What is a Mac OS X application, anyway?

Kelly McNeill writes “Recently I witnessed a raging debate in various Macintosh news groups regarding a hot topic: What signifies a true Macintosh application? Those included in the debate were not talking about the Macintosh that most of us know but rather, Apple’s next generation operating system, Mac OS X in all its incarnations. The debate has created a lot of heat on both sides. With Darwin, XWindows, as well as Classic, Cocoa and Carbon APIs, Mac OS X’s applications come in strange new flavors these days.”