Brushed metal initiative

Personally, I dislike Carbon because OS X is largely a PowerPC port of NextStep, which was already a complete and robust OS before porting began.

The driving force behind carbon was to provide backward compatibility with "classic" apps. It bridged two radically dissimilar OSs, and so inevitably programs written in it are not a hand-in-glove fit for either one.

For the first few years, Carbon speeded adoption of OS X - a good thing. However, now it is mostly slowing the final retirement of OS 9 - imho, a bad thing.
 
How is it slowing the retirement of OS 9 may I ask? I personally thought it was the lazy programmers who didn't want to at least carbonize their apps.
 
Those are the laziEST programmers.

The slightly-less-lazy ones are the ones who kept their market-share by using the crutch Apple threw them to do the relatively-quick-and-painless carbon port, but still aren't at even started porting to cocoa.

As long as commerical apps continue to be written in Carbon, OS9 users can continue to postpone making the switch.
 
I would love to see the metal background integrated in the whole system, like the brushed metal theme i always used (and still use at my G3 375 MT) :D
 
Originally posted by brianleahy
Those are the laziEST programmers.

The slightly-less-lazy ones are the ones who kept their market-share by using the crutch Apple threw them to do the relatively-quick-and-painless carbon port, but still aren't at even started porting to cocoa.

As long as commerical apps continue to be written in Carbon, OS9 users can continue to postpone making the switch.
Click to expand...

Uhm, there are Carbon apps that cannot run in OS 9 at all... because CarbonLib has fallen behind Carbon.

Now, I would like to point out that Carbon is not just a transitionary API... and that I can bet an awful lot of money that those game ports would be even later, or companies like Blizzard would drop/postpone the Mac platform if Carbon became unvailable. Cocoa REQUIRES Objective-C, which isn't exactly mainstream on anything other than MacOS X commercially. Would YOU spend extra money porting to Cocoa and get your programmers to adapt to a new language, or would you use the C API that you can cleanly implement into some cross-platform code?

As long as Objective-C remains a niche language, Carbon will be needed for making cross-platform software OS X native.

Cocoa is NOT the end-all solution to OS X programming... it is a FRAMEWORK. A framework that isn't 100% better than the alternatives. It is a solution for OS X-only, new apps... but it isn't the best solution for ports, cross-platform development, existing apps or even low-level code to be used in the system.

Seriously though, the kool-aid seems strong today.
 
Originally posted by brianleahy
OS9 users can continue to postpone making the switch.
Click to expand...

I for one find it unbelievable that someone would actually complain that software is downwards-compatible. How, may I ask, does the continued existence of OS 9 have a negative impact on your life? Everyone isn't rich, and everyone doesn't necessarily want to buy a new computer every three years.

Anyway, keeping software OS 9 -compatible means more potential customers.
 
I would just like to point out that Microsoft Office X is a Carbon application that does not run in OS 9. Carbonation does not mean Classic support. Cocoa does not support 9 at all, but Carbon doesn't have to.

Above, by "Link?" I actually meant URL. It slipped my mind that the brushed metal interface was a "link" between a device and the Mac. Sorry if I misled anybody.
 
Originally posted by arden

Above, by "Link?" I actually meant URL. It slipped my mind that the brushed metal interface was a "link" between a device and the Mac. Sorry if I misled anybody.
Click to expand...

I meant Hyperion, sorry.

And brushed metal doesn't need to be a 'link' between a digital hub device and the Mac, it just has to simulate one.
 
Okay, now that that's out of the way...

What kind of simulated link is Quicktime, then, television? And what about Safari, a webserver? That doesn't make much sense.
 
Very well, there are Carbon apps that are OSX only. I'll admit, it is not (at least now) only a way to keep OS9 around.

Still, that IS how it began. A lot of my concern comes from my experiences as a developer (for a manufacturing company, not a software company). In my experience, makeshift code (that is put in as a temporary patch or transitional module, when one major system is being migrated to another) have a nasty habit of becoming permanent, and before you know it, volumes of newer code are written which absolutely rely on an ad-hoc patch. Many are the nights I've been awakened by my pager because this sort of band-aid code has failed under a load it was never meant to bear.

Regardless of what it has become now, Carbon was conceived as transitional code. I will grant you my prejudice against it is based on being burned in the past by transitional code of many other kinds. Even if it's become a great tool in OSX, I have the feeling that, buried inside, is something that was never meant to make it past a x.x.1 release, and which piles of code now rely upon.
 
celeborn - You're right of course, backward compatability is important.

My work experiences have changed my perspective a little bit; I have been in the position where legacy code and older-hardware users have made my life pure hell.

EDIT: Originally I had posted next: "If you ever become a professional developer, your pespective may change too." And then I thought that sounded very condescending, which is not at all what I intended.

In my work situation, my co-workers and I are often faced with users demanding ever greater functionality and responsiveness, yet they are also unwilling to spend the money to upgrade OS's or hardware. It has conditioned me to have less sympathy for people clinging to older tech.

Of course, in my case, the hardware, software and labor are all coming out of a corporate budget. Naturally, it is a rather different matter when the computers and software in question are purchased by individual home users, out of their own pockets.

 
brianleahy, it is understandable that you are a little nervous about transistional patches and the like... but looking at OS X from a developers point of view... Cocoa calls into the same stuff that Carbon does... and there are a few custom classes that plug into Carbon because Cocoa's file handling needs work. Apple actually threw out a lot of the old OS 9 API when creating the Carbon API, mostly to remove all the junk hack calls, and they also made system structures opaque. They added on numerous large chunks into CarbonLib from CoreFoundation (which Cocoa uses for basic data members), as well as the HIToolbox API into Carbon.

I think it was a transistional thing, but that Apple planned for the long-term with Carbon. I have worked for a company going broke just trying to port their OS 9 app to OS X because the amount of 'bad' code that was used. Adobe took awhile for the Carbon port for similar reasons. Auditing code to remove all our hacks, kludges, and tweaks isn't fun... but Apple pretty much threw Carbon at us and said that it was easy. It is only easy to port from 9 to X using Carbon if you programmed the way Apple told you to begin with.

Anyways, back on topic... Carbon does need a method for properly accessing the property on windows for brushed metal vs aqua... that way we wouldn't have these kludge UIs on QT, iTunes, and a couple others. NIB files just don't cut it when using classic-style resources in those apps.
 
To bring us back to the original purpose of this thread, I completely agree that brushed metal has no purpose in the Finder. It is ugly, obtrusive, and breaks the consistency of OS X's UI. If Apple wants BM in some of it's apps, that's fine. I agree that it does work in apps that interface with external hardware (like the iApps), but the OS should be consistent across the board, otherwise it confuses the average user.

I do thank goodness that when you click the silver oval in the upper right corner of a finder window, it reverts back to the Aqua style, but you lose the toolbar and the sidebar completely.

Please please please offer the ability to turn off brushed metal as an OPTION in the Finder. Since the Finder already supports Aqua in "Classic Window Mode", it can't be that difficult to implement it as an option.

Thanks for letting me vent.
 
The Finder is no single window application. Thus, according to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, it should be Aqua rather than Brushed Metal. 'nuff said.
 
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