Reader Mail: Everything that's old is new again
StarManta writes: I was looking at a friend's NeXTSTEP computer, and when I found interface builder, i laughed out loud - it hasn't changed a bit in 12 years! I thought you might be interested. (Note: If you decide to post this shot, please rehost - my poor DSL can only take so many hits) :-)
Screen caps are always fun, especially retro. It looks like he's taken a NeXT screenshot and superimposed a few screenshots of some correlating Mac OS 10.2 windows on top of it to give a better idea of how similar things are. I will say I've been a little surprised at some of the mail expressing surprise at the similarities between NeXT and OS X.
You know, back in the MacWorld 2005 writeup I mentioned how there used to be a NeXT app called Pages, and did a little wondering as to whether or not this was simply the old app given new wings. Feel free to look at the screenshot of the old Pages.app and decide for yourself...
I also said:
...the thing that sticks out at me the most is "Where is the app called Tables?".
Now, most just took that to mean "Where is the spreadsheet app?", but I was actually referring to a very old NeXT app called Tables, which again you can check out an old screenshot of. I'm pretty sure 'Chess' will look familiar, and it's always fun to see how OmniWeb has changed over 3 version numbers.
If those made you smile, Eric Levenez has a whole bunch of old NeXTSTEP screenshots broken out into different categories of apps that came with NeXT, just click the link and scroll down to "Les applications NeXTSTEP". Chances are you'll see some other things you recognize now in OS X. If you want to see some other snaps on the site that were apps that existed for NeXTSTEP, like OmniWeb or Pages, those are there too.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 31, 2005, at 12:28 PM
Comments (16)
Posted by: Rory at January 31, 2005 03:27 PM
<rant>What's annoying from a developers perspective is that Interface Builder is getting so long in the tooth. It lacks some really necessary basic features and still requires that you manually inform it of any changes to your classes made in Xcode or vice versa. It doesn't provide any features to deal with maintaining localised nib files, it has spotty support for contextual menus, and generally makes editing complex component layouts (especially nested layouts) a complete nightmare. A lot of work which should be doable in a few clicks ends up having to be done programatically, which is time consuming to say the least and adds the potential for more bugs.</rant>
Posted by: vastheman at January 31, 2005 05:16 PM
The command-line nibtool helps a lot when doing localisations. But it would be nice if IB did it by itself.
Posted by: Mike at January 31, 2005 07:04 PM
I noticed all of this stuff when I watched that Steve Jobs' NeXT privew video. It was crazy, the Dock, Pages, Mail, even the networking.
Posted by: Carl at January 31, 2005 10:33 PM
And that part where Jobs uses the NeXToonz Music Store to buy music that he syncs onto his nPod?… The *exact same*.
Posted by: Jon H at January 31, 2005 10:46 PM
What's funny is reading comments over at the Slashdot thread about the 3.0 demo video, where people are vehemently denying that OS X is anything like an "OpenStep 5.0" or 6.0.
Posted by: Jon H at January 31, 2005 10:55 PM
Rory writes: "and generally makes editing complex component layouts (especially nested layouts) a complete nightmare"
Have you tried the hierarchical outline view of the nib? It makes some things a bit easier. Toggling the disclosure triangle for a window reveals its child, the content view. Toggling its disclosure triangle reveals its children. Etc. You can also view an object's outlet and target connections in this view. (Lines are drawn from the selected object to the connected objects.)
In the Instances tab, it's the lower of the two little buttons above the scrollbar. The top one (with the squares) toggles the icon view of the nib contents, the bottom one (with the lines) toggles the outline view.
All that said, yeah, it could use some work. I find containment to be generally annoying in IDEs. It didn't seem much better in JBuilder or Visual Studio.
Posted by: sevilla at February 1, 2005 12:21 PM
He has framemaker linked! I was crushed that framemaker was discontinued for OS X. Is there any chance of them refreshing the NEXT version since it is cocoa?
Posted by: M at February 1, 2005 01:43 PM
I played with IB a little when OS X came out just because it was included. Obviously I don't know how to use it properly and am doing something wrong, all I can get it to do is crash like Bomb.app.
I know that *I don't know how to use it* and if I DID, then it could do something useful and since I don't it's no surprise it doesn't do anything useful for me but - I'm just a little bemused that I can crash_it_by_dragging_stuff_around. (I'm more bemused by the feature gaps in leading development tools. The 'Huh?, the software used by the people who write software is this out-of-date and/or badly designed?' rxn when I read about things like the lack of integration between IB and XCode mentioned above by Rory. Weird, the people who write software that's supposed to help the rest of us do stuff more easily - can't see how antiquated their own tools are and write some better ones?)
Posted by: Jon H at February 1, 2005 03:49 PM
"Is there any chance of them refreshing the NEXT version since it is cocoa?"
Framemaker isn't really Cocoa. It's NeXTSTEP, which was a slightly less object-oriented version. To wit, where Cocoa has String objects, NeXTSTEP relied on old fashioned primitive character arrays, just like regular C.
The relationship is:
NeXTSTEP API
There are scripts to convert NeXTSTEP code to OpenStep code, which could then be updated to Cocoa, but it's still non-trivial. And Framemaker is probably some VERY old NeXTSTEP code, which the scripts might choke on.
Posted by: Rory at February 1, 2005 06:13 PM
Jon H: "Have you tried the hierarchical outline view of the nib? It makes some things a bit easier. Toggling the disclosure triangle for a window reveals its child, the content view. Toggling its disclosure triangle reveals its children."
Yep I've never really found this very useful, especially since it only identifies each item by its class so you get a long list of NSButtons, NSViews etc. so you have to click through each one to find out which item you're dealing with.
I was talking more about dealing with laying out lots of components (packing/unpacking nested views etc.) rather than accessing the individual bits and pieces.
Posted by: Jon H at February 2, 2005 05:09 PM
One thing I've noticed is that Apple doesn't seem to be making any attempt to encourage developers to write and market IB palettes.
Back in the NeXTSTEP 3.0 era, they had an "Objectware" catalog, which featured third-party palettes. Some of those have been obviated by NSFormatters - some products were fields that handled data types such as money, dates, etc. Another palette I remember had IBM 3270 terminal emulator you could drop into your application. (I'm not sure what you could *do* with it, but it was there.)
It'd be a good thing if Apple started encouraging that now.
Posted by: Oliver at February 3, 2005 04:43 AM
Well, Quantrix, another Lighthouse/NeXTStep App is alive too, it seems, see www.quantrix.com
Posted by: Jon H at February 3, 2005 02:22 PM
Some other programs with direct NeXT roots are Mesa, currently from P&L Systems (a spreadsheet), and the two progeny of the old NeXTSTEP application "Notebook": NoteTaker from AquaMinds and Notebook from Circus Ponies. The two guys who worked on the NeXT app each started their own company and did their own Mac version.
Posted by: Jonathan I. at February 3, 2005 07:03 PM
Oliver,
Yes, Quantrix is alive, but it costs $1000 and is nowadays written in Java. It is one of the better Java applications I have tested on OS X, but the price was a bit too steep for me. I'd really like to find a nice native little spreadsheet for OS X. None found :(
Posted by: chad at March 25, 2005 01:30 PM
I apologize to everone I didn't mean to post that last message I was playing around and I thought I was off line. I really am sorry for the screw up.
Yesterday I saw an intro to writing Apps in Gnustep and every step can be reproduced in Xcode. So they not look the same - they even behave the same.
b4n