[armadsen]

Both iTunes and Finder were at least partly Carbon for a long time. I'm not so sure convincing developers was the reason for that, though. iTunes 1.0 was Mac OS 9 only, and didn't even run on Mac OS X. It was a continuation of SoundJam MP, a third-party Mac app that predated the release of Mac OS X. So, really, iTunes was ported forward to Mac OS X using the same process Apple expected developers of existing Classic Mac apps to use, but that probably wasn't a decision (solely) made for developer relations reasons.

I don't know much about the history of Finder in this regard, unfortunately. It of course existed from System 1.0 in 1984, but how much of Mac OS X 10.0's Finder was a complete rewrite and how much was ported from Classic Finder vs NeXTStep is something I have no idea about. It certainly had UX that came from NeXTStep (the column browser, for instance).

[zapzupnz]

> I'm not so sure convincing developers was the reason for that, though.

It was for Finder. During one of the WWDCs or MacWorlds (I don't recall which), Jobs specifically mentioned that Finder was written in Carbon as a way to show that Apple eats its own dog food. It was the big demonstration that Carbon wasn't some second-rate API … although, of course, it was.

Dogfooding as a concept isn't Apple-specific but it's definitely a meme in Apple circles — especially when Apple is detected as specifically not eating its own dog food!

[saagarjha]

And then they had a big thing where they rewrote it in Cocoa, too, to show how easy it was to migrate over.