Apple may initially have intended Carbon as temporary, but has changed their stance when they started adding new APIs that never existed in MacOS 9 - HIView/HIWindow was intended to unify Carbon and Cocoa, there was even a 64 buy version of Carbon that shipped in Mac OS betas, and when Retina-Display Hardware shipped, Carbon received new APIs to deal with that.
Likewise, Cocoa in 10.0 was buggy and incomplete. It took until about 10.4, 10.5 for Cocoa to reach feature parity with Carbon and many Cocoa applications were using Carbon for certain features (in facts, last time I checked, Cocoa menus were implemented in Carbon).
HIView and HIWindow were added, if I recall correctly, because it allowed other toolkits (tk, Qt (who only recently moved off this), etc) to draw the native look “properly”. It was never actually up to date or well documented, and they kept it around just so the OS didn’t look so totally bizarre as you moved through it (like you see on Windows).
Bolting on Retina support to that is such a no-brainer that I hesitate to call it adding features - that was table stakes in making sure the switch to retina didn’t look like total ass.
None of this stuff ever changed how Carbon was deprecated. People just sat around not listening to Apple, and then the last two years the bigger GUI toolkits finally did the work to transition properly.
HIView was up to date and documented, and there were WWDC sessions teaching developers why they should move to HIView and how to do it. Likewise, Apple provided documentation about how to port your Carbon application to 64 bit Carbon. Maxon reportedly even had a 64bit Carbon version of Cinema 4D ready to ship when Apple suddenly announced that they would abandon 64bit Carbon - telling developers to disregard the 64bit Carbon they were still shipping in betas.
Toolkits that used HIView/HIWindow looked very out of date compared to proper Cocoa implementations (Qt, contrary to popular belief, wasn't really "native" for the longest time since they did this - it's part of why it always looked off).
There are very valid reasons to be frustrated with Apple, but the writing has been on the wall for this stuff for years now. Nobody should be complaining at this point.
Exactly. In the days of WWDC 2003/2004 there were numerous separate Cocoa/Carbon sessions, and the Carbon message was to go fully to HIToolbox and Carbon Events.
Carbon NIBs even existed, although the format (XML) and concept (definitely not “freeze-dried objects”) were totally different from anything Cocoa. Xcode 4 and up couldn’t edit or view Carbon NIBs, which made that tech deprecation pretty clear.
Likewise, Cocoa in 10.0 was buggy and incomplete. It took until about 10.4, 10.5 for Cocoa to reach feature parity with Carbon and many Cocoa applications were using Carbon for certain features (in facts, last time I checked, Cocoa menus were implemented in Carbon).