After the hubbub died down, many of us were left wondering about the Yellow Box. Remember that applications written to the Yellow Box APIs were supposed to run on Rhapsody PPC, Rhapsody Intel, Mac OS, Windows 95, and Windows NT, plus possibly Solaris and maybe some other operating systems. Where does that fit into the Mac OS X plans? In fact, now that Rhapsody's going away, what happens to Rhapsody Intel itself? Discussion of cross-platform support was conspicuously absent today; in fact, we don't think the phrase "Yellow Box" was mentioned even once.

While at first it seemed to us that Carbon was a repackaged Yellow Box, it's now clear that isn't the case; Carbon is a set of Mac OS API's that will work "natively" in Mac OS X, but since it consists almost entirely of Mac OS calls, it's not cross-platform like the Yellow Box. We think. Basically, MacCentral nailed it right on the head when they wrote about the confusion surrounding today's announcements. While most Mac developers are stoked about the day's surprises, we imagine a lot of former NeXT programmers, who have been writing to the Yellow Box for years, may be a little nervous at this change in direction.

The Carbon API's are a great way to keep existing Mac developers on the Mac platform as it grows and changes; however, the lure of the Yellow Box API's was that, once you spent all the effort of writing all your code for the Yellow Box, you could make it run almost anywhere with minimal porting work. Has Apple decided that such a strategy wouldn't be enough of a draw for new developers? Regardless, we did find one mention of the Yellow Box in a MacWEEK article on the day's events: according to marketing guy Phil Schiller, the Yellow Box will indeed run on both Mac OS X and Rhapsody. So Yellow Box developers aren't left out in the cold, at any rate. Hopefully the picture will become clearer over the course of the week.