Adaptive Scrolling

One of the amazing things about OS X that I have noticed just recently, is that if you have multiple applications open on the same screen say ichat, safari and itunes, and they happy to be overlapping but all visible, you can move over the program with your cursor and scroll up and down on within the program without actually bringing it to the front. So if I have safari open in the front, but itunes is in the back and I want to see what the next couple of songs will be, i can just move the mouse over and scroll down without clicking. Awesome!

The question is... why don't all programs, in my case MS Word, utilize this function. Is this application specific or is it OS specific or a little of both? Does anyone know if MS Office 2008 will harness this feature?

Anyways, it was pretty awesome to figure this out even if every app doesn't use it.

This feature is new to leopard. It sure is amazing (especially since I navigate using my tablet. Btw, you are aware that if you can drag a window in the background by Command+dragging the title bar right?

The reason why Word and some others might not use the scrolling is because they are Carbon apps. Carbon apps are non-native OS X apps. They are many a times ports of Windows applications and some other stuff. Cocoa are native OS X apps. They are sometimes hard to differentiate, but you will know a Cocoa app when you see one (comes with a little experience).

goobimama said:

This feature is new to leopard. It sure is amazing (especially since I navigate using my tablet. Btw, you are aware that if you can drag a window in the background by Command+dragging the title bar right?

The reason why Word and some others might not use the scrolling is because they are Carbon apps. Carbon apps are non-native OS X apps. They are many a times ports of Windows applications and some other stuff. Cocoa are native OS X apps. They are sometimes hard to differentiate, but you will know a Cocoa app when you see one (comes with a little experience).

Click to expand...

Carbon apps are native apps. Even the Leopard Finder is mostly Carbon. They run at the same speed, and can do anything that a Cocoa app can do (although it's often harder for the programmer to do the same things in Carbon, and many don't bother.)

Word 2004 is a Carbon app, yes, but it's also a Rosetta app. And what's worse, it's a Microsoft app, and a very old one at that. It has a lot of cruft, and Microsoft doesn't really put a lot of emphasis on supporting the latest features.

Carbon and Cocoa are APIs; a toolkit that programmers can use to build their applications. And for some time now, the tools in the Cocoa toolkit are shinier and flashier than the ones in the Carbon toolkit. But it's not true that Carbon apps can't support the cool stuff...it's just that most of them don't bother.

That is very cool.

Now I'm not sure what are the exact differences between Carbon and Cocoa, but I know that Cocoa is MORE native than carbon in many regards. Cause even stuff like Photoshop, Indesign which are don't have this similar feature. While a Cocoa app will have these features out of the box by their very 'being cocoa'.