[geeks] Mac definitions (was: Smart phone data usage)

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, 7 Jul 2011, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> On 07/07/11 11:32, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
>> If they'd ever fix their focus bugs, I'd be pretty happy with Apple's X11
>> distribution.
>
> I'm given to understand that some pretty smart people have looked at
> this problem and concluded that, as a result of design decisions Apple
> made in their UI layer, the focus problems in X on OSX *cannot* be fixed
> without re-implementing the whole Apple UI layer.  (Darwin?  Carbon?  I
> lose track of these completely orthogonal-to-relevant codenames.)

MacOS X - The whole Mac Operating Environment

Darwin - The underlying kernel for the OS (think SunOS 2.10 vs Solaris 10).

Carbon - the MacOS API from MacOS 8/9 days, OS X supported some bits of it
          but it has since been replaced with Cocoa

Cocoa - The current MacOS API

Quartz - Graphics layer for Mac OS X

Core Audio/Video/Animation/etc - low-level APIs for those varous subsystems

Finder - The UI, the graphical shell, what Apple calls "The Macintosh
 	 Desktop Experience," the rough equiv of Windows' Explorer
 	 (not IE, but explorer.exe).

My examples don't line up 100%, but should give you a rough idea of
where the bits fit together.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org
Austin, TX
KF5LGQ