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Re: NeXTstep -- err, Mac OS X.

On 5/30/03 2:40 PM, Robert Burns didst favor us with:

>> "Merely" Carbonizing the app is driving me crazy. The Carbonizing step
>> has become a career in itself (GRIN). Perhaps some day I will actually
>> get to write new features, rather than just making the old features
>> work in OSX.
>
> Yeah, I never tried porting a serious application to OS X; but from
> what I understand, it's really not as easy to do as Apple would like
> you to think.

The work involved can vary tremendously. If your Mac OS 9 application is
already using all the latest technologies such as Navigation Services,
Appearance Manager, latest Menu Manager APIs, FSRefs and the latest HFS+
file manager APIs, and so on, your carbonizing work will be significantly
reduced. OTOH, if you have an old code base which *doesn't* use the latest
technologies, carbonizing is going to force you to have to update all that
stuff, increasing the work required exponentially. Then of course there's
the core functionality of your application, which could port easily, or
could feel like the Battle of Normandy, all depending on what your
application does.

There are other factors as well. If you're porting to OS 9-CarbonLib/OS X
instead of just Mac OS X, there will be extra work involved. Every release
of the OS fixes more bugs, and bugs in the OS can suck up a lot of time if
you run into one of them. Some carbon stuff, like Carbon Events, is
optional. The more you choose to implement, the more work you'll do, though
CEs can solve some problems and save you time in some situations. It's
definitely the case that YMMV. ;-)

> Look at what M$ did with Office - they decided to start
> all over again with Carbon from scratch.

Microsoft has always had a tendency to flaunt the rules and do things their
own way. It could well be that their code base just had so much non-standard
code in it that it made more sense to start over, or, they decided to start
from scratch so they could implement a whole new bunch of non-standard code.
;-)

> I think all developers will
> end up doing this at some point.

No thanks. LOL However, by the time I was done carbonizing, I'd rewritten a
substantial part of my application.

Larry
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References: 
 >Re: NeXTstep -- err, Mac OS X. (From: Robert Burns <email@hidden>)



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