WWDC 2003: The year of Cocoa?

In our first installment of a series containing developer expectations and hopes for the upcoming 2003 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, our friend Wil Shipley from the OmniGroup opines that while last year's conference saw the "death" of Mac OS 9, this year's show will put the nail in its coffin.

"I have no idea where they're going to focus the show, although I think it's notable that every Apple system app that ships with Jaguar is Cocoa based (except the Finder), whereas a huge number of the apps with 10.1 were Carbon. Pretty much every group inside Apple has now discovered the power of Cocoa (except, maybe, the sound guys, who still are writing Carbon-only APIs and Java code, grrr).

"Now that Carbon and Cocoa can co-exist in the same app, and now that making apps backwards-compatible with OS 9 is pretty much moot, I think we're going to see a lot more of the "big boys" doing experiments with partial Cocoa apps -- they've got huge codebases of Carbon, but there's no reason they can't do new parts of their apps in Cocoa, and save time, money, and effort."

"What I do expect to see a lot of at this show as opposed to previous shows is 'how do you take advantage of all the cool things Mac OS X has to offer' instead of 'how do you write for OS X and still manage to keep your apps limping along on OS 9?' As recently as last year we would see updates to, say, OpenGL on the Mac OS X side and then Apple would have to worry about trying to do the same kinds of cool things for OS 9. Nowadays it's, 'Look, Mac OS X is just going to be faster and better...'"

For more information on WWDC, as well as registration, visit Apple's page.

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