iTunes 9 Cocoa?

If you haven’t clued into Apple’s hidden shame, iTunes and Finder (up until Snow Leopard) are Carbon apps. That just means that the applications haven’t been rewritten for Mac OS X and are still carrying the legacy of the Classic environment. That doesn’t mean much for the user except for an app’s ability to address large (4GB+) memory and run in the 64-bit-ness that users seem to like the sound of.

I’m not sure exactly what these screenshots (that I took) reveal, but it is interesting….

Note the plist file is in both 8.2.1 and 9. So what exactly changed?

I’m not 100% sure if this is a definite sign of Cocoa-ness, but I see a plist file– a staple of Cocoa… but that’s in both.

Note the RSRC file. This is a “resource fork“, an invention and utility of the original MacOS (and Carbon apps). Is this a definite sign it’s not Cocoa?

Also note that all of Apple’s apps run in 64-bit mode (as seen in Activity Monitor) except for iTunes. We know Carbon apps don’t do 64-bit, so is this an indicator… I mean, Apple would kick it up to 64-bit if it were Cocoa, right?

Not that which API iTunes uses is important for most users, it would be encouraging to think that iTunes has been moved off of it’s 10+ year old code-heritage. Any Apple devs out there that can speak on either direction of this?