SendEventToEventTarget fails in Acrobat 8 on Mac

Question

I have a plug-in which I'm porting from Acrobat 7 to 8 on Mac. I'm using PowerPlant to create a modal dialog which has a text control that captures standard editing keyboard shortcuts such as Command-C, Command-V, and Command-X when it's active. In Acrobat 7, it works fine. In Acrobat 8, however, none of these messages are getting through. The Debugger Console window in Xcode shows messages like the following when one of these keys is pressed:
2008-03-27 14:48:07.607 Acrobat[3309:613] SendEventToEventTarget() returned -9874.
Also, the entire application menu, including the Apple Menu, is disabled while my dialog is active. This also happens only under Acrobat 8, and not under Acrobat 7. I think that these two issues may be related: The Command shortcuts in the menu are disabled, so Acrobat can't dispatch the corresponding events. It's a theory, anyway.
Note that other keyboard shortcuts, such as Command-B, do indeed get passed through to my dialog. It seems to be just the ones that Acrobat itself is using that don't get sent. Note also that other third-party GUI APIs such as wxWidgets seem to be able to handle these keyboard commands in a modal dialog just fine, and the application menu is still accessible. The problem seems to be specific to the combination of PowerPlant and Acrobat 8.
Is there anything I can call in the Acrobat 8 API to tell Acrobat to send events to my dialog? Or is there something I need to change in the way that PowerPlant is handling events? What's different in Acrobat itself between 7 and 8 that is affecting my dialog?
Thanks,
Dan
(MacBook Pro, OS X 10.5.2, Xcode 2.5)

Answer 1

Thanks Leonard. I understand the issue with Carbon vs. Cocoa events. I'm not sure it's as simple as that, though. The wxWidgets API is also Carbon-based, but it seems to work fine and handle events under Acrobat 8 in a modal dialog. As far as I can tell, wxWidgets is calling ReceiveNextEvent whereas PowerPlant is calling WaitNextEvent, but they're both Carbon API calls.
In any case, I'm not sure that the solution is to completely recode everything and maintain two radically different code bases to be able to support both Acrobat 7 and 8. My PowerPlant dialog works just fine, except for this issue. The fact that Acrobat is putting that debugging message in the console window suggests that it has some idea about what's happening.
There may well be something relatively simple to change from PowerPlant's end to get Acrobat to work with it properly. Perhaps this is a question for a different forum. I was just hoping to get a little bit of insight into why Acrobat is putting out that message.
Thanks,
Dan