6 ms·

To an extent... but their swansong vision of portable OPENSTEP was quickly shut down by Apple, which is a crying shame because if OPENSTEP was still around it w

To an extent... but their swansong vision of portable OPENSTEP was quickly shut down by Apple, which is a crying shame because if OPENSTEP was still around it would be keeping Microsoft competitive on the desktop front - instead of today's languished desktop developer story which remains frozen in 1998 (for Win32) or 2005 (for .NET). Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and Linux - because that would be NEXTSTEP's legacy.

nine_k 10y ago
I happily used an openstep-inspired (or directly derived?) desktop environment named WindowMaker in Linux somewhere around 1999. I also remember LiteStep for Windows being available around that time. So there were attempts at using that approach on other platforms. (Funnily, my current Xfce setup still visually resembles my OpenStep-like setup of that time.)
- code_duck 10y ago
  I used Window Maker for years - still have it installed as the desktop of choice on older machines. It's fast, simple, reliable and direct.
  - 72deluxe 10y ago
    Yes and it makes for a great UI on a VNC server on a Raspberry Pi running as a SSH box, for example. Lightweight.
- aerique 10y ago
  I switched to i3 a couple of years ago but I've used WindowMaker the longest of any window manager in my 25 years of Unix usage.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Interestingly, I used it on Apple's MkLinux on a Powermac. When I returned to that office, all the retired Powermacs were running it on the operations staff desktops. Felt good.
TzlZAT8GSEDww00 10y ago
> Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and Linux - because that would be NEXTSTEP's legacy. Never say never, but none of the UI parts of Cocoa are written in Swift, and porting them to Windows/Linux would be way more than just writing them in Swift anyway. Curious, in what way is Windows's development story stuck in 2005 and the Mac is not similarly "stuck" in 2001 (or perhaps 1995)?
- ams6110 10y ago
  The port was already done in the 1990s. You could run Enterprise WebObjects on Windows NT, and it came with several NeXTStep apps on the CD including Mail.app.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  Apple pretty much said that Cocoa would be the basis for all future work they do on Mac OS X since 2001, and they've continually improved it, such as adding new widgets, adding functionality to existing widgets, high-DPI support, and so on. I see there's a lot of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) going on: there is only one GUI platform and UI toolkit for macOS: Cocoa. While the groundwork isn't new it is kept up-to-date. Compared to Windows where the "original" widget-toolkit (Window classes and the Common Control library) haven't been significantly updated since Windows XP - Wndows 7 did add some new controls, but they aren't exactly easy to use unless you're already a very experienced C++ Win32 GUI developer. The old low-entry-barrier dev story was VB6, which had a mix of Common Controls and ActiveX reimplementations, then it moved over to VB.NET and WinForms, which is a wrapper around the same - but the last significant update to WinForms was in .NET 2.0 in 2005 - Microsoft recently announced that they would not be adding true high-DPI support to WinForms, advising desktop app developers to use WPF or UWP instead - and therein lies a problem: WPF and UWP are both completely separate UI and application stacks. WPF is not perfect and like WinForms, hasn't seen much of an update for a while (it still runs on DirectX 9) and UWP is just confusing: it's arbitrarily limited to only run in a restricted sandbox environment, the standard widget library is very anemic (e.g. still no tree-view!) and it shares nothing in common with the rest of the entire Windows ecosystem. If you want to write a "real" Win32 desktop application you're best-off sticking with MFC, but there's so much legwork that's necessary, and legacy cruft (I swear the MFC codebase is still C++89 compatible) it just doesn't make sense for small applications, especially line-of-business systems that face constant changes, to be built with it. Compare with Cocoa on macOS where everything: from Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, to the built-in Jigsaw Puzzle mini-game, is all built with the same framework.
72deluxe 10y ago
I sometimes wonder if we need anything really new as a desktop paradigm. I know you say that systems are stuck in the early 00s, and I know that the underlying APIs are going through slow changes (they are mature after all). But the ability to take a Mac from nearly 20 years ago and take one from yesterday and be able to use them in nearly identical ways (mobileme instead of icloud eh) is quite impressive. I have seen the attempts to invent a new desktop paradigm in Linuxland with Unity and Microsoft's Metro attempt but I firmly believe that the windowing systems that we have at the moment are really as good as it is going to get, and more importantly, as good as it needs to be. The eyecandy is all very nice (animations, fading in/out) and new compositors is great too but from a usability point of view, I don't think we really need to add anything new. Am I alone in this? I mean Amiga got it right years ago and we've been trying to catch up since.... :-)
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  I don't think Linux will ever take the desktop, per se. The only opportunity is to leapfrog over the whole paradigm. Android is obviously that. And the upcoming transition to conversational UI (not just voice but stuff like news feeds, Snapchat, etc) and also VR will I think be the end of the desktop paradigm. I realize this is often overstated blah blah blah. But both mobile and VR are still kind of operating in a psuedo-desktop UI paradigm where they can't really reap their advantages. At some point in the next 10, 20 years I think both mobile and VR will have their WIMP-equivalent UI breakthrough and we will have a real horse race, and Linux will be in a different position. Speculation of course. * "Windows, icons, menus, pointer" was the big breakthrough discovery of the meat and potatoes of desktop UI
  - DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
    > I think be the end of the desktop paradigm. Think about how today's businesses generally use their employees: let's not beat about the bush: they're using Microsoft Office for producing documents and spreadsheets, doing research with Chrome, and (if applicable) creating business value using either line-of-business software ("Bob's Car Repair shop database in MS Access") or specialised content-creation software (Photoshop, AutoCAD). None of those use-cases can be fulfilled by recent interaction paradigms (i.e. smartphones, tablets, or voice-control). VR's useful for visualisation, but that's a very limited use-case, and VR has been used for architectural and civil-engineering visualization for decades anyway (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA ). Granted, when considering an iPad paired with a keyboard - we see some of those use-cases become almost workable again (namely word-processing), but it's essentially the same thing as a traditional laptop - just with considerably more painful precision object manipulation due to the lack of a mouse cursor. I feel the biggest paradigm-shift over the past 10 years is the movement of database business applications away from Access, VB6, Delphi, etc to be web-applications, usually hosted locally, and more recently to being moved to multi-tenancy, subscription-based services ("the cloud") - this has now become acceptable to businesses: the trade-off of no-longer being in exclusive control of their data is increased uptime, reliability, and significantly reduced start-up and (usually) running costs - and being browser-based this has meant a shift away from WIMP - where an activity is contained within a small-ish, often fixed-size, "window", to a "page", which has its own interaction model (e.g. no more modal windows because you can always open a new browser tab). The next iteration of human/computer interaction we'll see that impacts our (society's) actual working lives will be something that enables me to be more expressive without resigning any degree of control over what I produce - and right now nothing does that better than a large display which lets me interact with multiple applications simultaneously, a keyboard with which I can enter commands or prose almost as quickly as I can think it (with a very low error ratio too), and a mouse for quick, precise, (gorilla-arm-syndrome-free) content/command selection. Until something comes along that enables me to be more productive for my employer the desktop interaction model will still reign.
NoGravitas 10y ago
GNUStep[0] is a thing that exists, and it's mostly Cocoa-compatible (at least for old versions of Cocoa)? I don't think it is very widely used -- it never got much desktop traction compared to KDE or Gnome. But you can write apps that compile and run on both GNUStep and macOS -- the "macOS" version of Emacs actually targets GNUStep, for example. [0]: http://gnustep.org/ http://gnustep.org/
NEDM64 10y ago
Who cares? What would be interesting, it would be compiling iOS Applications to macOS and JavaScript.

nine_k 10y ago

I happily used an openstep-inspired (or directly derived?) desktop environment named WindowMaker in Linux somewhere around 1999. I also remember LiteStep for Windows being available around that time. So there were attempts at using that approach on other platforms. (Funnily, my current Xfce setup still visually resembles my OpenStep-like setup of that time.)

code_duck 10y ago
I used Window Maker for years - still have it installed as the desktop of choice on older machines. It's fast, simple, reliable and direct.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  Yes and it makes for a great UI on a VNC server on a Raspberry Pi running as a SSH box, for example. Lightweight.
aerique 10y ago
I switched to i3 a couple of years ago but I've used WindowMaker the longest of any window manager in my 25 years of Unix usage.
rbanffy 10y ago
Interestingly, I used it on Apple's MkLinux on a Powermac. When I returned to that office, all the retired Powermacs were running it on the operations staff desktops. Felt good.

TzlZAT8GSEDww00 10y ago

> Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and Linux - because that would be NEXTSTEP's legacy. Never say never, but none of the UI parts of Cocoa are written in Swift, and porting them to Windows/Linux would be way more than just writing them in Swift anyway. Curious, in what way is Windows's development story stuck in 2005 and the Mac is not similarly "stuck" in 2001 (or perhaps 1995)?

ams6110 10y ago
The port was already done in the 1990s. You could run Enterprise WebObjects on Windows NT, and it came with several NeXTStep apps on the CD including Mail.app.
DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
Apple pretty much said that Cocoa would be the basis for all future work they do on Mac OS X since 2001, and they've continually improved it, such as adding new widgets, adding functionality to existing widgets, high-DPI support, and so on. I see there's a lot of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) going on: there is only one GUI platform and UI toolkit for macOS: Cocoa. While the groundwork isn't new it is kept up-to-date. Compared to Windows where the "original" widget-toolkit (Window classes and the Common Control library) haven't been significantly updated since Windows XP - Wndows 7 did add some new controls, but they aren't exactly easy to use unless you're already a very experienced C++ Win32 GUI developer. The old low-entry-barrier dev story was VB6, which had a mix of Common Controls and ActiveX reimplementations, then it moved over to VB.NET and WinForms, which is a wrapper around the same - but the last significant update to WinForms was in .NET 2.0 in 2005 - Microsoft recently announced that they would not be adding true high-DPI support to WinForms, advising desktop app developers to use WPF or UWP instead - and therein lies a problem: WPF and UWP are both completely separate UI and application stacks. WPF is not perfect and like WinForms, hasn't seen much of an update for a while (it still runs on DirectX 9) and UWP is just confusing: it's arbitrarily limited to only run in a restricted sandbox environment, the standard widget library is very anemic (e.g. still no tree-view!) and it shares nothing in common with the rest of the entire Windows ecosystem. If you want to write a "real" Win32 desktop application you're best-off sticking with MFC, but there's so much legwork that's necessary, and legacy cruft (I swear the MFC codebase is still C++89 compatible) it just doesn't make sense for small applications, especially line-of-business systems that face constant changes, to be built with it. Compare with Cocoa on macOS where everything: from Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, to the built-in Jigsaw Puzzle mini-game, is all built with the same framework.

72deluxe 10y ago

I sometimes wonder if we need anything really new as a desktop paradigm. I know you say that systems are stuck in the early 00s, and I know that the underlying APIs are going through slow changes (they are mature after all). But the ability to take a Mac from nearly 20 years ago and take one from yesterday and be able to use them in nearly identical ways (mobileme instead of icloud eh) is quite impressive. I have seen the attempts to invent a new desktop paradigm in Linuxland with Unity and Microsoft's Metro attempt but I firmly believe that the windowing systems that we have at the moment are really as good as it is going to get, and more importantly, as good as it needs to be. The eyecandy is all very nice (animations, fading in/out) and new compositors is great too but from a usability point of view, I don't think we really need to add anything new. Am I alone in this? I mean Amiga got it right years ago and we've been trying to catch up since.... :-)

erikpukinskis 10y ago
I don't think Linux will ever take the desktop, per se. The only opportunity is to leapfrog over the whole paradigm. Android is obviously that. And the upcoming transition to conversational UI (not just voice but stuff like news feeds, Snapchat, etc) and also VR will I think be the end of the desktop paradigm. I realize this is often overstated blah blah blah. But both mobile and VR are still kind of operating in a psuedo-desktop UI paradigm where they can't really reap their advantages. At some point in the next 10, 20 years I think both mobile and VR will have their WIMP-equivalent UI breakthrough and we will have a real horse race, and Linux will be in a different position. Speculation of course. * "Windows, icons, menus, pointer" was the big breakthrough discovery of the meat and potatoes of desktop UI
- DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
  > I think be the end of the desktop paradigm. Think about how today's businesses generally use their employees: let's not beat about the bush: they're using Microsoft Office for producing documents and spreadsheets, doing research with Chrome, and (if applicable) creating business value using either line-of-business software ("Bob's Car Repair shop database in MS Access") or specialised content-creation software (Photoshop, AutoCAD). None of those use-cases can be fulfilled by recent interaction paradigms (i.e. smartphones, tablets, or voice-control). VR's useful for visualisation, but that's a very limited use-case, and VR has been used for architectural and civil-engineering visualization for decades anyway (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2CYLlSn1gA ). Granted, when considering an iPad paired with a keyboard - we see some of those use-cases become almost workable again (namely word-processing), but it's essentially the same thing as a traditional laptop - just with considerably more painful precision object manipulation due to the lack of a mouse cursor. I feel the biggest paradigm-shift over the past 10 years is the movement of database business applications away from Access, VB6, Delphi, etc to be web-applications, usually hosted locally, and more recently to being moved to multi-tenancy, subscription-based services ("the cloud") - this has now become acceptable to businesses: the trade-off of no-longer being in exclusive control of their data is increased uptime, reliability, and significantly reduced start-up and (usually) running costs - and being browser-based this has meant a shift away from WIMP - where an activity is contained within a small-ish, often fixed-size, "window", to a "page", which has its own interaction model (e.g. no more modal windows because you can always open a new browser tab). The next iteration of human/computer interaction we'll see that impacts our (society's) actual working lives will be something that enables me to be more expressive without resigning any degree of control over what I produce - and right now nothing does that better than a large display which lets me interact with multiple applications simultaneously, a keyboard with which I can enter commands or prose almost as quickly as I can think it (with a very low error ratio too), and a mouse for quick, precise, (gorilla-arm-syndrome-free) content/command selection. Until something comes along that enables me to be more productive for my employer the desktop interaction model will still reign.

NoGravitas 10y ago

GNUStep[0] is a thing that exists, and it's mostly Cocoa-compatible (at least for old versions of Cocoa)? I don't think it is very widely used -- it never got much desktop traction compared to KDE or Gnome. But you can write apps that compile and run on both GNUStep and macOS -- the "macOS" version of Emacs actually targets GNUStep, for example. [0]: http://gnustep.org/ http://gnustep.org/

NEDM64 10y ago

Who cares? What would be interesting, it would be compiling iOS Applications to macOS and JavaScript.