Mach-O and Cocoa

Mach-O is the native runtime model on Mac OS X, and Cocoa is the only API supported on 64-bit systems. On ArchiCAD's technology path lies the 64-bit transition; thus we had to abandon the previous Carbon interface, and switch to Cocoa. It has been a long journey; it's time for you to enjoy its benefits. For ArchiCAD 14 the minimum system requirement is 10.5, so we could move forward with this planned change.

What does this mean to you?

• ArchiCAD 14 makes it much easier to call Cocoa system functionality, because we changed to the Cocoa interface. An example for that is the Spell Checker add-on, which calls the spell checker built into the system directly, without a need for a Carbon-Cocoa wrapper bundle.
• You can much easily call Objective-C functions.
• The main event loop now uses [NSApp run] instead of the Carbon event loop.
• All windows and controls are now Cocoa windows. The Mac part of the dialog manager (DG) has been rewritten from scratch in Objective-C.

We also made a small set of unrelated changes to the source and resource files:

• We switched to the command-line version of the GRC compiler. This compiler could be called through a perl script.
• The platform independent .grc files are now really platform independent: they are in UTF-8. This supersedes the need for separate Windows and Mac version of the same resource file. You can read more about the necessary compiler options in the Resource Compiler documentation.
• The example source files are now in Windows-Latin-1 encoding (Windows codepage 1252), with Unix line ends (LF). As both compilers handles many different encodings and line ends, you won't have to modify your source files.
• Images are now TIFF files inside the add-on bundles. If you use the .grc format, the ResConv compiler handles this for you; don't forget to copy the generated TIFF files into the Resources folder of your add-on bundle (see the compileGRCs.pl example scripts).

For more information, please visit Apple's developer site.