it again. I think it makes a lot of sense if apple bought out adobe. Alas, I know that the chances of that happening is slim to none and slim left town.

[Veltliner]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

True dat. But I imagine we'll never see a Cocoa Photoshop.

Why?

[FireWire]

I liked that comment from MacNN's front page:

Originally Posted by phillymjs

isn't that the excuse...

...they gave us when CS3 was so long in coming?

I would have expected a different lame excuse this time, like the dog ate their only copy of it, or their grandmother died or something.

Seriously, everyone knew from the start that Carbon was only a transition. Adobe has simply no excuses...

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

I found this comment interesting. Any developers care to respond to these claims? This guy seems to be credible and apparently speaks from experience, but what he's saying flies in the face of what [I think I] know of Cocoa development and the quality of Cocoa apps.

Ok, so first off, I have no effing clue about Cocoa vs. Carbon.

But if Cocoa is the only platform supported in the future, and (at some point deprecated) Carbon is the only platform able to support bigger, complicated apps, doesn't that mean Mac software development is TOAST ?

-t

[Wiskedjak]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

Ok, so first off, I have no effing clue about Cocoa vs. Carbon.

But if Cocoa is the only platform supported in the future, and (at some point deprecated) Carbon is the only platform able to support bigger, complicated apps, doesn't that mean Mac software development is TOAST ?

-t

My guess it means Apple has something up it's sleeve and will be releasing a Cocoa based 64bit graphics editing suite in the near future and is just trying to trim down the competition a bit first.

[turtle777]

Ok, had to do some reading on this.

John Siracusa saw this "issue" for Adobe coming:

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review: Page 6

-t

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by voodoo 

Screw Adobe.

I also dislike Adobe. They are like the MS for your right brain side… this is not ignorance speaking, I find myself doing the core shapes in Freehand with one tool, I can't even think about that with Illustrator where I have to switch between three, four tools to get the same work done. Not an issue?, maybe if your work is an oval and a square… but place there hundreds of paths and what in Freehand takes one second to achieve is four seconds with Illustrator, do the maths and you will find your working scenario bloated by four times… damn funny.

IF ONLY Adobe improved the core drawing tools this could get better but of course NOT, you don't sell CS3, CS4, CS74 with 'same old but improved tools' banners, you have to place there a new freaking astonishing set of tools anyone running a yet-old CS version could dream to use ever… do they make things easier?, faster?, are they a joy to use?, who really (inside Adobe that is) cares, they are there to sell you on the NEW CS iteration and that's all what matters. You have realized a long time ago unbloated software is a thing of the past. Thank God I still can use XPress and still can use FreeHand, no matter what Adobe says albeit I guess FreeHand days are sadly numbered… so Adobe take note: improve existing features damnit !!

Back on topic…
32bit-whatever but is CS4 going to be intel only?
Hint to Adobe: develope PS for the iPhone

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by peeb 

now? You mean, like, a decade ago, right? They've know that carbon was a short term fix for the best part of ten years.

Since when? When Carbon was announced, it was supposed to be "the basis for all life." Hence the name "Carbon." Cocoa was originally intended to be "an alternative to Carbon." The way I understood it at the time was that Cocoa was eventually going to be rewritten to be a framework sitting on top of Carbon, so that both would be using the same UI elements and the noticeable differences between them would diminish. Apple didn't just port the OS 9 toolbox over - they added a bunch of new paradigms such as Carbon Events, and in the early years seemed to be improving Carbon much more rapidly than Cocoa, adding new C APIs like the CF* classes that exposed more functionality than the Cocoa equivalents, making you use C for a bunch of stuff that used to be Objective-C in OpenStep, etc., to the extent that I remember a lot of hand-wringing on the cocoa-dev mailing list by ex-NeXT people that were worried that at some point Apple was going to deprecate and/or drop Cocoa, comparing it to previous highly-hyped developer technologies such as QuickDraw GX and OpenDoc that later got axed (here's such a thread from 2002). People were even making t-shirts, mugs, and other such stuff with the [objc retain] slogan on them. And indeed, didn't Objective-C almost get dropped in favor of Java somewhere between Rhapsody and the early OS X developer releases, until people complained to high heaven about it?

This deprecating of Carbon smacks of a new development to me, and one whose motivations are probably political rather than technical. Indeed, the decision came sometime in the middle of Leopard's development - originally there was going to be a 64-bit version of Carbon, it and then it got removed somewhere between WWDC 2006 and WWDC 2007. And if you look in the headers right now, you'll find that a lot of the Carbon APIs are still there in 64-bit, and you can call them just fine from Cocoa apps - it's just the stuff to make your app a full-fledged Carbon app that's missing. Also, if you look at Leopard, you can see that a lot of work has obviously gone into Carbon on it - the noticeable differences between Carbon and Cocoa apps has diminished quite a bit. Also, important applications such as the Finder, the Dock, and iTunes continue to be written in Carbon. Clearly if Carbon was supposed to be a temporary, transitional thing the whole time, no one told the engineers at Apple.

Frankly, I think this is a bad idea. There's nothing wrong with having a low-level API and a high-level one. The two don't do the same thing, and they don't serve the same purpose. Cocoa is great for a lot of apps, but going with a lower-level API like Carbon makes a lot more sense for some types of apps, like games, where performance is essential. Carbon is also a lot easier to develop cross-platform apps with, which is why most of the big apps like Photoshop, MS Office, and iTunes that need to run on both Mac OS X and Windows tend to use Carbon. The other thing is that it's obnoxious how often Apple keeps making its developers retool their apps. The experience is sort of like this:

Apple: OS X is coming out, you're going to have to rewrite your apps.

Developer: Phew, that was a lot of hard work, but we've got the thing working on OS X now.

- later... -

Apple: Surprise! We're switching to Intel. Now you're going to have to rewrite your apps again.

Developer: Dammit, not again!

- still later... -

Disheveled, sleep-deprived developer: <pant> <wheeze> Okay, that's finally done. Now we are finally past all the transition crap and can finally just concentrate on adding features and fixing bugs.

Apple: Yeah, and don't worry, the Carbon framework is going to be 64-bit, so it will be easy for you to bring your app to 64-bit when it needs to be.

Developer: Oh, thank God!

Apple: PSYCH! You're actually going to have to do the largest rewrite you've ever had to do thus far!

Developer: WTF? That does it, I'm either going to cancel the Mac version or it can just sit in 32-bit land forever.

Here's an interesting article on this.

Daring Fireball: The $64,000 Question

[Veltliner]

Originally Posted by Wiskedjak 

My guess it means Apple has something up it's sleeve and will be releasing a Cocoa based 64bit graphics editing suite in the near future and is just trying to trim down the competition a bit first.

Interesting comment.

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Since when? When Carbon was announced, it was supposed to be "the basis for all life." Hence the name "Carbon." Cocoa was originally intended to be "an alternative to Carbon." The way I understood it at the time was that Cocoa was eventually going to be rewritten to be a framework sitting on top of Carbon, so that both would be using the same UI elements and the noticeable differences between them would diminish.

They way you understood it may or may not have been wrong, but over a year ago it was clear your understanding was not to be.

Apple was working on 64-bit Carbon, but decided to drop it completely.

As for the name 'carbon' it was indeed 'the base element of all life-forms' meaning it was the common element between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. Still reading too much into the name would be a mistake, it's just marketing by Steve and you should know better than to latch on to one of his definitions of truth and facts.

[analogika]

Great analysis by Ars Technica's John Siracusa: Rhapsody and blues

Blame Apple: If Apple had not discontinued the 64-bit port of Carbon, Adobe could have shipped Photoshop CS4 as a 64-bit Mac OS X application as planned. At WWDC 2006, there were many sessions about developing 64-bit Carbon applications. At WWDC 2007, 64-bit Carbon was canceled. Adobe found this out the same time everyone else did, at WWDC. By canceling 64-bit Carbon so suddenly, Apple screwed Adobe.

Blame Adobe: The death of Carbon was inevitable. Adobe should have seen it coming and planned accordingly. It's been clear for years that Cocoa offers many advantages to Mac application developers. Adobe should have started its Cocoa port of Photoshop years ago. By willfully ignoring Cocoa for so long, Adobe screwed Apple.

As usual, there's some truth to both points of view. But the key to understanding this situation—and therefore to knowing how best to apportion blame—is to look to the past.

[...]

Hindsight
And so we come back to the cancellation of 64-bit Carbon and its consequences for Adobe and Apple. I said earlier that Apple made the hard choice, but also the correct one. Long-term, maintenance of two full-featured GUI APIs for Mac OS X is an untenable situation. Carbon is, was, and always has been a transitional API, though of course it could not be presented as such for political reasons in the wake of the Rhapsody misfire.

The choice was hard not just because it hurts Adobe and Microsoft, but also because it hurts Apple itself. Apple has its own extremely large Carbon applications, at least one of which is aching to be 64-bit: Final Cut Pro.

[...]

For my part, I'm like the mutual friend that just wishes these two crazy kids could work things out. As I've said, I think Apple's decision to sunset Carbon was the right one. I'm also sorely disappointed that Adobe didn't start its Cocoa porting efforts until forced to by external events. But does this mean that I blame Adobe for this decision? Put another way, though it may not have done what I wanted, did Adobe do what's best for Adobe?

My initial instinct is to say no. It certainly seems like Adobe would have been better served to start down the Cocoa path years ago, if only as a skunkworks project running in the background. Again, the corporate psychoanalytical angle inevitably resurfaces. Here's what I would have said to Adobe circa 2003: "Dammit, Adobe, I know you're still sore about Apple's attempt to push those NeXT APIs down your throat, and I know you're annoyed by Apple's constant passive-aggressive behavior since then, but you're hurting your Mac customers by willfully ignoring the API that Apple so clearly still wants you to use. If you're sick of all the bullshit, then just get off the platform. But if you intend to stay, it's time to get on the Cocoa train. Someday, you may have no choice. Apple's a lot more powerful now than it was in 1997, especially with all this iPod stuff starting to take off. Swallow your pride and at least start looking into this Cocoa thing."

But there would have been risks to that approach as well. To make any meaningful progress on a Cocoa port, significant resources would have to be shifted to the project. Cocoa has also evolved a lot in the past few years, which means there would have been a baseline cost for Adobe just to stay above water.

Now let's look at the risks of doing nothing until forced. We've pretty much had the worst case scenario play out for Adobe. All signals were pointing to a smooth 64-bit upgrade path for Carbon Photoshop until a sudden revelation at WWDC 2007 dashed all plans and a Cocoa port had to be started immediately. That means no 64-bit Photoshop CS4 for the Mac, and no guarantee that the 64-bit Cocoa port will be ready in time for CS5. The cost to Mac users is clear, but what's the cost to Adobe? Will Mac users refuse to buy CS4 because it's not 64-bit? If so, what will they buy instead? CS4 for Windows? Nothing at all?

Try as I might, I cannot convince myself that the sales lost due to the decision to keep Photoshop on Carbon until forced to do otherwise even comes close to outweighing the benefits to Adobe of this approach. During all the years it wasn't porting to Cocoa, Adobe had more time, money, and resources for all its other projects. And though it's not currently able to deliver a 64-bit Photoshop to Mac customers, I believe Adobe will sell a copy of either the Mac 32-bit version or the Windows 64-bit version to nearly all the people who would have actually purchased a 64-bit version of CS4 for the Mac. The lack of a serious Photoshop competitor is ultimately what saves Adobe, and what makes its decision financially and strategically sound, even as it annoys and disappoints many of its customers.

I'm thinking that since CS3 is Intel-native, a lot of Mac customers will simply pass on CS4. Most graphics pros I've met seem to only buy into every other version of Photoshop, anyway...

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by voodoo 

They way you understood it may or may not have been wrong, but over a year ago it was clear your understanding was not to be.

WWDC 2007 wasn't over a year ago. It was last June, which was ten months ago. And I was replying to peeb, who claimed Carbon was clearly positioned as a transitional solution ten years ago, which is not the case.

Apple was working on 64-bit Carbon, but decided to drop it completely.

Could've sworn I said that.

As for the name 'carbon' it was indeed 'the base element of all life-forms' meaning it was the common element between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. Still reading too much into the name would be a mistake, it's just marketing by Steve and you should know better than to latch on to one of his definitions of truth and facts.

I dunno, between Steve's comments, the fact that Carbon was getting the lion's share of development work in the 10.0-10.2 days, the fact that Apple rewrote a bunch of their formerly Cocoa/OpenStep apps (i.e. the Dock and the Finder) in Carbon, the fact that all the big name software houses were developing in Carbon, the fact that Apple kept a bunch of their own apps in Carbon, the fact that Carbon is easier for cross-platform development, and the fact that Carbon and Cocoa don't really serve the same need in the first place, I think it was pretty clear in 2001 that Carbon wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if 64-bit Carbon made a comeback in 10.6, frankly. If Adobe and Microsoft start putting the pressure on Apple, along with a threat to discontinue the Mac versions of their software, Apple will cave. They simply can't afford to lose those apps if they want to remain viable as a platform.

[Faust]

Thank you for posting the link to Daring Fireball's article, CharlesS. Great insight, even for non-developers.

[Thinine]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Steve's comments

I know you know better than this Charles. Steve's comments on stuff like this are always hyperbole, and you know it.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

the fact that Carbon was getting the lion's share of development work in the 10.0-10.2 days

Yeah, because it was a completely new framework that MS and Adobe forced Apple to create in order to port their apps to OS X. Creating a completely brand new API from nothing takes a while.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

the fact that Apple rewrote a bunch of their formerly Cocoa/OpenStep apps (i.e. the Dock and the Finder) in Carbon

Again, Charles, you know this was merely a political move on the part of Apple to demonstrate the completeness of the Carbon frameworks and encourage Adobe and MS to fully port their applications over. It certainly wasn't because anyone at Apple felt that the Dock or the Finder would be better off as Carbon apps.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

the fact that all the big name software houses were developing in Carbon

Yeah, because Apple created Carbon to get them to develop for OS X in the first place, so of course they were going to use it.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

the fact that Apple kept a bunch of their own apps in Carbon

So what? They merely took advantage of the Carbon API to make certain OS 9 apps OS X compatible, not because they thought the apps would be better off. Like Adobe and MS they were trying to minimize the effort in porting apps to OS X. Just because parts of Apple did it doesn't make it a good idea.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

the fact that Carbon is easier for cross-platform development

This has nearly taken on the status of urban legend, with essentially no basis. Only by using the cross platform libraries (which were already similar to what would become Carbon) has Apple been able to do this. They already had invested considerable time in getting cross platform compatibility in some OS 9 components, so Carbon's resemblance to these APIs is just slightly more than coincidence. Can you name a cross platform product that was newly developed in Carbon over the last few years? (Since Panther?)

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

and the fact that Carbon and Cocoa don't really serve the same need in the first place

No kidding. Carbon served as a clearly transitional API between OS 9 and X, while Cocoa was the more advanced framework to be used in quickly creating quality applications. Nowadays, however, they do serve the very same purpose: GUI program development on OS X, which is quite redundant.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I think it was pretty clear in 2001 that Carbon wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Only for those unwilling to move to Cocoa, which was the entire reason Carbon was created in the first place.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I wouldn't be surprised at all if 64-bit Carbon made a comeback in 10.6, frankly. If Adobe and Microsoft start putting the pressure on Apple, along with a threat to discontinue the Mac versions of their software, Apple will cave. They simply can't afford to lose those apps if they want to remain viable as a platform.

I would. Adobe and MS are dealing with a much different Apple today than the one they coerced into developing Carbon 10 years ago.

Moving forward is what Apple's best at; it's the only way they can succeed in competing against larger companies. I don't begrudge Adobe's decision not to do a 64-bit port of CS4, but claiming that Carbon should be supported any longer is lunacy.

[turtle777]

Uhm Charles, nobody said Carbon is going away immediately.
Apple only said there's NOT going to be 64 bit Carbon.

BIG difference.

I don;t understand the big fuss. The 8% - 10% increase you'd get on average with 64 bit is nothing compared to the bumps you can expect from processor upgrades and HW development.

What this means is: Apple does not jeopardize anyones immediate future. ALL Apple said is: Carbon is dead in the LONG RUN !

-t

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Thinine 

Yeah, because it was a completely new framework that MS and Adobe forced Apple to create in order to port their apps to OS X. Creating a completely brand new API from nothing takes a while.

Even after Carbon was already working, and shipping, it still had more work done on it for a long time. Cocoa didn't seem to get much until Panther came around.

Again, Charles, you know this was merely a political move on the part of Apple to demonstrate the completeness of the Carbon frameworks and encourage Adobe and MS to fully port their applications over. It certainly wasn't because anyone at Apple felt that the Dock or the Finder would be better off as Carbon apps.

If so, why do you think they'd have kept adding improvements to the existing Finder and Dock code since then? It's been 7 years - you'd think by now the Dock would at least be Cocoa if they thought Carbon was a bad idea.

Yeah, because Apple created Carbon to get them to develop for OS X in the first place, so of course they were going to use it.

And since you have to have Carbon in order for those big-name software houses to develop for OS X, you'd better well have Carbon.

This has nearly taken on the status of urban legend, with essentially no basis. Only by using the cross platform libraries (which were already similar to what would become Carbon) has Apple been able to do this. They already had invested considerable time in getting cross platform compatibility in some OS 9 components, so Carbon's resemblance to these APIs is just slightly more than coincidence.

So the fact that Carbon uses a language that's commonplace on pretty much every platform out there, and Cocoa uses a language virtually unused outside of OS X, doesn't have any relevance?

Can you name a cross platform product that was newly developed in Carbon over the last few years? (Since Panther?)

Uh, pretty much any cross-platform app that isn't Java or X11?

Can you name a cross-platform product developed at any time that uses Cocoa? I'm sure there's one or two out there, but it would be about 0.01% of all cross-platform apps, and certainly isn't commonplace. You'd pretty much have to make the Cocoa part just a thin wrapper around cross-platform C or C++ code, and not take much advantage of what the Cocoa framework offers.

No kidding. Carbon served as a clearly transitional API between OS 9 and X, while Cocoa was the more advanced framework to be used in quickly creating quality applications. Nowadays, however, they do serve the very same purpose: GUI program development on OS X, which is quite redundant.

They don't serve the same purpose. Cocoa is a high-level API, and Carbon is a low-level API. Cocoa is great for things like productivity apps and utilities, but for things which require a lot of performance like games, Cocoa doesn't make a lot of sense since you won't be using its features anyway, and you want to be closer to the metal without the overhead caused by dynamic dispatch.

Only for those unwilling to move to Cocoa, which was the entire reason Carbon was created in the first place.

The reason companies are unwilling to move to Cocoa is because that would be an impractically massive undertaking.

I would. Adobe and MS are dealing with a much different Apple today than the one they coerced into developing Carbon 10 years ago.

Apple has more good press, true. But take away MS Office for the Mac, and no one will buy it. Simple as that. People consider MS Office a requirement for doing any kind of work on a computer, regardless of whether that's justified or not. Losing Photoshop would also do a great deal of damage to Apple, since photo editing work is one of their big niches.

Moving forward is what Apple's best at; it's the only way they can succeed in competing against larger companies. I don't begrudge Adobe's decision not to do a 64-bit port of CS4, but claiming that Carbon should be supported any longer is lunacy.

Only if you're living in some sort of fantasy world where Apple doesn't need any of the big-name software houses at all and can attract users with nothing more than in-house and shareware apps.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Can you name a cross-platform product developed at any time that uses Cocoa? I'm sure there's one or two out there, but it would be about 0.01% of all cross-platform apps, and certainly isn't commonplace.

Adobe Lightroom.

[Thinine]

That's what I would have mentioned, but there's also the fact that sharing anything more than underlying libraries across platforms is pretty dumb. Lightroom is a great example of how to do a cross platform app if you really, really have to. Unless a program needs to be exactly the same across platforms (i.e. games), it doesn't really save any time or effort to do cross platform codebase when developing native code would result in a higher quality product.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Thinine 

Yeah, because it was a completely new framework that MS and Adobe forced Apple to create in order to port their apps to OS X. Creating a completely brand new API from nothing takes a while.

Carbon was made from the Macintosh Toolbox, not "nothing."

And even after Apple had finished Carbon and all the big-name apps had been ported over, Apple continued to put a lot of work into it (the whole HIObject API sprang up in 10.2). In fact, there were a lot of things that were only possible with Carbon — some have been added to Cocoa, some are still Carbon-only. Cocoa actually calls into Carbon on Leopard to get some of its functionality. Apple planned to fully support Carbon in 64-bit until fairly late in the Leopard development cycle. It's pretty obvious that project was dropped simply because of time constraints.

Originally Posted by Thinine 

Moving forward is what Apple's best at; it's the only way they can succeed in competing against larger companies. I don't begrudge Adobe's decision not to do a 64-bit port of CS4, but claiming that Carbon should be supported any longer is lunacy.

Carbon is still supported — just not all of it.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

So the fact that Carbon uses a language that's commonplace on pretty much every platform out there, and Cocoa uses a language virtually unused outside of OS X, doesn't have any relevance?

It shouldn't have much. If your programmers can't learn a simple language like Objective-C, your problem is incompetence, not the API. I mean, I can understand why they wouldn't want to if they don't have to, but it's not like we're talking about Brain**** here. It's C with some very simple extensions on top.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

They don't serve the same purpose. Cocoa is a high-level API, and Carbon is a low-level API. Cocoa is great for things like productivity apps and utilities, but for things which require a lot of performance like games, Cocoa doesn't make a lot of sense since you won't be using its features anyway, and you want to be closer to the metal without the overhead caused by dynamic dispatch.

They're both fairly high-level frameworks for the most part. If you're writing a game or something else "close to the metal," I don't see how either Carbon nor Cocoa is going to be particularly helpful to you. I doubt any game developer has ever said, "Man, I could totally get this complex, performance-sensitive function done so much faster if only I could use Appearance Manager!" (Feel free to replace "Appearance Manager" with "List Manager," "TextEdit" or any of the other Carbon APIs that aren't allowed in 64-bit.)

[Thinine]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Even after Carbon was already working, and shipping, it still had more work done on it for a long time. Cocoa didn't seem to get much until Panther came around.

Yeah, because Apple was still being bullied by vendors like Adobe and MS who didn't want to use Cocoa at all and yet wanted a more modern API than Carbon was initially.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

If so, why do you think they'd have kept adding improvements to the existing Finder and Dock code since then? It's been 7 years - you'd think by now the Dock would at least be Cocoa if they thought Carbon was a bad idea.

One, because they obviously haven't felt it important to devote much energy to improvements of those programs at all anyway, and two, because of the inertia already there from the Carbon codebase. You say it's ridiculous to expect Adobe to port to Cocoa, why would Apple's already Carbon apps be any different?

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

And since you have to have Carbon in order for those big-name software houses to develop for OS X, you'd better well have Carbon.

There's a permeating syllogism to be sure. And it's not as if Apple is getting rid of Carbon entirely, they are just not extending its support into the 64-bit realm.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

So the fact that Carbon uses a language that's commonplace on pretty much every platform out there, and Cocoa uses a language virtually unused outside of OS X, doesn't have any relevance?

What, you mean C? No, it really doesn't since the Carbon APIs aren't support cross platform in any significant way. Objective-C can not only use C and C++ code, but pretty much any other language OS X supports, including Python and Ruby.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Uh, pretty much any cross-platform app that isn't Java or X11?

So name one, please.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

They don't serve the same purpose. Cocoa is a high-level API, and Carbon is a low-level API. Cocoa is great for things like productivity apps and utilities, but for things which require a lot of performance like games, Cocoa doesn't make a lot of sense since you won't be using its features anyway, and you want to be closer to the metal without the overhead caused by dynamic dispatch.

Games are hardly Carbon apps and most likely use Core* technologies rather than any specific Carbon stuff. There's still room for a procedural framework in Cocoa world that isn't Carbon.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

The reason companies are unwilling to move to Cocoa is because that would be an impractically massive undertaking.

You can say that about any new app creation. So why do companies develop new apps at all? Because they know that the superior technologies they can use will make a product superior enough to what was previously available for it to be worth the massive undertaking. Perhaps that day isn't here for Photoshop or Office, but it will be eventually. And it's not Apple's responsibility to delay the coming of that day just to spare other companies the expense.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Apple has more good press, true. But take away MS Office for the Mac, and no one will buy it. Simple as that. People consider MS Office a requirement for doing any kind of work on a computer, regardless of whether that's justified or not. Losing Photoshop would also do a great deal of damage to Apple, since photo editing work is one of their big niches.

More good press? Is that what you really think is the difference? Seriously?

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Only if you're living in some sort of fantasy world where Apple doesn't need any of the big-name software houses at all and can attract users with nothing more than in-house and shareware apps.

Again, they aren't removing Carbon, merely not extending it beyond where it is today.

Sure it's crappy that Apple's decision not to make Carbon 64-bit was last minute, but it's hardly game ending. Unless you're contending that Carbon support should be continued indefinitely, you know this had to happen eventually.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Thinine 

Yeah, because Apple was still being bullied by vendors like Adobe and MS who didn't want to use Cocoa at all and yet wanted a more modern API than Carbon was initially.

"Bullied..." heh. I'm guessing you are not a software developer, because that's the only way you could have apparently no idea of the sheer amount of work that would be involved in rewriting Photoshop in Cocoa.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

If so, why do you think they'd have kept adding improvements to the existing Finder and Dock code since then? It's been 7 years - you'd think by now the Dock would at least be Cocoa if they thought Carbon was a bad idea.

One, because they obviously haven't felt it important to devote much energy to improvements of those programs at all anyway, and two, because of the inertia already there from the Carbon codebase. You say it's ridiculous to expect Adobe to port to Cocoa, why would Apple's already Carbon apps be any different?

I think you're misunderstanding what I was saying in the text you quoted there, because I don't really understand how your response follows from the text you quoted. My point was that Apple obviously hadn't planned to phase out Carbon until very recently, or they would have rewritten applications of theirs such as the Dock, which incidentally is so many orders of magnitude simpler than Photoshop that I'm sure Apple could rewrite the Dock at least a thousand times in the time it would take to rewrite that app.

There's a permeating syllogism to be sure. And it's not as if Apple is getting rid of Carbon entirely, they are just not extending its support into the 64-bit realm.

1. Some of the biggest Carbon apps out there have an obvious use for 64-bit. For example, Photoshop...

2. Sure, 64-bit may not seem necessary now, but neither did 32-bit at one point. 640K is all you need, you know. This will become an issue later on.

3. This sends a message to developers that continuing to develop on Carbon is potentially a dead-end street and a waste of time. If a developer sees the writing on the wall but doesn't have the resources to devote toward a full Cocoa rewrite, you can kiss the Mac version of that software goodbye.

4. This is Apple we're talking about. Apple hates backwards compatibility. When they do something like this, you know that there's a good chance that they'll remove the thing entirely before too long.

So name one, please.

So the latest versions of MS Office, Photoshop, iTunes, Acrobat, Finale, et al aren't good enough for you?

Well first of all, your requirement that it come after Panther is kind of stupid, because Panther wasn't really that long ago - only a few years. Most of the cross-platform apps that one readily brings to mind are applications that have been around forever, like MS Office, Photoshop, etc. These applications have often been made by large companies, are usually pretty complex, and usually have taken quite a while to bring to their current form. It's also not easy to find out when version 1.0 of an application shipped, because often that information is hard to find online.

With that said, how about Firefox? Version 1.0 came out on Nov 9, 2004. It's a popular Web browser, and it's Carbon. I hear some people like it.

Games would probably be the easiest example to find, since they have a shorter life-span than other software. Unfortunately, I don't really play games anymore, but I do know that Halo and World of Warcraft are both Carbon.

You can say that about any new app creation. So why do companies develop new apps at all? Because they know that the superior technologies they can use will make a product superior enough to what was previously available for it to be worth the massive undertaking.

The problem is that for a cross-platform application, you're not using any of the features specific to the library, so while Cocoa does have a lot of superior features, a lot of those things don't really come into play in a cross-platform app.

More good press? Is that what you really think is the difference? Seriously?

In the context of this discussion, yes. Apple may be a rising star right now because of the iPod and iPhone, but take away MS Office from the platform, and watch users go "Oh, those Mac computers are really neat, but I need to have Office," and buy a PC instead.

Sure it's crappy that Apple's decision not to make Carbon 64-bit was last minute, but it's hardly game ending. Unless you're contending that Carbon support should be continued indefinitely, you know this had to happen eventually.

Funny how something can be asserted by no one until after the fact, when all of a sudden it's obvious. Did anyone predict that Carbon's 64-bit support would get axed in Leopard before Apple announced it?

[Chuckit]

Personally, I'm still tentatively expecting Apple to finishing Carbon's 64-bit support in Leopard++. Apple has never explicitly said Carbon is out, and it seems people have been saying "the writing is on the wall" for either Carbon or Cocoa for nearly a decade now, every time one gets something cool that the other doesn't have.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Apple has never explicitly said Carbon is out, and it seems people have been saying "the writing is on the wall" for either Carbon or Cocoa for nearly a decade now, every time one gets something cool that the other doesn't have.

I dunno. John Siracuse's articles seem to strongly indicate that, and he definitely know's his sh!t.

One way or another, if Apple really sticks to its guns and doesn't develop Carbon 64 bit further, Carbon is dead in the long run. At some point, 64 bit is going to be today's 32, and 128 bit is the next great thing. Keeping Carbon 32 bit around is like Windows XP still being based on DOS. Just a little different

-t

[OreoCookie]

The demise of Carbon was clear from the start, just the exact point in time was not. Steve said so (when OS X was first released)
Apple is not pulling the plug on Carbon, it just won't make a 64 bit version of it. For apps like Office, this isn't significant, but for others, it is. Of course, technically, 64 bit Carbon is possible and as far as I remember there has been a preview included in some of the earlier Leopard betas.

The reason Apple uses Carbon for iTunes and QuickTime, for example, is that there seems to be a tool that makes it easy to make a Windows version of the app. Apple has moved its Carbon test-bed app (that's the Finder for ya) to Cocoa -- which is a clear sign. Adobe on the other hand, instead of investing into new technologies has not done so for what, 8 years now? They have ignored a clear trend on the Mac platform and gotten into many problems (e. g. transition to OS X, transition to Intel) when they have had plenty of time to prepare. We don't expect that a rewrite in Cocoa will take only a few months or a year, but they have clearly missed an opportunity here. I think that if they don't step up to the challenge, Apple will release something in that direction (pure speculation on my part). They have the know-how to pull it off, at least.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

The reason Apple uses Carbon for iTunes and QuickTime, for example, is that there seems to be a tool that makes it easy to make a Windows version of the app. Apple has moved its Carbon test-bed app (that's the Finder for ya) to Cocoa -- which is a clear sign.

QuickTime Player is Cocoa not Carbon. And of course QuickTime itself is available in Cocoa and 64-bit as the Cocoa QTKit.

The Finder did not move to Cocoa. It's still Carbon.

[mfbernstein]

Or to make a long story short. Apple doesn't believe in backward compatibility. Good on them, but it's asinine to blame the developers for not rewriting their apps every time Apple has another change of heart.

As has been repeated ad infinitum, it's also kinda hard to blame Adobe when Apple themselves couldn't be bothered to port all their high-end stuff to Cocoa. Moreover, it's not as if they haven't been forced to do a lot of unnecessary work by Apple developing CS3 - porting their entire codebase from CodeWarrior to XCode.

Finally, Lighroom is irrelevant to this discussion. A completely new application that's an order of magnitude less complicated than Photoshop, it was written for Cocoa/XCode from the start.

[OreoCookie]

I stand corrected. (Unlike with 10.3 and 10.4, I haven't had the same level of `under-the-hood' experience with Leopard.)
In any case, the QT player used to be Carbon and the reasoning was the one above.
The Finder was (and apparently still is) the testbed for Carbon while Mail is the testbed for Cocoa.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Personally, I'm still tentatively expecting Apple to finishing Carbon's 64-bit support in Leopard++. Apple has never explicitly said Carbon is out, and it seems people have been saying "the writing is on the wall" for either Carbon or Cocoa for nearly a decade now, every time one gets something cool that the other doesn't have.

"You're not a wartime Consiglieri, Carbon...You're out, Carbon."

[Deal]

No matter how much developers squirm (or outright lash out in forums and in private), technology moves forward for the better of us all.

There were programmers complaining about OS X back in OS 10.0 days (many didn't start complaining until they actually started doing something in the late 10.1 days). Imagine Apple saying, "OK, you don't like it. We'll go back to OS 9."

Programming is a job and you are a rare breed indeed if you find it relaxing and enjoyable. Every time I've every tried it, I hated it. I hate accounting too. I hate both as much as I hate long lines at the bathroom during large events. If you have to do what you have to do, you're going to have to deal with it.

And yet, we still get to hear all the moans and complaints about how somebody has to go and re-write a million lines of code. It's not like Adobe is inexpensive. It's also not possible to throw in enough bells and whistles that I want to buy every new version that hits the shelves. However, a 64 bit version would be nice. My images get unwieldily from time to time and if I could through more memory at them, it would help.

Apple makes these decisions because they are the right decisions, not because they are popular amongst all parties. George Bush is in the same boat. He's very unpopular right now, but one would have to look long and hard to find any wrong decisions. The consequences of the alternatives were unacceptable. It is better to be right than to be popular (although we have other candidates and software companies that think otherwise).

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Deal 

And yet, we still get to hear all the moans and complaints about how somebody has to go and re-write a million lines of code. It's not like Adobe is inexpensive.

No, it's more like someoone has to go and rewrite a million lines of code, and then as soon as they finish that they have to go rewrite that million lines of code again, and as soon as they finish that, they have to go rewrite a million lines of code again. It's insane. If Apple had the majority of the market that Microsoft has, I could almost understand it, because developers wouldn't really have any choice other than to just deal with it. But they make up less than 10% of the market, and the big companies like Microsoft and Adobe are going to get the majority of their sales from the Windows version, which incidentally doesn't require a complete rewrite for every new version. The hassle developers have to go through is completely out of proportion to the amount of benefit they will draw, so it sends a clear message to developers: get lost, we don't care about you. And it's unreasonable - developers are the livelihood of a platform, and they deserve a little more respect.

Frankly, if I were in charge of Adobe, I would consider just leaving Photoshop for OS X in 32-bit forever. After all, even if they do spend the enormous time they'd need to rewrite the app, who's to say that Apple wouldn't come out with some other whiz-bang technology as soon as they were done with that and decide that everyone would have to port to that, and rewrite the code again? Better, I'd say, just to wait 10 years in between versions. It'd probably save you about 3-4 rewrites - just get 'em all done with one great big rewrite way after the fact. After all, what would Adobe have to lose? The people who depend on Photoshop for their livelihood aren't just going to quit using it - they'll just switch to Windows if they have to. Hey, Macs run Windows now, so it would be easy. Bottom line, they'll still be Adobe customers, even if they're no longer Mac users, because the fact is that as far as the Mac platform is concerned, Apple needs Adobe much more than Adobe needs Apple. Apple seems to think it's the other way around, for reasons I can't fathom. Sure, things aren't the same as the late 90s in that if the Mac platform died entirely, Apple would still survive on its iPod/iTunes empire, but that would be of small comfort to most of us, I think.

In summary, I think Apple needs to knock it off with the constantly requiring developers to rewrite their apps all the time. It's unreasonable, and if it continues it could very likely lead to commercial "Mac Software" becoming simply the Windows version bundled with a copy of CrossOver.

[manleycreative]

...Light and Room. Is there any doubt Adobe is going to roll Photoshop features into Lightroom where they have new code and new features already that would be great in Photoshop?

Adobe has a clean slate with Lightroom. Why else would they add the Photoshop to the title? No reason other than to plant the seed for where Photoshop is headed.

[Deal]

OK, he's correct that it should be made as painless as possible... but Apple is in the same boat and they are eating their own dogfood.

The decisions they make are painful both ways. They don't make them lightly. It's not as if they are saying, "eh eh eh, lets make it really difficult for our developers THIS times, muaahhhhh..."

There are two sides to the story. One is, lets create an environment that deals with all the issues and runs natively and eventually we'll make it work flawlessly. The alternative is to keep running a hybrid language with baggage.

Sorry, I didn't have time to read through all these posts, but I would like to know what alternative you think is best.

[osxpinot]

There was a time in Apple's history when they needed Adobe and Microsoft. Now, not so much. That's why you are seeing this attitude.

Everybody will say what they will about Carbon, but from a UI standpoint, it seems really h4xxxed out. The end user experience is quite annoying, in my opinion.

[Big Mac]

Apple, Inc. may not need Adobe and M$, but the Mac platform would be substantially affected if they pulled their support. Apple really should be done with it and buy Adobe already, a move I've been advocating for years.

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Apple, Inc. may not need Adobe and M$, but the Mac platform would be substantially affected if they pulled their support. Apple really should be done with it and buy Adobe already, a move I've been advocating for years.

I disagree.

M$ Office in Carbon (32 bit) is not a problem, no change necessary anytime soon.

I think that whole "Apple needs Adobe" thing is an urban myth. It was 5-10 years ago, it doesn't matter too much these days.

-t

[analogika]

Originally Posted by Deal 

George Bush is in the same boat. He's very unpopular right now, but one would have to look long and hard to find any wrong decisions. The consequences of the alternatives were unacceptable.

Please spare us the grief and shoot yourself now.

(wrong forum)

[analogika]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

I think that whole "Apple needs Adobe" thing is an urban myth. It was 5-10 years ago, it doesn't matter too much these days.

Looking at the utter piece of **** that is Photoshop Elements 6, I have to wonder why they even bothered *making* a "Mac" version at all.

If you're going to crap all over my screen, stick entirely to non-standard menu arrangement, insult me with assistants and wizards and then clump a document window into the middle of all that with weird Windows-gleaned "full", "window", and "tile" arrangement icons WHY THE HELL BOTHER?

Run the ****ing thing in Parallels, at least there you know what to expect and it shits up its own little contained Windows-sandbox.

GAH. That thing is almost as bad as Word 6.0 was, for all the same reasons.

If that's what Adobe thinks Mac software is, their time on Macintosh is over.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by turtle777 

I disagree.

M$ Office in Carbon (32 bit) is not a problem, no change necessary anytime soon.

I think that whole "Apple needs Adobe" thing is an urban myth. It was 5-10 years ago, it doesn't matter too much these days.

-t

I didn't say 64-bit was a big deal. I'm scenario I'm talking about is completely termination of development of Photoshop and Office. That would be a big deal.

[Thinine]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

"Bullied..." heh. I'm guessing you are not a software developer, because that's the only way you could have apparently no idea of the sheer amount of work that would be involved in rewriting Photoshop in Cocoa.

Your response doesn't have anything to do with what I was responding to.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I think you're misunderstanding what I was saying in the text you quoted there, because I don't really understand how your response follows from the text you quoted. My point was that Apple obviously hadn't planned to phase out Carbon until very recently, or they would have rewritten applications of theirs such as the Dock, which incidentally is so many orders of magnitude simpler than Photoshop that I'm sure Apple could rewrite the Dock at least a thousand times in the time it would take to rewrite that app.

Why would they have? Neither need to be 64-bit and until the decision is made to remove Carbon completely, it's unnecessary. We're talking about extending an existing API to do something it couldn't previously do, not removing it completely. The writing has been on the wall in this regard for quite a while.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

1. Some of the biggest Carbon apps out there have an obvious use for 64-bit. For example, Photoshop...

2. Sure, 64-bit may not seem necessary now, but neither did 32-bit at one point. 640K is all you need, you know. This will become an issue later on.

3. This sends a message to developers that continuing to develop on Carbon is potentially a dead-end street and a waste of time. If a developer sees the writing on the wall but doesn't have the resources to devote toward a full Cocoa rewrite, you can kiss the Mac version of that software goodbye.

4. This is Apple we're talking about. Apple hates backwards compatibility. When they do something like this, you know that there's a good chance that they'll remove the thing entirely before too long.

Again, this doesn't really seem to apply to my response or what I replying to. 3 is true though, in so far as Carbon will no longer be developed, just maintained.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

So the latest versions of MS Office, Photoshop, iTunes, Acrobat, Finale, et al aren't good enough for you?

With that said, how about Firefox? Version 1.0 came out on Nov 9, 2004. It's a popular Web browser, and it's Carbon. I hear some people like it.

No, since none of the cross platform code in those programs is actually Carbon. They merely implemented a Carbon UI on top of various cross platform pieces from the Windows Office devs. And even then, they didn't choose Carbon because it was better technically, but because they could keep more of their old code.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

The problem is that for a cross-platform application, you're not using any of the features specific to the library, so while Cocoa does have a lot of superior features, a lot of those things don't really come into play in a cross-platform app.

Except that in nearly every case, the UI code is platform specific while underlying functionality is not. You don't seem to be seeing this distinction.

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Funny how something can be asserted by no one until after the fact, when all of a sudden it's obvious. Did anyone predict that Carbon's 64-bit support would get axed in Leopard before Apple announced it?

Another amazing syllogism.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by Thinine 

Why would they have? Neither need to be 64-bit and until the decision is made to remove Carbon completely, it's unnecessary. We're talking about extending an existing API to do something it couldn't previously do, not removing it completely. The writing has been on the wall in this regard for quite a while.

Apple was actively extending this API and promising to do more until quite recently. I don't see how you can say "the writing was on the wall" when there was in fact literal writing on the wall stating that Carbon would go 64-bit.

Originally Posted by Thinine 

Another amazing syllogism.

What part of Charles' post was syllogistic? (I'm not trying to be argumentative. I just didn't notice any syllogisms and I'm curious.)

[voodoo]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Apple was actively extending this API and promising to do more until quite recently. I don't see how you can say "the writing was on the wall" when there was in fact literal writing on the wall stating that Carbon would go 64-bit.

For whatever reasons I wasn't the least bit surprised to hear Apple was going to put Carbon in 'maintenance mode' and go ahead with Cocoa as the de facto API standard from here on out.

I can't say exactly why. I guess the writing on the wall was for Carbon, but not because of any particular one thing. I like to think supporting two APIs isn't very elegant and mr. Elegance who runs Apple seems to hate loose ends like that.

On the other hand I wasn't expecting it to be at WWDC 2007 specifically. But it was going to happen. No question.