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Apple and Independent Developers

Posted by michael on from the iDevelopers dept.

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?"

8 of 395 comments (clear)

  1. linux can learn alot from apple by abandonment · · Score: 5, Interesting

    this is a good thing, not a bad thing.

    seriously, linux is already a larger presence than apple in the market, there are major players that have just entered, and haven't even begun to reach their full capacity (novell in particular) and in general - linux could definitely learn a thing or two from apple, particularly in the interface and ease of use department.

    i don't see how apple could become any more of a threat than it is currently, and if anything, it becomes a powerful marketing force to help promote linux/opensource in general - we want them on our side after all...

    --
    Gekido's Lair
  2. Apple frameworks on Linux would be excellent by vijayiyer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am looking to write some software for a project of mine. Being a Mac user, I will write a Mac version. Understanding market realities, I will have to write a Windows version. I'd love to have a Linux version which would be a straight recompile, but that's not possible yet. I'm aware of and considering GNUStep, but I really would like a straight recompile. Apple hardware would likely sell itself if it didn't have fewer available software titles, and having excellent cross-platform development tools would result in greater software availability.

  3. Re:Yeah by the_2nd_coming · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Linux, if it wants to gain more share int he desktops, needs to become much more froendly with the Digital cameras, DV cameras, and scaners.

    it then needs high quality photo apps and Video editing apps.

    after that, it needs high quality DVD authoring apps.

    all of these apps need to work together smoothly and there needs to be a workflow the exists between them so you can export from one into the other from each app. oh and fix the GIMP... maybe par it down and use it as a base for the photo application, get a red-eye, touch-up and enhance, plus a few other simple things going. then get the app set up so you can upload to clubphoto and snapfish, etc.

    if you make the consumer applications for making bad home videos, touching up and ordering bad home photos, and collecting music files, all in an nice integrated workflow, then consumers will come.

    --



    I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
  4. Cocoa for Windows exists by goMac2500 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When OS X originally was announced, it wasn't called OS X at all, it was called Rhapsody. Carbon didn't exist under it, it was pure Cocoa. The plan called for the following 1) Rhapsody for Mac: a full fledged Rhapsody OS for Mac, 2) Rhapsody for x86, a full fledged OS for x86, 3) Yellow Box for Mac OS, a layer to run Cocoa programs under OS 9, and 4) Yellow Box for Windows, a layer to run Cocoa apps under Windows. Sadly Apple morphed Rhapsody into OS X, killing all the other versions except for the Mac version. These days you can still find Rhapsody x86 on some peer to peer servers.

    1. Re:Cocoa for Windows exists by necro2607 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Indeed, I just recently installed and ran Rhapsody on an x86 system of mine. The networking didn't work properly (due to lack of a proper driver), but it was kind of cool, and I suppose in some way ironic, to have an Apple OS running on an Intel processor... :)

      It was interesting, but it felt kind of awkward with the NeXT influence just kind of thrown in there, because it didn't really fit in with the Mac OS interface.

      You can definitely see how Rhapsody became Mac OS X, as Rhapsody was based upon the Mach kernel just like Rhapsody, and NeXT before it. I think one place where Apple made a large change is when they decided to have the UNIX side further integrated into the Mac OS itself, creating a closer-knit combination of the two, rather than having them so seperate and awkward-feeling as it was with Rhapsody.

      Of course, you can see that many NeXT and Rhapsody elements survived, like the layout of the File Manager which is almost identical in OS X to what was in Rhapsody and NeXT.

      For some screenshots go here or here.

      Also, here's something pretty interesting: screenshots of Mac OS X server before the Aqua GUI was added, still existant on the Apple website!

  5. Re:What about GNUstep? by __aavhli5779 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Objective-C literally takes about 5 minutes to learn.

    It adds a few keywords to C (it's in the single-digits, I believe) and one syntactic structure.

    The idea that people aren't picking up Objective-C because they don't want to learn another language is preposterous. They're not picking it up because the only complete platform to develop with it is Apple's Cocoa, and that's just not large enough of a platform to be worthwhile to a lot of development houses. Once GNUstep is up to par (in my opinion it already is if you're willing to be a hacker, but that's obviously not true for most) I think exactly that raison-d'etre will be delivered.

  6. That's not entirely true by fdobbie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Carbon is emphatically *NOT* a stepping-stone API.

    Apple continues to improve and evolve the Carbon API, dropping a lot of their legacy cruft and encouraging developers to move their applications forwards. While it does ease porting, if you just do the minimum so your old apps compile and run on OS X, you do not really have a Mac OS X application - it probably won't look and feel completely right.

    Carbon also works completely differently under the hood. As time goes on, Apple exposes these improvements through entirely new API, for example the HIView stuff that appeared in 10.2. Things like QuickDraw are largely going away for a lot of uses, with more modern alternatives like Quartz 2D or OpenGL recommended depending on your needs.

    It's also important to note that Cocoa is actually implemented using Carbon in some cases, and we're starting to see the reverse also be true.

    You can't say that Carbon, at its heart, is a "horrible, messy kludge". It's actually a fully-featured modern procedural API for creating native applications that provide a full Mac OS X look and feel.

    Having said that, it's highly unlikely that Carbon will see the light of day on other platforms, purely because of the effort involved in writing something comparable and the sheer size of the API.

    Apple seems to be pushing Carbon as its lower-level application development API, and Cocoa as its application framework (as a replacement to MacApp, the former C++ framework that was based on Carbon).

  7. Re:What about GNUstep? by putaro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't care how long it takes to learn. The problem isn't the learning curve - it's that nothing else on the planet besides OS X has good support for it. Not only do you wind up with an app tied to the Cocoa UI framework but all of your code is in a language that doesn't have good support on any other platform.


    I just did an app for OS X - we did it in Java/Cocoa. Works fairly well, looks like a good Mac application. And 90% of the code is directly portable to just about any other platform.