5. Carbon Plug-ins

“I got creative and ambitious—a dangerous combination.”

—Unknown (from CocoaDev Mailing List)

What did developers do before Cocoa? They ate, drank, and slept Carbon—that's what they did! Carbon is a set of APIs that bridge the gap between previous versions of the Mac OS and Mac OS X. If you've programmed the Macintosh in the past, many of the APIs will look familiar to you: File Manager, Memory Manager, and Resource Manager. Both Carbon and Cocoa applications can access the Carbon APIs, which is an advantage for developers pursuing Cocoa development.

Depending on the last time you wrote a Macintosh application, things might have changed. A nib-based Carbon application used in Project Builder can literally be as simple as the ...

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