Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Documents, Programs, and Spaces

From the day Apple first announced Mac OSX, the company made clear that Mac OS X offered a lot of advantages, particularly in stability—but that you would need all-new versions of your programs to realize these benefits. Most software companies announced that they would get to work Mac OS X–izing their programs, but Mac fans kept reading the same advice: Don't switch to Mac OS X until most or all of the programs you use every day have been adapted to run on it.

For most people, that time is here. One by one, the Mac OS X versions of big-name programs became ready: Microsoft Office, Photoshop, InDesign, QuarkXPress, iMovie, iTunes, Illustrator, Freehand, Quicken, FileMaker, Internet Explorer, and thousands of others. In fact, most of the latest Mac versions run only in Mac OS X.

UP TO SPEED: Carbon, Cocoa, and Classic (R.I.P.)

There are two chief kinds of Mac OS X–compatible programs, known by the geeks as Carbon and Cocoa programs. These terms refer to the programming tools that were used to create them, which also have a small effect on how well they run in Mac OS X. The Font Panel covers them in more detail, but the point is that this chapter describes how Carbon and Cocoa programs work—these are true Mac OS X programs.

Now, until Leopard came along, there was a third software category. Older Macs (pre-Intel Macs) could also run the very old, pre-2001 operating system known as Mac OS 9, and all of its programs. Mac OS X came with a built-in ...