Introduction to Carbon Overview

Originally designed to provide a gentle migration path for developers transitioning from Mac OS 9, Carbon is a collection of C programming interfaces that let you implement basic application functionality such as the user interface, event handling, file management, and so on.

This document describes Carbon's place in Mac OS X and gives overviews of the Carbon interfaces. It also describes a wide variety of other programming interfaces that Carbon applications can use, supporting everything from video playback to alternate text input.

As Carbon is a C interface, you can also use all the standard C library APis; however, Mac OS X often has superior replacements (for example, Unicode string manipulation APIs versus the ASCII-related APIs, such as strcmp in the standard C library).

Who Should Read This Document?

You should read this document if you are new to Mac OS X and would like to write Mac OS X applications using procedural C or C++.

Organization of This Document

This document contains two chapters:

• Carbon Basics briefly describes how Carbon fits into Mac OS X and the tools available to build Carbon applications.

• The Carbon Factory Tour gives an overview of Carbon managers and services, including nonCarbon specialty services.

• Legacy Interfaces describes managers and services that have been superseded by newer technologies. If you are a new developer, this chapter is of historical interest only.