Mac OS X is the world’s most advanced operating system. Built on a rock-solid UNIX foundation and designed to be simple and intuitive, it’s what makes the Mac innovative, highly secure, compatible, and easy to use. Quite simply, there is nothing else like it. Mac OS X is a series of OS (operating systems) and graphical user interfaces (GUI) developed, marketed, and sold by Apple. Since 2002, Mac OS X has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems. Mac OS X is the successor to Mac OS 9.
Mac OS X, where "X" represents the Roman numeral for "10" and is a prominent part of its brand identity, is a Unix-based operating system, built on technologies developed at NeXT. Its sixth release, Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard", gained UNIX 03 certification while running on Intel processors.
The first version of Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released in 1999, and a desktop-oriented version, Mac OS X v10.0 "Cheetah" followed on March 24, 2001. The server edition, Mac OS X Server, is architecturally identical to its desktop counterpart, and includes tools to facilitate management of work groups of Mac OS X machines, and to provide access to network services.
Mac OS X is a fertile field for all kinds of programming endeavors, especially if you have a *nix frame of reference. Life is still much better for a developer on Windows than on Mac OS X - no matter what one might think of the usability, etc. of Windows. Apple has been trying to improve things for developers lately, which is a good sign.
This is a set of procedural C-based APIs for Mac OS X that are based on the old Mac OS 9 API (actually dating back as far back as Mac OS 8.1). Carbon was originally designed to provide an easy development migration path from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. The Carbon APIs are all-encompassing (they include legacy interfaces), covering most things that you are likely to do programmatically on Mac OS X. Carbon specific code is not portable to other platforms.
Mac OS X includes a Classic (Mac OS 9) emulator that executes in a protected memory environment so as to let users run programs written for Mac OS 9. Apple does not encourage you to actually develop for this environment.
Mac Cocoa
This is an object-oriented Objective-C based API that's the preferred way of doing things in Mac OS X (if what you want to do can be done through Cocoa), particularly because of how well it's supported by Apple's Rapid Development tools. However, there are many parts of Mac OS X, and applications from 3rd party vendors, that have not converted to Cocoa completely, or at all. A Cocoa application can call the Carbon API when necessary. Cocoa is largely based on the OpenStep frameworks, and consists of primarily two parts: the Foundation (fundamental classes) and the Application Kit (classes for GUI elements).
Mac OS X features
The versatility and power of Mac OS X make it compatible in almost any environment, including Windows networks. It works with virtually all of today’s digital cameras, printers, and other peripherals without the need to manually download separate drivers. It opens popular file types such as JPG, MP3, and Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.
The core of Mac OS X is built on the same ultrareliable UNIX foundation that powers industrial-strength servers, helping to ensure that your computing experience remains free from system crashes and compromised performance.
Mac OS X Security
Mac OS X includes various security features, services, and APIs (including what's available on typical *nix systems), such as those for controlling/managing passwords, certificates, public/private keys, application-level privileged operations (capabilities), trust policies, etc. Mac OS X supports Kerberos, OpenSSL, and PAM as well.
Mac OS X Speech Interface
Mac OS X includes both speech recognition (part of Carbon) and synthesis frameworks, that are fairly well integrated with the system. Applications can make use of APIs to these frameworks.
Mac OS X fully loaded
Mac OS X comes in a single, full-featured version that includes a large collection of beautifully designed applications. They not only let you surf the web, conduct video and text chats, manage your contacts, and accomplish other day-to-day tasks.
Carbon is a 32-bit procedural API for developing Mac OS X applications. Carbon provides backward compatibility for existing Mac OS X software, while serving as a stepping stone for developers porting procedural applications from other platforms.
The Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks that power Mac OS X and iPhone OS are tightly integrated into the Xcode development experience. Cocoa’s high-level APIs make is easy to add animation, networking, and the native platform appearance and behavior to your application with only a few lines of code.
