Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Documents, Programs, & Spaces

The whole point of owning a computer, of course, is to run programs—or apps, as the iPhone crowd likes to call them. But if you’re a software company, the history of apps on Mac OS X is a short and exasperating one.

When Apple rolled out Mac OS X in 2001, the world’s software companies slapped their foreheads. This was a completely new operating system, and required completely new programs. It would require every single app to be rewritten: Photoshop, Quicken, Microsoft Office, and thousands of others.

It took several years, but finally they got there; all those old Mac OS 9 programs now ran on Mac OS X. They completed the rewrites just in time to hear Apple make another announcement: The company was switching to Intel processing chips for all new Macs.

UP TO SPEED: Carbon, Cocoa, and Classic (RIP)

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. Two Kinds of Programs: Cocoa and Carbon 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 (Mac OS X) 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 ...