on 13/1/01 12:18 PM, Omar Shahine at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On 1/12/01 2:19 PM, "Remo Del Bello" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> on 1/12/01 12:28 PM, Dan Crevier deftly typed out:
>>
>>>>> No, that's not what it means. Office for X will only work on OS X.
>>>>> Carbon
>>>>> makes it *possible* to write an app that will run on both, but that is
>>>>> very
>>>>> difficult.
>>>>
>>>> So, you're saying that Office for OS X is a Cocoa app? ;-)
>>>
>>> Nope.
>>
>> What he's saying is that Carbon makes it possible to write an app for both
>> OS 9 and X, but not necessary. An application can be made OS X native by
>> using the Carbon APIs, but without additional effort won't necessarily still
>> run in OS 9. I'm getting the impression that it'll be OS X only.
>
> Yes.
Not being privy to Microsoft's code I can't say for sure, but for example:
The move to OSX means that the "extensions" that MS installs in your system
folder cannot be used in the same way. OSX tries REALLY HARD to make
developers put all needed resources in their application, not in "the
system". If an application's capabilities need to be shared with other
applications, then several alternatives are available, "services" being one
of them. So because MS cannot just move the "extensions" over to OSX, they
must re-engineer them in one of the OSX ways (shared libraries probably),
which makes it almost impossible to make a single application for both
platforms.
This is just one of the design difficulties they must have, I'll bet there
are quite a few others just as hard.
This doesn't mean you can't write apps that run on both platforms, (For
example, AppleWorks 6 runs better in OSX Public Beta than in OS9,) just that
the way MS Office was designed, a single app for both platforms is probably
not possible.
--
Peter Gort
--
To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To search the archives:
<http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
