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Apple and Independent Developers
Corleone writes "We've seen a realization recently that Microsoft isn't standing still with Longhorn, and countering Longhorn has been pushed to the forefront. That is why I found the concept of Apple being the larger danger in Rhapsody in Yellow so ironic. The author skirts the scary question: would Apple porting their frameworks to Linux give them undue influence over the direction of the free operating system movement? This is after recent reports saying missing programs are the biggest thing holding Linux back on the desktop. Macromedia has interest in their tools on Linux, surely many others are too. This would seem to allow thousands of companies a simple path to the Linux market but with Apple as the gateway. If not Apple, what of Microsoft porting their engine?"
They won't even port Quicktime!
Except the biggest thing holding Linux back is that it's not easy enough for the average user that isn't particularly computer literate.
Linux needs to be easier to setup, be easier to use, and have less trouble with various devices (e.g. audio).
Vonal Declosion
Apple DOES help the open source community. Both Konqueror and FreeBSD are much improved thanks to Apple's contributions.
That CSS file that blocks ads
the linux presence in the market is an estimation. if you go on pure factual numbers from statements, Linux is still behind.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Last time I read a drunken rant by a blogger EVAR!!!!
.NET camp on over to CoCoa/Objective C.
I read and read and read...
but still don't quite get it all.
I think he's whinging about the lack of developer exodus from the wintell
Well durrr... I think it comes down to wanting to fill your pocket with something more than lint.
Not intending to troll, and I'm typing this on one of my 2 powerbooks, it's just that not many a 3rd party have gotten rich developing for Apple platforms. And when people do have a successfull product, Apple has tended to come up with their own version in house that kills the 3rd party app. On occasion, Apple has been known to be nice and just acquire said tech, but lately, they've taken no prisoners. Most the big apple apps these days are apps that used to be made by third parties. Most are rather raw at this time such as Garage Bad (Acid Wannabe) while Final Cut has slaughtered Premier.
When looking at Apples treatment of 3rd party apps and developers, their monolithic approach and the fact that in the last 5 years they've gone through a MAJOR OS change and have now migrated their processor architecture to 64-bit I'd expect most people to be keenly interested but taking a wait and see tact.
Surely, OS X is a beautiful OS and Apple puts out some sexy hardware, but with ~5% marketshare, not many are exactly looking at OS X as *the* platform to be developing for when it comes to reaching the masses and driving your sales figures.
Hopefully the G5 will catch on when they release the die-shrink to 90nm and the speed boosts to both 2.5ghz and 3.0ghz over the course of the summer. Personally, I've been waiting for that boost myself and plan on buying one when the 3ghz comes out.
But when it comes to 3rd party development for OS X desktop software? I'm not holding my breath waiting for a glut of new 3rd party apps anytime soon.
the important thing is the applications, not the underlying toolkits and frameworks
Applications are created using the underlying toolkits and frameworks. The higher the quality of these frameworks, the better the applications will be. The easier the frameworks are to develop with, more applications will be developed more quickly.
Its a chicken and egg sort of thing where the egg definately comes first.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Check out Qt (no not QuickTime). That toolkit provides an incredible amount of useful utilites and is very high quality. It runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. With a little bit of care, you can build applications that recompile to any of the aforementioned OSs.
As much as I respect Cocoa and Objective-C development on OS X, the one thing Apple really needs is a high quality C++ toolkit. Even though the benefits of Obj-C are worth it, it can be quite hard to convice developers to learn a completely different language to develop in (native language, so don't tell me Java). I'd really like to see Apple partner with Trolltech and include Qt by default in OS X and eliminate or reduce the fees for developers who target Qt/OS X.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Keep in mind that porting iTunes to win32 increased their potential userbase tenfold. Porting to linux? Pah. Yeah, they can add a number of users to their base that's even smaller than their native userbase. Sounds like a winning idea to me.
Seems to me that the article is forgetting that Apple has been, and probably will always be, a hardware company. It's certainly not going to change as long as Jobs still has influence at Apple. Any attempt to change that has failed misserably (the clone era) or died an obscure death (attempts at porting the Mac OS to x86, some of which were successful to a degree)
Even the rare bit of software that Apple has developed has been serving some other purpose, like iTunes and iTMS selling iPods. So to apple the question is going to be "What will we sell if we port the frameworks?" If it isn't overpriced hardware theres no chance in hell of it happening.
Furthermore what Apple has done with Darwin and keeping that open source has been tied down with conditions and restrictions that to barely support open source development.
Sure it would be great to see Apple throwing its weight behind *nix to form an alliance that could present a channenge to Microsoft, but in reality its never going to happen.
What it's missing is a few crucial pieces which are slowly starting to fall together
No. What is missing is the final (and most important) piece of the cross-platform idea - Windows. I'm a Mac guy, and I love Cocoa, and I've been a Linux user since 1994 and a Solaris user befor that, but I understand the realities of the world today. For a development platform like GNUStep to succeed, it has to be able to run on Windows and, and here's the kicker, act like a native Windows application.
If Apple were to throw their weight behind GNUstep ( a tough decision, but an interesting one which could potentially bode well for both Apple and the free software community ) we could have the outcome the author asks for... Apple pushing a disruptive technology based on their own frameworks into free software, and taking hold of the market.
I actually agree in this situation - the open source version, given the ability and cooperation from Apple, could flourish technically and allow cooperation between Apple and the free software community which extends past simply command line tools and support libraries, while Apple still eats its lunch on the interface and user experience side of things (in addition, just because Apple would allow third party developers to develop true cross-platform apps between itself and *nix (and, like I said earlier, Windows), there would not necessarily be a version of Final Cut Pro for Linux - you want the real Mac experience, for what Macs are really good for, you buy a Mac.
Wow, that's a long sentence.
That is indeed something that was pointed out in the article. Don't forget, however, Carbon is simply a stepping-stone API. It was created by Apple so their legacy developers wouldn't be caught out in the sands with a completely new OS and a completely new API. Apple knew that combination would be disastrous so they created a new API from scratch that was mostly source-compatible with the old one to allow for easy porting.
Carbon, however, will never be deployed on other platforms. It's a horrible, messy kludge composed of about 15 years of Macintosh API evolution plus the necessary changes to make it work on OS X. There's nothing about it that's appealing from a "beginning to code for" standpoint... it's just there for transition.
Cocoa has all that potential because it is a beautiful, clean API in a modern object-oriented language plus it already has cross-platform support in the form of GNUstep. The article decried the lack of interest in starting to code for Cocoa (and thus to create new Mac OS apps) by new developers precisely because it's only really supported on OS X and thus not attractive... I think GNUstep already proves that false to a degree and will do so further in the future.
Uh, only the Mac and X11 versions are GPL'd. They charge $1500 for the Windows version.... There are plenty of free solutions out there nowadays.
I'm surprised he didn't mention Darwin even once. Darwin, the open source core of OS X, can run on x86.
Maybe because without Aqua, Darwin is useless. It's extremely slow and has horrible device support.
It's also an up and coming userbase though. Linux is growing very quickly among the younger crowd and getting them interested in macintosh software is a good way to increase their userbase down the road.
Er, he said he was looking at GNUstep (which is L-GPL'd), and that his one reservation was that he wanted a "straight recompile." What he didn't say was his one reservation was that GNUstep was free, and he was actually hoping to spend around $1500.... ;-)
wxWidgets, by comparison, uses the L-GPL (and actually grants additional rights). Much closer in spirit to GNUstep, which he mentioned.
true, I forgot the Carbon part. And since I haven't developed anything for mac. I wouldn't have known the dash. But since they were able to port it too win32, why would it be more a pain to develop to linux. And everyone getting on my @ss bout lack of users, part of the problem is lack of Real software. OpenOffice is nice for Documents, but not html, I rather have Macromedia Dreamweaver. There are others too. I love my linux box, but it can't do everything out of the box, requires major tweaking to get DVD's to run, or to burn a decent CD. We need more companies to Develop.
SimonTek
Microsoft realized early on that in order for their platform to dominate, they MUST recruit as many third-party developers as possible. This is one of the main reasons, if not THE main reason, that Windows acquired its huge desktop market share. (make fun of Steve Ballmer for his "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" monkey dance if you want, but that's why he's a billionaire). Microsoft bends over backwards to help developers. They give away excellent development tools with excellent documentation and support, just so that you'll write Windows programs. They nearly kill themselves checking backwards compatibility with every Windows release, just to make sure your poorly-written Windows program doesn't break when Windows XP comes out.
.NET and Java are attracting developers, and Cocoa is not.
Apple seems to care about its users somewhat, but not at all about its developers. There just isn't the same level of outreach nor the same "developers come first" attitude as Microsoft. And not nearly as much care about compatibility. e.g. how many OSX programs broke with the OSX 1.2 and 1.3 updates?
Both companies offer excellent APIs that are specific to their platforms (e.g. DirectX on Windows and Cocoa on Mac). But Microsoft has an advantage here. If you write your program to use Windows-exclusive APIs, you still have 90% of the potential market. But if you use Apple-specific APIs, you cut yourself down to 10%. THAT is why
Any rational desktop software company will develop for Windows first, and then, if it seems worthwhile, they'll make a Mac port. There is a small market for Mac-only stuff but I don't think it's a reasonable business strategy to support ONLY the Mac. For one thing, Apple has a habit of shipping free products by surprise that demolish the market for an established Mac vendor. (how'd you like to be a Mac-only calendar/email application developer the day after iCal and Mail came out? or MetroWerks' Mac team after Xcode?). This is outright developer-hostile behavior.
...would like to have a Mac:
1. You open the box, plug it in, use it. End of story,
2. I know that it's built on *BSD,
3. It's not Windows.
Why I don't have a Mac:
1. Too expensive, can't afford it.
Why I would like to be using Linux:
1. It's free,
2. It's not MS Windows (therefore stable and secure).
Why I don't use Linux:
1. My must-have applications won't run on it (or at least not without some geek-tweak),
2. Experienced Linux users seem to be more interested in pissing-contests than helping new users.
Why I wish I didn't have to use MS Windows:
1. It sucks, it really does, no matter what MCSEs might shriek in its defence. I'm so sick of having to dance naked in the virus and spyware minefield every time I boot it up.
Why I use MS Windows:
1. What else am I gonna use? Refer previous sections.
When Apple drops their prices then I'll buy a Mac; or when Linux developers stop trying to be so damn 133t and focus on user-friendliness; and the must-use applications (or equivalents) I need become available for that OS, I'll give Linux another try.
You can sneer at me and all the others like me for being n00b luser whatevers (and most of you apparently think you have to), but not everybody has the free time necessary to learn all the arcane rules of the High Priest's OS.
I develop with Cocoa on OS X, and while it's is remarkably easy to program in once you're used to it, it's more than a little, shall we say, messy.
The classes contain endless numbers of "convenience" functions that don't really belong where they are. Witness that the STRING class has methods like stringByAppendingPathComponent, and similar other functions that should be in a separate class for paths. Meanwhile, Attributed strings do not respond to any of the standard string methods, although they do respond to methods to do things like load RTF files.
The problem is that Cocoa is not straightforward enough to be easy to program in without an intimate familiarity with the API. It's just too different from anything else out there. Now that I'm used to programming in it, I can develop an application faster than I ever could with windows APIs, but the learning curve makes it difficult.
The other thing about Cocoa, which the article doesn't quite get to saying explicitly, is that the design of the API itself actually makes it very difficult to get apps to the mac from other platforms.
Cocoa is designed to be easy for porting applications to other platforms. But you can't port applications to other platforms because Cocoa isn't available for other platforms. What Apple needs for their existing strategy to work is an API that is easy to port existing programs to. They sort of have this with carbon (hence why most applications that get ported from windows are written using carbon APIs), but they don't take advantage of a lot of features (like system services, and automatic spell checking) that only work with Cocoa programs.
It would be nice if Apple would port their APIs (or at least support something like GNUStep), but if they won't, then they need to make their "strong" API something that can easily be ported to. There are oddities in Cocoa that make incorporating code from anywhere else almost impossible.
In short, Apple's programming tools and their corporate strategy are incompatible. The article frames this as a problem with Apple's strategy, but it could just as easily be seen as the tools not fit for the job. Apple started out with Rhapsody to try and make the mac the premier program for development but somewhere in between changed their focus to getting existing software to the mac. Unfortunately, they didn't change the tools to match.
How exactly does Apple owe any of its success to Linux? Steve Jobs was in the Unix market before Linux was even a glimmer in Mr. Torvald's eye. Also , let's not forget Apple's previous Unix, AUX, or the fact that OSX IS BSD! The do however owe alot to the Opensource community. (Apache, FreeBSD, GNU, etc.)
Objective-C literally takes about 5 minutes to learn.
Well, I wouldn't go quite that far... When I've presented cocoa intro classes, I've generally covered the basics of Objective-C in a one-hour lecture.
My experience in learning Objective-C was that it took me about a day to be productive with it, and within a month I was an Obj-C language lawyer. Most people I've seen taking up Obj-C for the first time have a pretty good handle on it in about three days.
As for GNUStep, I'd say it's a commendable effort, but an unfunded volunteer project is always going to have difficulty tracking an API that a Fortune 500 company has under active development.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Firstly, that blog was intense. Bordering, due to it's length, on the edge of unreadability, it was fascinating-not due to it's indepth-ness, but that it lightly touched on so many interrelated threads. (the wideness of the wide is the "depth" of the superficial)
He dared mention Rhapsody, for the love of gawd, HE DARED to MENTION it. Dazed,confused and oft bitterly disilussioned developers and dreamers bitten once by that dream never really have recovered- I loved her, she was so beautiful, but she was a....lie. Has enough time passed to heal the wounds of betrayal, could it be her beauty was just premature(ie. not 16 yet)
Rhapsody promised more than any other computing project worth mentioning in the last 20 years. It was friggin incredible. The entire landscape of desktop computing would be markedly different today if Rhapsody had ever materialized. But no. Apple killed it, killed the best project that they ever actually came up with.
The author of the blog appears to not have a clue about Linux-land. Neither did he mention GNUstep, nor did he acknowledge what is now being developed at X.org-ie.cairo+opengl+xdamages+xfixes+xcomposite. in other words the tech that will bring the GUI desktop of the Linux world into the 21st century-farther along that trajectory in fact than either Acqua or Longhorn.
If Apple would just open up their API's new apps could be developed for a combined market-Apple + Linux. Now is the time to overcome the desire for attaining windows compatibility-if app developers could count on a market of Apple and Linux users this would push both Apple and Linux beyond the effects of the chicken-egg dilemna which both have been struggling with
The propietary parts of Aqua are being realized now, in an opensource form, in cairo, which is in a state of very active development. If the GNUstep coders use cairo as the basis of their new developments they finally have an answer to the display postcript issues which have dogged them.There is already a great deal of convergence going on between the MACOSX and Linux world-if nothing more than the GNU utilities which compose our common toolkits.
Now is the time for Apple to heal wounds with the development community. They should open up their API's, provide exact documentation as to the point where cocoa and OpenStep meet and where the specific differences lie and they should support GNUstep as the basis for developing cross platform apps. With the developments at X.org ongoing GNUstep could be made very viable for such purposes in short order,ie GNUstep + cairo >= cocoa
I'm sure this is all just pipe-dream stuff, but combining the markets for Apple and desktop Linux just make sense for both Apple and Linux users....
Now someone with more of a clue about these issues-go ahead shoot this idea down...
3% market share: Yes, if we repeat it enough then it must be true.
Developers don't trust Apple or Jobs: I'll admit developers might be squirmish due to past history, but the point of the article was getting NEW developers people who have yet to work with Apple and can't develop any of these distrusts.
Too Many APIs: Only an idiot would claim this as a problem. If you think everything is held together with duct tape you need to be introduced to a little document called SystemOverview.pdf trust me OS X is held together by much more sophisticated glues than duct tape. If the glue that held OS C together was duct tape, them that which holds Linux together would be happy thoughts and good wishes, Almost all those APIs interact with each other of one relies on the other. There is no MacOS API, nor NeXTStep, only Carbon and Cocoa.
As for appliances, that same argument must hold for Compaq/HP then as they now sell A LOT more types of media players than computers.
Thanks again for trolling.
-"I'm one of those Mac people that will break a bottle on the bar and hold it to your throat for bad-mouthing my system"
I love all this discussion about GNUstep and such. Personally I'm partial to WindowMaker which I believe is or can be a part of GNUstep. Not sure, it's early
But this talk of Microsoft porting their framework to Linux... Why? Seriously... Why? I just don't see why anyone with an eye on technical factors give this any consideration at all.
It's Over because Linux and Apple have clearly broken the beach heads to Fortress Microsoft and now it's time to prepare for their big defensive resistence push as we eat their market share and profit margins.
What got me to originally consider Linux wasn't the interoperability or ease of use or feature rich desktops. It was the freedom from Microsoft and the freedom from Corporate PHB's trying to run the show. Do you have any idea how much Marketing Hype is integrated into every software manual?
What's going to keep me there is the same thing. Microsoft could release Office XP for Linux tomorrow morning in both RPM and DEB packages and I simply would not touch it. Too my Hype and too many Hooks to use safely. So if Microsoft isn't really involved in the article, don't give them any airtime. Their current direction shows they are Loosers. If they can honestly change their tune then maybe the won't be Loosers.
And don't give me that "Corporations have to make money and that's all Microsoft does" crap. RedHat and SuSE makes money and they haven't been convicted multiple times in multiple countries.
It's also an up and coming userbase though. Linux is growing very quickly among the younger crowd and getting them interested in macintosh software is a good way to increase their userbase down the road.
It's also a "down-with-IP", "information wants to be free", "I don't want to pay for watching this movie", "I don't want to pay for this song", "down with even the most liberal forms of DRM" userbase.
I imagine people aren't picking up ObjC because of this syntactical buggery. In fact, I'd wager that, as far as standard OOP stuff goes, C++ is easier to learn than ObjC for the existing C programmer preciesly because the syntax doesn't cause cognitive dysentary. FWIW, I really wanted to be an ObjC supporter, but the friggin' syntax pisses me off, and there are some features of C++ that are incredibly useful (i.e. templates) which have no counterpart in ObjC.
I suspect Apple doesn't want to give *nix users a reason to not switch to Apple. They are forced to support QT on windows because if they don't, it won't stay relevent.
Plus, I believe several companies license QT from Apple for use on embedded systems running Linux, so porting it is not cost prohibitive.
But who gives a "flying fuck" anyway? I believe the Xine developers already reverse-engineered the codec and have a native version for Linux. Oh, right... Patents... *sigh*
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Oddly enough, I reckon the disruptive technology on Mac OS X won't come from Apple - it will be C# and Mono... more specifically the PPC JIT. Give it another year and you'll start noticing quite a few .NET apps running on Mac OS X.
.NET framework blurs the boundary between client and server, or native app vs. sandboxed web app. vs ASP.NET web pages. Furthermore the C# developer base is growing rapidly.
Cocoa is a great technology, but it isn't agile enough. By that I mean that it's more monolithic application/client oriented, wheras the
Not this old sock again.
Macs are pretty competitively priced for the hardware and software that you get.
Sure, they can't compete with Dell for the "3Ghz PC with 17" TFT for $400! Theres nothing wrong with it, honest! We didn't use the cheapest, crappiest parts we could find to offset the cost of the CPU and LCD panel, really!"
You'll be hard pressed to find a better value laptop than an iBook (or even a Powerbook, excluding the 17" which is a bit overkill).
The dekstops vary more, but an eMac is as close as you'll get to budget - and it's pretty good value for money.
With OS-X being basically BSD, Their wouldn't be much work to do so.
Why do clueless people continue to state this idiotic premise? I'm not even going to correct it, I just want to say how displeased I am to see it showing up every time Apple is mentioned. To people who will comment in the next Apple article: get a clue, and don't post this stupid thing again!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
yes it does. when you count up the DOCUMENTED deployments of Linux, Macs are still ahead of them.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
First thing, Apple already has an open source link, FreeBSD, BSD whichever one. Why would it port itself to Linux when most things will compile with very little or no changes. The only thing that is a problem is binary releases. But just give the source and you needn't worry about those things. Apple has no need to switch to linux. Why switch from Unix to a Unix clone?
Microsoft, bring themselves to Linux, I highly doubt that. Microsoft might make a move on the PPC architechture. But this is speculation because of the XBOX 2 hardware specs include PPC 970 derivatives, if not actual 970's. But that is just speculation.
With ObjC, you're stuck with that @interface and [object message] crap, no matter what.
Let me see if I understand you. You're saying that you dislike Objective C because... the @ character is unattractive to you? What?
I write in my journal
The idea of write-once-compile-anywhere is a pipedream. We've all known this since the early 1990's when we saw the failure of projects like Java AWT.
If you use a cross-platform GUI framework, you're going to produce substandard applications. That's pretty much the end of that.
So the user interface will have to be native for each target platform. That's fine. If you use the model-view-controller paradigm, the largest fraction of your application code can remain unchanged across platforms; only the view, the UI, needs to change.
I write in my journal
Offtopic, but couldn't they have possibly come up with a better name than "HIView?"
Second, I still play games from Loki that are 5 years old, on a fully up-to-date Gentoo box. I have never had a problem with binary compatability with any commercial binary-only Linux program. IBM, Sun, Loki, CodeWeavers, Garage-Games, Linux Games Publishing, ID, Epic, Ryan "Icculus" Gordon etc., etc. all ship binary-only software in a generic manner that works fine on all the major distros. Fuck, I'm a goddam idiot, and I have put together generic, binary packages for Linux that have had no problems working across all major distros.
You are completely full of shit. Pure, unadulterated, goddam fucking bullshit.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
That is patently ridiculous. Apple supports QT on Windows. They have free downloads for Windows. It wouldn't cost any more to have free downloads for a couple *nixes.
Wha?
You are saying that developing from the ground up a port of a very complicated and optimized set of libraries and GUI applications onto a platform which not only does Apple have zero infrastructure for in terms of personell which know how to develop for it, not only is this platform the single most diverse in terms of hardware and software configurations in the world, but also you can't assume the presence of a usable GUI widget toolkit and there isn't even really a single totally universally accepted method of sound playback... would be something that would be zero cost to Apple?
I'm sorry... it would be lovely to have QuickTime on Linux. And there is no really justified reason why Apple doesn't just let the MPlayer people go under NDA and add support for the unsupported quicktime codecs, or provide those Xine people you mentioned with a limited license to use the relevant patents on UNIX. But the fact is that porting quicktime itself to UNIX in any form would be an absolutely huge undertaking. Did you notice how many *months* it took them just to port iTunes to Windows? And look at all the problems they've had with getting QT/iTunes to act like a "normal" Windows application (file associations, minimize to taskbar, etc). Just think of how much trouble they'd have trying to get Quicktime, a closed-source app, to be a good userland "citizen" on UNIX, which is not merely slightly different from MacOS as Windows is, but relatively totally alien?
Yeah, Real managed UNIX ports, but RealPlayer is at least an order of magnitude less complexity than the complicated multimedia management API that is QuickTime, and Real doesn't have to drag around a significant portion of their operating system API with them every time they port. QuickTime is much more complicated than just "open up a movie and play it".
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Mindshare doesn't pay the bills. For example, Java has an enormous amount of mindshare, but it's not translating into massive revenues to Sun.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
We've been running Macs in the family exclusively for over two years. None of us have ever had a crash. Not a one. I think it's the language. Sure, there's more, but this discussion of desktops sidesteps the issue of languages.
C is a great language. Obj-C proves that by its deferential treatment. Apple say you can learn Obj-C in two hours. Obj-C builds on Smalltalk.
C++ builds on Simula. As does Smalltalk. But Alan Kay doesn't exactly like C++, and he's the one invented both Smalltalk and the term object orientation. So that should give you a clue.
C++ is incredibly complex. It puts ordinary programming grunts in a tailspin. It doesn't even have dynamic binding. It's the quintessential simple idea that gets hairy and tangled by the time it's half done. Without a doubt C++ is responsible for most of the woes in software development today.
Obj-C makes it all simple again. The precise clear relationships you had in C, that were somewhat lost when you needed 150% more code because you needed a GUI, are back again. It's clear, it's clean, and it's rugged. NeXTSTEP has a history interwoven with Obj-C, and Apple and NeXT made additions to the language, and Interface Builder marks the first and only time these technologies have come together, but Obj-C can stand in its own right.
In short, I don't think it's relevant to port a desktop to Linux. I don't think it's a good idea, and I don't think it will give Apple any market benefits.
But the entire world would benefit if they got the language Obj-C more out in front.
I really don't think this rant nor your rant regarding the G5 were very well thought through. I consider it a low for you as there's times when you've got some fairly insightful rants about various topics. The squandered G5 rant was not one of them.
Your redux falls into the same logical traps as your original rant. You assume that a multi-platform API will cause developers to run out and buy Macs to do their development on. This simply does not follow. If the API is cross platform as OpenStep was there is little preventing a developer from firing up vi/emacs/pico/Notepad and grabbing the header files they need to write some code. I don't think you'd expect Java developers to go drop money on a Sun workstation when they can do it just as well at home on their $699 Windows or Linux PC. XCode isn't really enough to draw developers by the thousands to the Mac. You'd see a quick and dirty KDevelop or GBuilder fork to handle Cocoa development before you saw anyone buying a Mac to do it.
Both your rant and Redux fail to explain exactly what sort of functionality you'd expect out of the new Yellow Box. AppKit is nice but contains very little in the way of advanced functionality on its own. NSSound might be a decent class for playing simple audio files in an app but it doesn't hold a candle to the classes in CoreAudio. As such Apple would need to port CoreAudio to make Yellow Box a viable system to write audio editing/playback applications on. If they didn't do so the app's developer would need to write their own framework and bundle it with their app. They would need to put all that extra work into building their own frameworks when they could have just gone the Win32 route and been able to use DirectSound.
You point as WebObjects as if it were the best example of a Yellow Box application available. WO is a viable Yellow Box "application" because it is built mostly of its own utility frameworks. WebObjects is an entire set of frameworks on its own, it just uses Yellow Box for a base system to run on. It could have very well been written to sit on top of POSIX or Win32. WebObjects doesn't rely on system frameworks in the same way say iChat AV or OmniWeb do. Without Quicktime iChat wouldn't be such a fancy application. Without WebKit OmniWeb 4.5 and up wouldn't be doing a whole lot of anything.
You're also missing the small issue of why exactly developers would even bother with Cocoa/YB when they've got existing codebases with hundreds and thousands of man-hours invested into them. If Linux and MacOS aren't large enough blips on a developer's radars right now to garner any interest having Cocoa available isn't going to phase them. I don't know many developers that like tossing themselves into new APIs all of the time. All APIs and implementations have quirks, successful developers have learned to recognize and work around such quirks. Version 1.0 of SomeApp might have sucked but version 3.4 is really sweet because the developers are familiar with the target platform. Version 1.0 of SomeCocoaApp will likely suck and be extremely expensive to develop. It won't matter that the app has a 4% larger number of potential buyers if it sucks.
In all of your ranting you entirely ignored a fairly large group of developers. Not all developers write in C++ and ship their products in a box with brightly colored packaging. Macs have turned into excellent systems for internet/intranet development. Out of the box a Mac running OSX has a copy of Apache, Perl, PHP, and Java. With a few quick terminal commands it will have MySQL up and running. Portable Unix systems with warranties and hardware support that run all of the services and programs the servers in the NOC run; who the hell do you think bought the millions of laptops Apple sold last year? Macs can run all of the backend software the servers are running along with the front end apps like Dreamweaver and GoLive the design department is running.
Rhapsody was a much better idea in 1996 than it is in 2004. When Rhapsody was first floated Windows de
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.