Steve Troughton-Smith writes for highcaffeinecontent.com, “With the rapidly-upcoming introduction of UIKit apps to the Mac, I’ve been reminiscing on Twitter quite a bit about Apple’s transition to Mac OS X, and just how NEXTSTEP and Mac OS found common ground despite being two very different OSes both architecturally and from a design standpoint.”
“For Mac OS X to actually work as a successor to Mac OS for Apple’s customers, they were going to have to gut it and start over,” Troughton-Smith writes. “The solution? Apple was going to port the legacy Mac OS toolbox into a new compatibility library, called Carbon, and make it the linchpin of the consumer Mac OS X experience.”
“Apple needed to show developers that Carbon was going to be a real and valid way forward, not just a temporary stopgap, so they committed to using Carbon for the Mac OS X Finder,” Troughton-Smith writes. “The Carbon version of Finder was introduced in Mac OS X Developer Preview 2, before Aqua was revealed; it acted a bit more like NeXT’s, in that it had a single root window (File Viewer) that had a toolbar and the column view, but secondary windows did not. At this stage, Apple didn’t quite know what to do with the systemwide toolbars it had inherited from NEXTSTEP.”
“Mac OS X shipped to consumers in 2001,” Troughton-Smith writes. “It had taken Apple four years to find the new ‘Mac-like’, and this is the template Mac OS X has followed ever since. Here we are, eighteen years later, and all of the elements of the Mac OS X UI are still recognizable today. So much of what we think of the Mac experience today came from NEXTSTEP, not Mac OS at all. AppKit, toolbars, Services, tooltips, multi-column table views, font & color pickers, the idea of the Dock, application bundles, installer packages, a Home folder, multiple users; you might even be hard-pressed to find a Carbon app in your Applications folder today (and Apple has announced that they won’t even run in the next version of macOS).”
“I’m sure we will have great, genre-defining apps from both UIKit and AppKit on the Mac. With Carbon, we had iTunes, Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Final Cut Pro. Eighteen years on, Carbon is finally reaching its end date, and the transition of all these apps to Cocoa/AppKit is complete. If AppKit still has eighteen years left ahead of it, I think the Mac will be just fine,” Troughton-Smith writes. “Both classic Mac OS and NEXTSTEP came to an end; the Mac did not.”
Read much more, and see all of the screenshots, in the full article – very highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The ever-evolving Mac, as long as it retains its “Mac-ness,” is indomitable.
Yes, get ready for some growing pains that run the gamut all the way up to severe from non-Mac developers bringing their wares to the Mac for the first time. But, this’ll be fun – we promise! The Mac is all about experimenting and trying new things and, anyway, over time, it’ll all shake out and we’ll be back to quality apps that look, act and work as longtime Mac users expect. — MacDailyNews, May 8, 2019
Think code convergence (more so than today) with UI modifications per device. A unified underlying codebase for Intel, Apple A-series, and, in Apple’s labs, likely other chips, too (just in case). This would allow for a single App Store for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users that features a mix of apps: Some that are touch-only, some that are Mac-only, and some that are universal (can run on both traditional notebooks and desktops as well as on multi-touch computers like iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and – pretty please, Apple – Apple TV). Don’t be surprised to see Apple A-series-powered Macs, either. — MacDailyNews Take, January 9, 2014
Related articles:
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Apple’s Project Marzipan could mean big things for the future of the Macintosh – February 20, 2019
Apple’s Project Marzipan targeted to combine iPhone, iPad and Mac apps by 2021 – February 20, 2019
An enterprise take on Apple’s ‘Project Marzipan’ – January 11, 2019
Apple’s initial macOS Mojave Marzipan apps are ugly ducklings – September 25, 2018
Marzipan in Mojave: Porting developer iOS apps to macOS – June 13, 2018
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Craig Federighi doesn’t see a touchscreen Mac in the future – June 6, 2018
Apple’s Craig Federighi details how iOS apps will run on Macs – June 5, 2018
How Apple might approach an ARM-based Mac – May 30, 2018
Will the 2019 Mac Pro be powered by an Apple ARM-based chip? – April 6, 2018
Project Marzipan: Can Apple succeed where Microsoft failed? – December 21, 2017
Apple is working to unite iOS and macOS; will they standardize their chip platform next? – December 21, 2017
Why Apple would want to unify iOS and Mac apps in 2018 – December 20, 2017
Apple to provide tool for developers build cross-platform apps that run on iOS and macOS in 2018 – December 20, 2017
The once and future OS for Apple – December 8, 2017
Apple, a semiconductor superpower in the making, looks to build their own ARM-based processors for Macs – September 29, 2017
On the future of Apple’s Macintosh – February 6, 2017
Apple’s Craig Federighi explains why there is no touchscreen Mac – November 1, 2016
If the Apple of today was managing the OS 9–X transition, they wouldn’t have bothered with Carbon or Classic — preferring to break compatibility with legacy applications and expecting developers to start from scratch in Cocoa. Machines sold before the release of Mac OS X would not get the OS, and those that shipped after would not be able to boot Mac OS 9.
Macs haven’t been “Mac like” since OS 9. I remember when you could simply drag the system folder from one disk to another and reliably have a new boot drive. Error messages actually told you useful things that helped you solve the problem. We used to laugh at Windows users over “The disk that i’m showing on your desktop can’t be found.” I just got that error yesterday.
…oh yes, and list view actually showed you the names of files without truncating them into uselessness. And if you spelled a file’s name correctly, it would appear in a “find” search, instead of having half your hard drive show up for everything.
Remember when all files had comment windows in “get info”?
Remember when Quicktime was the only player we needed because it played everything that existed perfectly?
Remember saving files as a template?
Remember when programs could almost always read each others files because there were a small set of universal file formats?
Remember when anything you could type was a valid file name?
Remember when you could buy a reasonably-priced Mac that was faster then anything Intel had to offer, (G3 233Mhz) had three slots, and user replaceable ram, hard drive, CD and monitor, all with standard parts?