Article:		Inside Contextual Menu Items, Part 2
Subject:		Are the old Apple docs still useful?
Date:		2005-03-23 21:57:09
From:		ptwobrussell
Nice developer article... As a fairly new Mac developer, I haven't waded too far out of the Cocoa frameworks, but have touched on a little bit of Carbon from time to time. I've run across the old Apple docs like the one you reference here about Interprocess communication, but sort of just tossed them to the side, because I figured any document that's dated "Jul 1996" must have been so many OS releases ago that it's no longer useful (especially given the big changes with OS X). As a general rule of thumb, is this the case, or not? Can I confidently learn relevant development info from the old docs that are dated pre 1999? I know they're out there for a reason, but thought it might have been for historical purposes or something.

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• Are the old Apple docs still useful?
  2005-03-25 12:14:33  EGOSysDiz [View]
  
  
  (Un)fortunately, yes.
  
  One of my main dissapointments with Mac OS X programming is how much Carbon knowledge is needed in order to create useful things like CMIs. This is slowly changing for the better, but until Apple kills it off completely, you'll need to ask yourself, "MUST I do this with Carbon?" way more often than you'd like.
  
  Of course, now that OS X (and Carbon) has been around so long, it's doubtful that the Carbon API's will EVER really go away, but the day we can create CMI's in Cocoa will a day for great rejoicing. (If anyone already knows how to do this, let us know!)