Apple developers who attended the sessions relating to the new Mac OS X operating system announced by interim CEO Steve Jobs on Monday (CI No 3,408), are styling the new Carbon APIs as a re-write of 80% of the original MacOS APIs so that memory protection and pre-emptive multi-tasking can be supported, something that the company failed to do with the proposed but then abandoned Copland MacOS release. Re-writing existing applications to support the new operating system will require some work, but Adobe Systems Inc was on hand last week to show off a version of Photoshop 5.0 that had been adapted to work with Carbon in one and a half weeks, as the application itself was being finalized. Photoshop 5.0 began shipping on Monday. The underpinnings of Mac OS X will be the Mach 3.0 microkernel, BSD Unix services and the HFS file system, the same as the Rhapsody operating system from NeXT Software Inc was to be based on.
