To demonstrate the ease of developing Carbon applications, an Adobe engineer took the stage during the WWDC 98 keynote to show a prototype Carbonized version of Photoshop that he assembled over a two-week period.Īpple named the technology 'Carbon' because the element is the basis of all life forms.

Many of the APIs that didn't make the cut provide support for 68K Macs and other old technologies, what Steve Jobs described as the 'crusty barnacles' of the Mac OS. By sticking to the Carbon APIs and reworking their code to operate within a modern OS environment, developers could move to OS X with relative ease.Īpple says the Carbon APIs cover about 90 percent of the functions used by most current applications. Carbon consists of those 'approved' APIs, along with some new ones designed to exploit Mac OS X's more-sophisticated architecture. (Some programs 'cheat' by accessing low-level system functions directly, but these are the exception.)Īpple engineers found that most of the APIs in the current Mac OS would work in a modern OS environment. In a similar way, Macintosh programs use APIs in the Mac OS to access the operating system's underlying functions: drawing windows and dialog boxes on the screen, interpreting mouse and keyboard input, and so on. Adobe Photoshop plug-ins, for example, use Photoshop APIs to apply filters to bit-mapped images.

Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newslettersĪPIs provide a standard means for one piece of software to access functions within another. Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you Soon, developers who had been skeptical about Apple's prospects were making plans to migrate to the new OS. It defines a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that developers can use to run the same software on Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X.īy making relatively modest changes to their code, developers can take advantage of Mac OS X's modern OS features while retaining compatibility with legacy systems. The word they would hear was 'Carbon.'Ĭarbon, they learned, is a software specification that would provide a bridge to Mac OS X, which Apple revealed as the new name for the next-generation operating system. But developers were still awaiting word on what the company said would be a new Mac OS strategy. Apple had just introduced the iMac, and a month earlier had reported its second consecutive profitable quarter. Coming at a time when Apple was still losing bucketfuls of money, it appeared that the company's latest OS scheme might go the way of the ill-fated Copland project.įast-forward to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, May 1998.

Mac developers were not thrilled with this scenario, and some-including Adobe Systems-held out the possibility of shunning Rhapsody.

No more codewarrior for mac