Hacker News Reader

Comment by pilif | Hacker News Reader

> For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5.

right. And the Finder - a piece of Software central to OSX was using Carbon until... when exactly? At most 6 months prior to when CS5 came out.

iTunes - a corner stone of the iPhone software world? Still on Carbon.

If I hate one thing, it's hypocrisy.

Aside of that, nice arguments and well-written. Also, from this perspective, MonoTouch and Unity might be in the clear too as they are not cross-platform toolkits reducing themselves to the least common denominator.

View on HN

"Also, from this perspective, MonoTouch and Unity might be in the clear too as they are not cross-platform toolkits reducing themselves to the least common denominator."

Hell yeah! Let's pray. I'm not interested in using MonoTouch because I want to make a cross-platform App that also runs on iPhone/iPad. I'm interested in using MonoTouch because I prefer C# to Objective-C, if only because that's where the bulk of my experience is.

Unity works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX as well as iPhone. What isn't cross-platform about it? Do you mean doesn't work on android?

Actually Linux is not supported by them. I think it's Windows, Mac OSX, iPhone and Wii. Still cross-platform certainly.

Apple purposefully wrote Finder in clean Carbon as an example to developers, to prove that it was possible to make good cross-platform software. iTunes was also written very carefully -- and very cleanly -- in Carbon to be cross-platform.

Adobe, however, hacked Creative Suite into Carbon with buggy, inefficient code and then took 10 years -- ten years -- to schedule the time to fix it.

>Tunes was also written very carefully -- and very cleanly -- You are joking right?

Have you ever used itunes on pc? It sucks. Almost as much as flash.

It's true. Its fine on my MBP, but I can't stand it on Windows. It feels sluggish on a quad core processor. How that is even possible I don't know, but it does.

Carbon = OS X + OS 9 native code. It has nothing to do with the PC version (well, it does a little bit, but that is irrelevant to this discussion).

It almost serves as an example of how cross-platform targeting can deliver a poor product.

iTunes wasn't written in Carbon to be cross-platform with Windows--if anything, it would be easier to make a Cocoa app cross platform because you just need to port Cocoa, which is basically just OpenStep.

It was written in Carbon to be cross-platform with Mac OS 9. And because it was just SoundJam MP, which was written for Mac OS pre-X. (Though, to be fair, so was Photoshop.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com