History... It was invented and developed by Jean-Marie Hullot, originally in Lisp (for the ExperLisp product by Expertelligence). It was one of the first commercial applications that allowed interface objects, such as buttons, menus, and windows, to be placed in an interface using a mouse. One notable early use of Interface Builder was the development of the WorldWideWeb web browser by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN using a NeXT workstation.
I introduced Steve to Interface Builder in 1986 (at NeXT). (It was written in ExperLISP for the Mac - completely OO, and deeply integrated with the toolbox.). His first comments were typical Job's "I've seen much better...". He was referring to HyperCard. By the end of the meeting, he was sold, and NeXT built the Object-C version still in use today. We created an (unreleased) product that was an OO/incrementally compiled cross between HyperCard and IB in '87. I also built a much more powerful tool called Action! for the TI micro-explorer in '88.
So Steve liked HyperCard a lot; he just realized that IB was more powerful. It is surprising to me though that he didn't pursue an easier to use variant... We still need one! Squeak is the closest so far.
There are only a couple of good first languages: Squeak (Smalltalk within its own learning universe), or Scheme (a solid basis for computational concepts).
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Interface Builder was publicly released by ExperTelligence in 1986. I should probably update Wikipedia...
From Wikipedia article on IB:
History ... It was invented and developed by Jean-Marie Hullot, originally in Lisp (for the ExperLisp product by Expertelligence). It was one of the first commercial applications that allowed interface objects, such as buttons, menus, and windows, to be placed in an interface using a mouse. One notable early use of Interface Builder was the development of the WorldWideWeb web browser by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN using a NeXT workstation.
I introduced Steve to Interface Builder in 1986 (at NeXT). (It was written in ExperLISP for the Mac - completely OO, and deeply integrated with the toolbox.). His first comments were typical Job's "I've seen much better...". He was referring to HyperCard. By the end of the meeting, he was sold, and NeXT built the Object-C version still in use today. We created an (unreleased) product that was an OO/incrementally compiled cross between HyperCard and IB in '87. I also built a much more powerful tool called Action! for the TI micro-explorer in '88.
So Steve liked HyperCard a lot; he just realized that IB was more powerful. It is surprising to me though that he didn't pursue an easier to use variant... We still need one! Squeak is the closest so far.
There are only a couple of good first languages: Squeak (Smalltalk within its own learning universe), or Scheme (a solid basis for computational concepts).