The Cellar - View Single Post

02-14-2003, 05:41 AM

OKAY! Here we go...

Aqua is the interface implementation. An Aqua-app is one that has the brightly colored buttons in the upper-left corner, etc. Think of it as GTK for Macs, except it's easier to program for.

Quartz is the technology that displays the images on the screen. It is based on Adobe's PDF (which is why you can save anything as PDF in OS X). Quartz is the reason that everything is so beautifully anti-aliased in Mac OS X.

Quartz Extreme is even cooler. Basically, what it means is that instead of the graphics on your screen being drawn by the 2D portion of your card and your CPU, they are handled primarily by the 3D processor on your video card. Everything you see is rendered as a 3D texture by the GPU and displayed on your desktop for you to marvel at. This takes all the heavy graphics off the CPU and made for a tremendous performance boost when it was introduced. Mac OS X is very graphics-heavy, and this takes advantage of the hardware you've got. I'm still amazed at this.

Carbon exists to "create a gentle migration path for developers transitioning from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X." Basically, what it means is that you can write your apps to run in both OS X and System 9 (aka Classic). It doesn't quite have all the functionality of Cocoa and it apparently isn't as fast. It's a convenience measure, and it was done to garner developer support.

Cocoa is what you'd want to do any Mac OS X programming in. It's designed for Mac OS X only and you can read more about it here.

The difference between Carbon and Classic is that Classic apps require OS 9 to run whereas Carbon apps generally do not. Carbon apps should look like OS X native apps (when run in OS X, of course), while Classic apps will have that old Mac look (platinum title bar, etc). Classic apps can be run in Mac OS X via Classic mode, where OS 9 is basically running on top of OS X. It's a poor way to do things, and since you don't have any legacy Mac apps, you wouldn't need to worry about it.

There is a wealth of information available on Apple's site. One of the best pages for understanding the technologies involved is available here:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/

When you cut through the buzz, you can see that there really are a lot of cool things going on.

02-14-2003, 05:41 AM	#12
dave Guest Posts: n/a	OKAY! Here we go... <b>Aqua</b> is the interface implementation. An Aqua-app is one that has the brightly colored buttons in the upper-left corner, etc. Think of it as GTK for Macs, except it's easier to program for. <b>Quartz</b> is the technology that displays the images on the screen. It is based on Adobe's PDF (which is why you can save anything as PDF in OS X). Quartz is the reason that everything is so beautifully anti-aliased in Mac OS X. <b>Quartz Extreme</b> is even cooler. Basically, what it means is that instead of the graphics on your screen being drawn by the 2D portion of your card and your CPU, they are handled primarily by the 3D processor on your video card. Everything you see is rendered as a 3D texture by the GPU and displayed on your desktop for you to marvel at. This takes all the heavy graphics off the CPU and made for a tremendous performance boost when it was introduced. Mac OS X is very graphics-heavy, and this takes advantage of the hardware you've got. I'm still amazed at this. <b>Carbon</b> exists to "create a gentle migration path for developers transitioning from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X." Basically, what it means is that you can write your apps to run in both OS X and System 9 (aka Classic). It doesn't quite have all the functionality of Cocoa and it apparently isn't as fast. It's a convenience measure, and it was done to garner developer support. <b>Cocoa</b> is what you'd want to do any Mac OS X programming in. It's designed for Mac OS X only and you can read more about it here. The difference between Carbon and Classic is that Classic apps require OS 9 to run whereas Carbon apps generally do not. Carbon apps should look like OS X native apps (when run in OS X, of course), while Classic apps will have that old Mac look (platinum title bar, etc). Classic apps can be run in Mac OS X via Classic mode, where OS 9 is basically running on top of OS X. It's a poor way to do things, and since you don't have any legacy Mac apps, you wouldn't need to worry about it. There is a wealth of information available on Apple's site. One of the best pages for understanding the technologies involved is available here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/ When you cut through the buzz, you can see that there really are a lot of cool things going on.