Cocoa or Carbon?

[Drew Mazurek]

Sorry if this has been asked but............. Is PT6 a Cocoa app or a Carbon app?
drew

[Saracino]

Originally posted by dmazurek:
Sorry if this has been asked but............. Is PT6 a Cocoa app or a Carbon app?
drew

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Why do you ask? It doesn't make a difference.

-- Joe
Digidesign Engineering

[Mark Wheaton]

correct me if I am wrong, but a Carbonized program is an existing application that addresses a set of libraries that allow it to run under OS X.
Carbon apps are typically used to adapt an existing set of code written for OS 9 to OS X.

Cocoa is an application written from the ground up as an OS X application. As such Cocoa apps take full advantage of all the feature set of OS X.

Carbon take advantage of some but not all of OS X features.

I do not know which features are missing in Carbon apps. I do not know which Pro Tools is in version 6.0

[The Recordist]

One of the things cocoa apps can do is use services. Go to Finder>Services and you will see stuff that can be used to make the apps interact better. Like, selecting some text on a web page (Omniweb-a cocoa app) and automatically transferring it to textedit (cocoa app).

-F

[Drew Mazurek]

Curiosity mostly. Although I thought I read somewhere that it did matter. no biggy.
drew

[a holck]

Cocao has at least a few major features over Carbon:

- You get a lot of functionallity for free: Services, basic Applescript, Multiprocessing handlers, easy interface creation with Interface builder.

- You are forced to rewrite the whole application! Take an app like ProTools, it probably still contains legacy code fragments from the original version from more than a decade ago. Until six month ago writing an app using the cocoa frameworks required you to rewrite the entire app using a laungauge called Objective-C in Apples app creation program called ProjectBuilder, Old OS9< programs like ProTools and Photoshop was mostly using using the C++ laungauge in an app called codewarrior. so all your code had to be rewritten using a whole new program.

Rewriting an app like ProTools is NOT an option, so most BIG app creators use the other available framework in OSX called the Carbon framework. in which you can use your old creation app like CodeWarrior to rewrite only a protion of the code to make it compatible with OSX.
But this has a backside....
You only have to rewrite a 'small' part of the application to make it RUN in OSX, but to make it run good and look like a reqular OSX app will take you a LOT more time.
First you still have to do a lot of work to make it multithreaded and you will have to redesign ALL windows to make them comply with the UI in OSX

Then all apps in OS9 was using something called QuickDraw to display onscreen graphics and fonts, This library has been replaced with something called CoreGraphics wich is much more advanced.
But QuickDraw still exists in OSX, but is someway lying on top of CoreGraphics in an emulated state.
So an app like Protools 6 can still use its old QuickDraw code in its OSX version but it WILL be slower than running OS9.
Just like an Carbon OSX app can still use the old single unthreaded process model and not the newer Carbon event model.

So which is best Carbon or Cocoa?

Thay can be almost alike and both very efficient, but its a lot easier to make a bad Carbon experience than a bad Cocoa experience becase Cocoa will require a lot of retrhinking using a much modern toolset.

[Shatner's Bassoon]

Whether it is Cocoa or Carbon, there are still serious problems with PT v.6
Come on boys sort it out! [img]images/icons/mad.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/mad.gif[/img]

[shadowbox]

It's interesting that Digi Engineering would respond to this thread with a non-answer. Why not say it is a carbon app, AND it doesn't make a difference in performance, if that is the case?

Bottom line is, from what I've read, it doesn't really affect performace. In fact many carbon apps are faster than cocoa apps. (iMovie 2 was carbon, iMovie 3 is cocoa. iMovie 2 was faster.)

The fact that ProTools 6 was based on an existing app, and that it must run on OS 9 as well as OS X, means that it would have been ridiculous for Digi to rewrite PT from the ground up in Cocoa. Especially considering there is no advantage in performance.