Steve Jobs and the History of Cocoa, Part Two
Pages: 1, 2
Mac OS X, Ready or Not
Many Macintosh purists insisted that Mac OS X was not a real Macintosh operating system. But that just begs the question -- “What is a real Macintosh operating system?”
The original Macintosh operating system could run just a single program at a time on a computer with 64K of ROM and 64K of RAM. (The 128K Mac was Apple’s second-generation Macintosh computer.) It didn’t support up or down arrow keys because Apple’s dogmatic engineers insisted that anything done with a keyboard could be done better with a mouse.
In fact, Mac OS X is very much a Macintosh operating system. It may have a Unix kernel, but it’s a Unix kernel sitting on top of an Apple HFS+ file system, complete with creator codes and resource forks. Mac OS X still supports AppleTalk, Apple’s easy-to-administer, automatically configuring networking system.
What’s more, Mac OS X really does run all of those old Macintosh applications -- which is what the "Classic" Macintosh environment is all about. If you double-click on an application program that runs on older Mac OS computers, a Mac OS X system will launch a copy of Mac OS 9 within Mac OS X. When you activate this application, the Macintosh computer will have much of the look and feel of a Mac OS 9 computer. It’s weird, but you can run those old apps quite well in Classic mode.
If you are a programmer, the Mac OS X platform has a lot to recommend it.
- If you are used to writing programs for Linux or other flavors of Unix, you can use all of your existing skills to write applications for Mac OS X. In return, you’ll get a market with an order of magnitude more users.
- If you are a solo programmer, you’ll discover that the Cocoa development environment makes you far more productive than you could ever imagine. With Cocoa, one or two people really can write an industrial-strength application that can be sold for hundreds of dollars.
- If you work in a high-security environment, you can use Mac OS X content in the knowledge that you are safe from the majority of computer worms, viruses, and hostile code that now routinely circle the Internet.
|
Links • Apple II history, with screen shots |
Building Cocoa Applications
This spring, O’Reilly & Associates will publish Building Cocoa Applications -- A Step-by-Step Guide. This book is based on literally years of experience with the NeXTSTEP, Macintosh, Unix, and Cocoa environments. In it, we try to show users a step-by-step approach to building realistic applications. And we try to do it while having a lot of fun.
Our book does not assume prior knowledge with the Macintosh or any other window-based operating environment, nor does it assume knowledge of object-oriented programming. In fact, a previous version of the book was actually used in several schools to teach object-oriented programming back in the 1990s.
Building Cocoa Apps begins with introductory but important material on the Macintosh operating system and object-oriented programming. Then the rest of the book concentrates on building three major applications. The first, Calculator, is built in Chapters 5-8. The second, MathPaper, is built within Chapters 10-14. The third and final major application is GraphPaper, built in Chapters 16-21.
There are numerous additional simple applications built throughout the book to demonstrate features of Cocoa and Mac OS X. You can build all of these applications right along with us. We provide simple but complete instructions on how to do whatever is necessary to build these applications from scratch.
If you are not sure whether our book is for you, you can download the Calculator, MathPaper, and GraphPaper applications from the O’Reilly Web site. Run the programs, then read the code. If you have always wanted to write programs with super-slick user interfaces, now is the time to start.
Simson Garfinkel is a developer with 24 years of programming experience, the author or coauthor of 14 books, an entrepreneur, and a journalist. He is the founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sandstorm Enterprises, a Boston-based firm that develops state-of-the-art computer security tools.
Michael Mahoney is Dean of the College of Engineering at California State University, Long Beach, where he is also a Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science.
Return to the Mac DevCenter.
Showing messages 1 through 13 of 13.
-
Did Apple learn anything from its past mistakes?
2002-05-21 15:55:14 spiderbytes [Reply | View]
Can we puchase OS X at a reasonable price ($200), and install it on the same hardware which we use for Win 2000 or XP?
Back in the 80s I give up waiting for the price of Macs to become reasonable, retired my II+ and switched to MSDOS. When I give up waiting for Microsoft to fix DOS I switched to Linux. In 97 I discoved that Win 95 was the 32-bit fix for DOS that I was waiting for. Since Linux still dosn't have anything to compete with where Visual Studio and COM was in 97, I have been using Windows ever since.
Now I have been using Visual Studio .NET and C# since Beta 1 in Dec 2000. I am still waiting for Apple, IBM, & Sun to learn from their past mistakes and start providing some real competition for Microsoft.
Putting Unix on top of Mac OS seems backwards to me. I would think that the right way to do it would be to put Mac OS on top of the Mach kernel, along with Unix.
Once .NET is available on Linux, there will be no reason to use Mac OS X.
Bill
-
Did Apple learn anything from its past mistakes?
2003-09-05 09:34:23 anonymous2 [Reply | View]
"Real Competition for Microsoft" Ha! Microsoft OSes are the butt end of the computing world. Everything on a Windows platform requires more than twice the work accompanied by a lot of frustration. It's a very unorganized, easy to screw everything up platform.
Development time on the Nextstep and again in OS X using Cocoa is simply a much better, more organization, well thought out & PROVEN solution.
The application stemming from Nextstep resulted in amazing technology for the time and they were doing it in months not years.
All Microsoft does is copy every other technology out there, screws it up and then charges for it. Look what they did with Java from Sun and Javascript from Netscape.
Dude, the real competition has been out there for a long time where have you been? Mac OS X has an amazing OS with fantastic technology. Compare creating movies, pictures or even programming on OS X with linux or sun or Microsoft. I think you'll come to a shocking realization you have been in the closet for some time...... -
Did Apple learn anything from its past mistakes?
2002-12-28 14:22:12 tooki [Reply | View]
"Putting Unix on top of Mac OS seems backwards to me. I would think that the right way to do it would be to put Mac OS on top of the Mach kernel, along with Unix."
Of course it seems backwards to put UNIX on top of Mac OS. That's why Apple didn't do that. OS X is a real UNIX on the Mach kernel, with a Mac-like GUI stuck on top. If you choose to run Classic (Mac OS 9 running in a virtual machine), which is something many people choose not to do, then it is running on top of Mach, not vice-versa.
tooki
-
History of Cocoa or Apple's search for a next generation OS?
2002-05-20 20:06:12 lamebrain [Reply | View]
n/t
-
Even more corrections
2002-05-17 13:08:23 jdb8167 [Reply | View]
The original shipping Mac was 128K not 64K.
The second generation was 512K.
The second & 1/2 generation was a bigger floppy and ROM update to 512KE.
I know, trivia but the text is wrong. The 512K version was a skunkworks put in against SJ wishes by the chief Mac hardware guru.
-
Copland?
2002-05-16 14:29:29 raster [Reply | View]
I thought it was Copland, not Copeland. (After the famous musical composer...)
-
PDF vs PostScript
2002-05-15 09:21:50 kapinos [Reply | View]
"Unable or unwilling to cut a deal with Adobe for Display PostScript, Apple decided to remove it from the operating system and replace it with a next-generation drawing subsystem called Quartz. (The Quartz system uses Adobe’s Portable Document Format as an interchange file format. Nevertheless, Quartz implements PDF without a line of Adobe code -- and thus without a cent of royalties due to Adobe."
...wrong conclusion again, as Quartz (which is a marketing term for Core Graphics in Mac OS X) is using PDF model (an open standard developed by Adobe Systems Inc) as opposed to PostScript (used in NextStep and then in OpenStep) due to its speed of rendering in the first place and only then due to the licensing terms (been made free by Adobe).
-
PDF vs PostScript
2002-05-16 15:23:19 rudybee [Reply | View]
No way! The licensing fees were a real issue, as every developer for YellowBox or OPENSTEP for Windows will confirm (the end customer was getting hurt by those fees there, the fee was the reason why the runtime of these frameworks for Windows was not free).
About the speed? I don't have any numbers to support my claim, but the Display PostScript is faster than Quartz. That will definitely change with future releases of OS X, but the DPS shipping with OPENSTEP/Rhapsody was highly optimized (10 years) and faster that you'd think.
Rudy
-
more corrections
2002-05-15 08:58:01 kapinos [Reply | View]
"Largely as a result of the move to Mac OS X, Apple now sells far fewer kinds of computers today than it did three years ago. "
...very wrong conclusion indeed, as three yeatrs ago (Spring of 1999) Apple had much less offerings than it does today: PowerMac G3 (aka "Blue & White"); one model of iMac (though in multiple colors); PowerBook G3; no iBook yet; no Xserve; no eMac; no Flat Pannel iMac. Even no iPod yet!
If authours meant by "three" five years ago, than again wrong conclusion, as multiple Mac models had all different motherboards then, which was very expensive and contributed considerably to Apple's financial problems in the mid-90s as everybody remembers that.
That changed with the introduction of a single model Power Machintosh G3 (platinum-colored) and single motherboard (with different options for processor speed etc) at the end of 1997. That unified motherboard strategy worked for Apple's bottom line, and the software (Mac OS) has nothing to do with that.
-
Some Corrections
2002-05-13 16:46:57 asalamy [Reply | View]
"Copeland" was actually "Copland" named after the modern composer Aaron Copland. Copland was to be step 1 of a two step plan to modernize the Mac OS - step 2 was called "Gerswin". These names were from "modern" composers in contrast to the code names of the classic Mac OS versions such as "Mozart".
Also Rhapsody was actually Gil Amelio's strategy where all applications would need to be rewritten as "yellow box" applications. "Yellow box" referred to the combination of OpenStep with Apple technologies and allowed applications to run under Rhapsody (which ran on both Apple and Intel hardware) as well as allowing applications to run under Windows(!) using libraries to be available licence free to developers.
The problem was most developers didn't want to rewrite their existing applications under "yellow box" and it was because of this that Carbon was created and announced by Steve Jobs at the following year's WWDC. "Yellow Box" was renamed Cocoa to reflect the addition of Java as a supported language.
Finally I believe that the lack of support for arrow keys in the original Macintosh (the first models had no arrow keys at all on their keyboards) was actually a directive from Steve Jobs. This was changed with the release of the Mac Plus (after Steve had left Apple).
-
Generations...
2002-05-13 09:14:29 glenmark [Reply | View]
You wrote: "The original Macintosh operating system could run just a single program at a time on a computer with 64K of ROM and 64K of RAM. (The 128K Mac was Apple’s second-generation Macintosh computer.)"
While Apple probably had internal prototypes with just 64K of RAM, the first version to market had 128K of RAM. The 512K Macintosh was the second-generation system.
was taligent already seen as dead/hopeless?