In my last post I praised Cocoa and said it signified an Apple advantage. In this post I'm going to praise CodeWarrior for MacOS and it's counterpoint, the PowerPlant class library for MacOS. PowerPlant is THE BEST C++ library I have ever seen or used. The source code is included, and the library follows a rigid, highly disciplined naming convention for all its classes. Even without the better UI building tools found in Visual C++ on Windows, the combination of CodeWarrior and PowerPlant on the Mac is hard to beat. Right now I am building Carbon and Classic binaries for my QuickTime export component. CodeWarrior, itself a Carbonized application, is running great under OS X. The compiler is screaming fast as well.

I have to give much credit to PowerPlant for allowing me to get up to speed with MacOS programming so quickly. It was a joy to learn, and anytime I needed help understanding how to program the Mac, I'd just look in the library source or in the highly informative and excellent sample code that is included in the product. In my case, back in 1997, I had to figure out how to wire up the C++ exception handling mechanism in the Premiere plug-in I was writing at the time. Talk about a fish out of water! Our first cut of the plug-in would crash hard if it hit a C++ exception. Whoops. Well, what are build numbers for anyway.

For the time being, I am holding off making the switch to Cocoa programming on the Mac (hey, I said it was Apple's advantage, not mine). I am going to stick with CodeWarrior and Carbon. I figure the 40 million or so classic Macs out there still need good software.