[fpc-pascal] Using cocoa instead of carbon libraries

[Travis Siegel]

On Jan 26, 2009, at 11:02 AM, dmitry boyarintsev wrote:

> See this page: http://wiki.freepascal.org/PasCocoa
>
Thanks for that, will check it out.
>>

>> The carbon apis are no longer supported by apple,
> Has apple anounced that?

> Repeatedly.  They're encouraging all developers to use the cocoa  
> apis, because of the tighter integration to the system, and future  
> upgrades and so forth.

>
>> and it would be nice to
>> have cocoa apis supported, because of their better integration to the
>> system, and their accessibility features that are basically free  
>> when used
>> properly.
> what do you mean by "accessibility features"?
Voiceover (the screen reader that ships with osx) and the other  
accessibility features such as reading outloud, screen contrast,  
larger/smaller text, background/foreground colors and so on) are all  
basically free when using cocoa apis, as the features are built-in to  
the cocoa apis, and require very little (if any) coding on the  
developers part to make the programs usable by users of these  
technologies.
Being a voiceover user myself, I'm of course all for this modification.
Carbon aps can be made accessible, but it takes additional work on the  
developers part, and generally, they're still a bit more difficult to  
use (I.E. vo users need to use simulated mouse clicks instead of using  
voiceover generated button clicks) as well as labels for things like  
buttons, tables and scroll bars.  All these things are much simpler  
under cocoa than they ae using carbon equivalents.


> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/MakingAppsAccessible/AXCarbonIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html
>
> As opposed to the one for cocoa at:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Accessibility/cocoaAXIntro/cocoaAXintro.html
There's considerably less work to access enable a cocoa app then there  
is for a carbon one, as evidenced by comparisons between these two  
document trails.
On the surface, it looks similar, but do some digging, and you'll see  
there's a world of difference.
A lot of things you get for free with cocoa takes specific coding on  
the carbon apis.
That's why I'm trying for cocoa support (preferrably by default) as  
that would make more apps accessible right out of the box.