In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, communication protocols, and tools for building software. In general terms, it is a set of clearly defined methods of communication among various components. A good API makes it easier to develop a computer program by providing all the building blocks, which are then put together by the programmer.
Classic Mac OS is a colloquial term used to describe a series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The Macintosh operating system is credited with having popularized the graphical user interface concept. It was included with every Macintosh that was sold during the era it was developed, and many updates to the system software were done in conjunction with the introduction of new Macintosh systems.
These APIs were originally designed to provide a common text handling system to support text entry fields in dialog boxes and other simple text editing within the Macintosh GUI. Over time, they were extended to provide more advanced text editing features, but its limited original scope led to fundamental limitations. Apple repeatedly stated that TextEdit was not a word processor, and therefore providing rich text editing was always left to third-party developers.
The graphical control element dialog box is a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response.
A word processor (WP) is a computer program or device that provides for input, editing, formatting and output of text, often plus other features.
16-bit internal indexing limits text to a maximum length of about 32,000 characters
use of QuickDraw for glyph rendering limited the maximum height of a text block to 32,767 pixels - this could be encountered well before the character limit was hit with larger font sizes.
QuickDraw is the 2D graphics library and associated Application Programming Interface (API) which is a core part of the classic Mac OS operating system. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still existed as part of the libraries of Mac OS X, but had been largely superseded by the more modern Quartz graphics system. In Mac OS X v10.4, QuickDraw has been officially deprecated. In Mac OS X v10.5 applications using QuickDraw cannot make use of the added 64-bit support. In Mac OS X v10.8, QuickDraw header support was removed from the operating system. Applications using QuickDraw will still run under OS X 10.8 through macOS 10.12; however, the current versions of Xcode and the macOS SDK do not contain the header files to compile such programs.
The first incarnation of TextEdit provided support for only a single style of text, which was applied to all text in the block. This was more than adequate for its intended use, supporting text entry fields. Later, support was added for styled text so that TextEdit could be used for more complex text editing tasks, such as text editing areas in web browsers, etc. [clarification needed]
TextEdit remains part of the Carbon API on macOS, but has been superseded by numerous other solutions including ATSUI in Carbon, the third party WASTE text engine, as well as NSText and related classes within Cocoa.
Carbon is one of Apple’s C-based application programming interfaces (APIs) for Mac OS X, the operating system that powers Macintosh computers. Carbon provided a good degree of backward compatibility for programs that ran on Mac OS 8 and 9. Developers could use the Carbon APIs to port their “classic” Mac software to the Mac OS X platform with little effort, compared to porting the app to the entirely different Cocoa system, which originated in OPENSTEP.
macOS is a series of graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac family of computers. Within the market of desktop, laptop and home computers, and by web usage, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows.
The WASTE is an Apple Macintosh text editing software library. WASTE helps Macintosh programmers include advanced text display and editing in their applications.
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ISO 9660 is a file system for optical disc media. Being published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) the file system is considered an international technical standard. Since the specification is available for anybody to purchase, implementations have been written for many operating systems.
SimpleText is the native text editor for the Apple classic Mac OS. SimpleText allows editing including text formatting, fonts, and sizes. It was developed to integrate the features included in the different versions of TeachText that were created by various software development groups within Apple.
The ext2 or second extended file system is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext). Having been designed according to the same principles as the Berkeley Fast File System from BSD, it was the first commercial-grade filesystem for Linux.
Notepad is a simple text editor for Microsoft Windows and a basic text-editing program which enables computer users to create documents. It was first released as a mouse-based MS-DOS program in 1983, and has been included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 1.0 in 1985.
The BMP file format, also known as bitmap image file or device independent bitmap (DIB) file format or simply a bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device, especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems.
Historically, the classic Mac OS used a form of memory management that has fallen out of favor in modern systems. Criticism of this approach was one of the key areas addressed by the change to Mac OS X.
System 7 is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple Computer, Inc. It succeeded System 6, and was the main Macintosh operating system until it was succeeded by Mac OS 8 in 1997. Features added with the System 7 release included virtual memory, personal file sharing, QuickTime, QuickDraw 3D, and an improved user interface.
QuickDraw GX was a replacement for the QuickDraw (QD) 2D graphics engine and Printing Manager inside the classic Mac OS. Its underlying drawing platform was a resolution-independent object oriented retained mode system, making it much easier for programmers to perform common tasks. Additionally, GX added various curve-drawing commands that had been lacking from QD, as well as introducing TrueType as its basic font system.
The Amiga Fast File System is a file system used on the Amiga personal computer. The previous Amiga filesystem was never given a specific name and known originally simply as "DOS" or AmigaDOS. Upon the release of FFS, the original filesystem became known as Amiga Old File System (OFS). OFS, which was primarily designed for use with floppy disks, had been proving slow to keep up with hard drives of the era. FFS was designed as a full replacement for the original Amiga filesystem. FFS differs from its predecessor mainly in the removal of redundant information. Data blocks contain nothing but data, allowing the filesystem to manage the transfer of large chunks of data directly from the host adapter to the final destination.
The Macintosh Toolbox is a set of application programming interfaces with a particular access mechanism. They implement many of the high-level features of the Classic Mac OS. The Toolbox consists of a number of "managers," software components such as QuickDraw, responsible for drawing onscreen graphics, and the Menu Manager, which maintain data structures describing the menu bar. As the original Macintosh was designed without virtual memory or memory protection, it was important to classify code according to when it should be loaded into memory or kept on disk, and how it should be accessed. The Toolbox consists of subroutines essential enough to be permanently kept in memory and accessible by a two-byte machine instruction; however it excludes core "kernel" functionality such as memory management and the file system. Note that the Toolbox does not draw the menu onscreen: menus were designed to have a customizable appearance, so the drawing code was stored in a resource, which could be on a disk.
HFS Plus or HFS+ is a file system developed by Apple Inc. It replaced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS 8.1. HFS+ continued as the primary Mac OS X file system until it was itself replaced with the release of the Apple File System (APFS) with macOS High Sierra in 2017. HFS+ is also one of the formats used by the iPod digital music player. It is also referred to as Mac OS Extended or HFS Extended, where its predecessor, HFS, is also referred to as Mac OS Standard or HFS Standard. During development, Apple referred to this file system with the codename Sequoia.
In computing, a file system or filesystem controls how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, information placed in a storage medium would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of information stops and the next begins. By separating the data into pieces and giving each piece a name, the information is easily isolated and identified. Taking its name from the way paper-based information systems are named, each group of data is called a "file". The structure and logic rules used to manage the groups of information and their names is called a "file system".
Several binary representations of character sets for common Western European languages are compared in this article. These encodings were designed for representation of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols. Although they're called "Western European" many of these languages are spoken all over the world. Also, these character sets happen to support many other languages such as Malay, Swahili, and Classical Latin.
In the macOS, iOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep programming frameworks, property list files are files that store serialized objects. Property list files use the filename extension .plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file systems.
The SemWare Editor (TSE) is a text editor computer program for MS-DOS, OS/2, and Windows.
The Advanced Disc Filing System (ADFS) is a computing file system particular to the Acorn computer range and RISC OS-based successors. Initially based on the rare Acorn Winchester Filing System, it was renamed to the Advanced Disc Filing System when support for floppy discs was added and on later 32-bit systems a variant of a PC-style floppy controller.
