26 ms·

Hello Mac OS X Tiger

377 points by ronyfadel 5y ago

ricardobayes 5y ago
Very nostalgic. I wonder if an old PPC is feasible at all for basic browsing these days. Probably would run into issues updating the browser?
- Pamar 5y ago
  Pretty sure it would: I replaced my old PPC iMac in (IIRC) 2017 and it was already basically impossible to get an updated browser version (let alone most if not all the other apps).
- fredoralive 5y ago
  Until recently there was TenFourFox, a Firefox fork for old Macs, if you wanted a modern browser although it's now mostly dead.
  - djxfade 5y ago
    It has been forked as InterWebPPC
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    I'm still doing security updates, but you have to self-build, and any new development would be "when I get a round tuit." Some people are doing downstream forks and there are build-it-for-you scripts/Automator packages you can use.
- sneak 5y ago
  You can emulate it on modern hardware, faster than it would run on the real deal, if you truly want to go that route.
  - cellularmitosis 5y ago
    Not quite. My M1 is running Tiger in QEMU and it’s a little slower than my 1.2GHz eMac.
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  The problem is mostly slow JavaScript performance on this era of ppc machines
varispeed 5y ago
I was never able to work in an environment with so many floating windows. I lose focus instantly and can't do much work.
- throwmeback 5y ago
  Same, this feels absolutely dreadful! "Where do I start? Why is there so much stuff screaming at me? What's my first move here? Oh shoot it, I don't want to do this anymore."
andrekandre 5y ago
i really feel the ui in tiger was just great... not perfect of course, but just feels peak (pre-darkmode) osx to me... btw, taping the rss link doesnt open my rss app on ios, i think it may be the mime-type isnt set?
coolandsmartrr 5y ago
Tiger was a solid release from Apple that made me switch to the then-unstable Windows ecosystem. I guess back when you paid for software, Apple made sure to squash bugs so you were happy with it. Nowadays...
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Switch to or switch from?
  - coolandsmartrr 5y ago
    Good catch.
- matheweis 5y ago
  About 20 years or so ago, I actually got Apple to replace an out of warranty motherboard for a paid os upgrade. Can’t find a reference to it now [1] but there was some sort of somewhat known issue with the powerbook g3 that I had at the time that presented under os x, but not os 9. I argued successfully that it should be fixed under the “software warranty” because it said it was compatible with that powerbook, but the processor issue made it incompatible, and it worked. Imagine that happening today… [1] This CNET article alludes to it but doesn’t go into much detail: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lombard-powerbook-the-processor-is-the-problem/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lombard-powerbook-the-pr...
  - Lammy 5y ago
    It’s kind of remarkable there weren’t more issues than that considering Lombard was their very first “New World” portable, “PowerBook1,1”! Even the OG toilet-seat iBook comes afterward as “PowerBook2,1”: https://macintoshgarden.org/apple-powermac-line-of-computers#PowerBook https://macintoshgarden.org/apple-powermac-line-of-computers...
    - philistine 5y ago
      That New World switch is such an Earth-shaking change and it’s basically forgotten. It was Steve Jobs’ first big software transition before OS X was even decided on as the future of the company.
dmitriid 5y ago
An interface where all elements are distinguishable from each other..
- carlivar 5y ago
  Because Jobs was still in control. As I understand it, this was a constant tension between Ive and Jobs. Of course Ive design eventually dominated after Jobs' death.
  - grishka 5y ago
    It appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions, slowly but surely. There are skeuomorphic icons in Monterey, and I think there's fewer borderless crap. The one thing that does really grind my gears though — they've replaced all purpose-made icons in toolbars and such with some "universal" ones that completely disregard the existence of the pixel grid. There's literally not a single line in these icons that isn't blurry af.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions, slowly but surely And yet there's the completely washed out BigSur and Monterrey for which I recommend turning on contrast mode: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1456894618000400385?s=20 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1456894618000400385?s=20
sharikous 5y ago
Tiger was the apex of developer-friendly FOSS-friendly Apple. You can find the last official guide to modifying and compiling the xnu kernel from that time. Documentation was fabulous. I miss those times.
- easton 5y ago
  It’s kind of sad when you find a great Apple doc that there’s a 90% chance the top of the page says “Documentation Archive”.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  Also, the GUI for building GUIs was great. Nothing really made you appreciate why they wanted objects so much as dragging buttons around and instantiating the class. It made sense internally to me as a university student at the time. Objective C was a "relatively simple" set of extensions (which I never really understood) over C (which I claimed to understand at the time) and the language made you aware of both "the magic" of what you were doing and, at the same time, how it related to the bare metal. I learnt a lot from it. I'd love to know what this looks like to a straight-out-of-university developer of an Electron app, though.
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code, there was a cottage industry of custom NSSplitView classes. Even just making a button a different color involved reinventing the wheel a substantial amount. The current Electron/React approach has no happy path - everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to have to write a novella.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      > Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code I'm making this up, but perhaps this was beneficial for UI consistency across apps anyway?
kailuowang 5y ago
Yeah I was there. Some people may think it's just the norm in the old times. It's not. It's just Apple obsession with being "user friendly", and for some reason, they think Gui is more friendly for programmers than code.
- toyg 5y ago
  It did work though, the developer drain from MS to Apple around that time was massive. They were giving easy tools to low-skill developers, and command-line access to high-skill developers, a win-win. Whereas MS around that time was busy overcomplicating Visual Studio in their quest to merge web and desktop development for lock-in purposes.
- anthk 5y ago
  Where would you put TCL/TK? It merges the best of both worlds.
alisonkisk 5y ago
Is that iPhone a legit early Apple mockup before, or just a joke?
- someotherperson 5y ago
  Neither -- it appears to be a third-party mockup of what an Apple phone could have looked like.
- callahad 5y ago
  Just a joke. There were plenty of rumors about an Apple phone around that time, but it was generally referred to as the "iTunes Phone." And the mockups were significantly more hideous: https://web.archive.org/web/20070630183849/http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/05/06/28/motorola_itunes_phone_revealed.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070630183849/http://www.applei... Five months after Mac OS X Tiger's release, the iTunes phone was unveiled: the Motorola ROKR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR). You can find some fun things in the old MacRumors archives (https://www.macrumors.com/archive/ https://www.macrumors.com/archive/). For example, a post (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/07/29/steve-jobs-on-itunes-phone-and-carriers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2005/07/29/steve-jobs-on-itunes-ph...) from July 2005, two months before the ROKR, and two years before the iPhone: > When questioned about the lifespan of the iPod and why the functionality won't eventually move into the cell phone, Jobs answers, "I'm going to leave the answer to our actions in the future." Or this (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/09/20/jobs-on-motorola-itunes-video-ipod-bluetooth-and-more/ https://www.macrumors.com/2005/09/20/jobs-on-motorola-itunes...), from September 2005: > - Feels that Bluetooth isn't a good option. Sound isn't good. Recharging headphones is a pain. Eleven years later: AirPods.
flohofwoe 5y ago
Wow, that old Xcode UI with "Active Target" and "Active Build Configuration" made a lot more sense than the current layout! I always thought that weird "Scheme" stuff was a left-over from the olden days, but it actually seems to be an intended feature that was introduced at a later time.
- RandallBrown 5y ago
  The scheme stuff was added because Xcode became able to do a lot more stuff beyond "Run app" and "Debug app". There were a lot of hoops you had to jump through to get unit tests working and there weren't iOS apps that could be run in a simulator or device.
Liquid_Fire 5y ago
Maybe I am missing some context here as I have never developed for an Apple platform, but what is the point this blog post is trying to make? That the tooling used to be very complicated?
- toyg 5y ago
  Actually the opposite, likely. The tooling was preinstalled and ready to go, and you could largely click your way through building interactive experiences. Compare this GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable flow with the incantations you need to know to set up a React interface, for example. It's night and day.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    Xcode/dev tools were not preinstalled, but just cost a registration on their site to download and install.
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      When OS X was still distributed on optical discs, it came with a dev tools disc for the first several releases. That how I personally stumbled upon Project Builder, Cocoa, etc. I may have never found it if I had to seek it out and download it.
  - addandsubtract 5y ago
    What does macOS / iOS / iPadOS development look like today? Do you not have XCode with a GUI-driven workflow anymore? I only poked around iOS development during the iPhone 1/3G days, but I thought tooling has been constantly improving since then.
    - AndroidKitKat 5y ago
      Disclaimer, I'm only a wannabe Apple platform developer, but the GUI-driven workflow is still the predominate way to develop for Apple platforms. The most radical change is the introduction of SwiftUI, which has you writing interfaces entirely with code, rather than using drag-n-drop components with Storyboards.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Not sure why alisonkisk's comment is dead, as that's the only thing interesting in this post. It's funny to see, because the first Android versions were similar / no touch
- skhr0680 5y ago
  If someone asked me what I thought an iPhone would look like in 2006, that’s what I would have come up with
_teyd 5y ago
I don't know if it's nostalgia but somehow this interface looks more lively and friendly to me than modern MacOS which feels flatter and has less personality (to me personally).
- nly 5y ago
  I agree. Modern UIs are soulless
  - petepete 5y ago
    I agree to an extent but the thought of having an application spread across seven or eight windows makes me feel nauseous.
    - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
      It can be a good way to make use of smaller screens (e.g. on laptops). Multiple "virtual desktops" makes it easier to manage
    - dijonman2 5y ago
      I use many, many windows and tools to help me switch including virtual desktops. Carryover from X11 days.
    - ptx 5y ago
      It helps that you can press Command+Option+H to hide all other windows (from other applications) to reduce clutter.
  - abraxas 5y ago
    Yeah, it's like everyone fell in love with the X/Athena widgets all of a sudden. I'd never have guessed that after all these years we'd go back to UIs looking like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets#/media/File:Screenshot_of_%22Xman%22_program.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets#/media/File:S...
- sneak 5y ago
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
My favorite version of OS X was El Cap. Nothing since has been enjoyable. I get it, my preference, but I'm allowed.
- sgt 5y ago
  My favorite is Mojave.. coincidentally the one I am running.
  - Normille 5y ago
    Me too.
  - pcdoodle 5y ago
    Same.
- grishka 5y ago
  My favorite is Mavericks, the last one with skeuomorphism.
- godDLL 5y ago
  10.8 was the last of agreeable direction for OSX for me. I'm running 10.12, for software compatibility reasons. Likely here our paths will split. Versions beyond this are of no interest to me.
seumars 5y ago
OSX Tiger running on a Power Mac G5 was my dream setup I never could afford. Time flies.
- flatiron 5y ago
  Someone had one of those g5s on eBay for a few hundo. Ones with the wheels. I regret not picking it up and at least putting bsd on it.
- chrizel 5y ago
  I bought my first desktop Mac back in 2004 after owning an iBook 3G since 2002. And as a 19 year old software developer from Germany who finished his apprenticeship, I wanted the best Mac I could afford. I bought a Power Mac G5 - one of the first dual core models with water cooling. Was a lot of money back then and I waited months for it to arrive, but it was a great machine. Played a lot of World of Warcraft on this thing. :-) And did some Cocoa/Objective-C development. But it was never the big investment that I thought it would be. After the Intel switch in 2006, the Power Mac G5 didn't have much more use for me personally because the new Intel machines were so much better... Today I'm more into buying the cheaper machines for myself. Should have put the money from the Power Mac G5 into Apple stocks...
  - Normille 5y ago
    My first desktop Mac was an 8500. I bought it when I was a student and took out a loan to buy it at £3500 second hand. Unbelievable how cheap computing power has become in such a relatively short time.
mfollert 5y ago
I really love this, thank you. This was so much me back then ... the switch from Windows to a Mac basically was my "awakening" as a dev.
throwmeback 5y ago
I... don't get the nostalgia. Just for context, I'm 26, from a post-commie country, have been around computers since birth thanks to my dad. He wasn't technical, he just liked the new tech. What stinks to me: - I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone) - Skeuomorphism was always very "uncanny valley" for me; I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones, the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend to lose my focus quickly - I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those old IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default - most of them were never used by anyone and everyone would just click through to the main window; being a small child I didn't know what to do or where to start and nobody around me could help - this memory kept me disinterested with programming until I literally went to a programming bootcamp after my finals. - I really mean it! IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those supposedly golden times.
- ptr 5y ago
  Nostalgia is irrational and often felt for things that were objectively worse. I feel nostalgic about a lot of crap. Including Tiger.
- vintagedave 5y ago
  > I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those old IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default... Tiger and Xcode 2 is quite old and I think is not really the version of macOS many people yearn for. It was the first version many started using (10.0-10.3's graphics were terrible - pinstripes! - and 10.4 was the 'Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers' release which was genuinely exciting. Although I'd used OS X at uni, I bought my first Mac with 10.4 Tiger. Since for many it was the first used, it's what's remembered - but using Tiger this month, I realised that several things I fondly remembered were actually in newer versions.) The 'best' version is very likely 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009), or possibly Mavericks (2013), the last pre-flat-design OS X. Snow Leopard had a clean, fairly modern UI (so your concerns about multi-window were heard) yet was still joyful. > I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone) The iMac G4, which runs 10.4 Tiger and 10.5, has a 16:10 aspect ratio screen if you buy the 17" screen option. (Source: just bought one, to investigate if it's truly nostalgia or things really were better back then.) > I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones Much of OS X was bright and colourful, with pretty graphics, which as you note is very different to Win95/OS 7. However the skeuomorphism wasn't as strong as its reputation is these days. Much of the interaction (say, Cover Flow) is what we'd today call skeuomorphic but really was just a fairly natural way to interact. The real skeuomorphic elements, like the Calendar app using stitched leather, were fairly rare. > the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend to lose my focus quickly 100% agreed. I personally find it very hard to distinguish elements at a glance in modern macOS. > IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those supposedly golden times. I think early 2000s OS X was not as golden as remembered, but mid-2000s to 2012 was extraordinary. OS X really ramped up and improved in those years. Then when they switched to flat design, they lost a lot of usability tweaks along with it. Running current and old OSX/macOS side by side on one desk, as I'm doing, you can clearly see it's the same OS, but today's has much more onscreen, taking more space, but has many small UX indicators missing, and yet despite the amount onscreen the design feels austere and soulless. I find UIs with UX hints built in to their design, and designed for visual beauty, both usable and pleasing for my mind the same way any beautiful object is, and I dearly miss them.
a-dub 5y ago
> You’re amazed by the brand new Spotlight and Safari RSS, you like your new OS so much you want to develop apps for it. when i was younger i had a used next slab. it had the same effect, everything was so cool you just wanted to build things for it. next thing i knew i was coming in on weekends to build a from scratch port of my then employer's product. my boss at the time was blown away. it's no wonder to me that berners-lee wrote the first version of worldwideweb on the next, nor carmack with quake... edit: i guess it was doom. it was a long time ago!
- mietek 5y ago
  It was both Doom and Quake!
bluedino 5y ago
I always wondered how early Mac OS X developers learned to navigate XCode and Cocoa. Were they all just ex-NeXT programmers? I bought an old copy of the Hillegass book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but I'm guessing most people learned from Apple developer docs that I never saw (or guess didn't know how to find back then) As an aside, I don't miss the old programming books where each chapter just showed you how to use some GUI elements and they never got around to showing patterns on how you would actually create a usable application.
- fundad 5y ago
  The most useful non-source code resources at the time were about GCC, BSD and Apple’s PDF guides on how the OS works, and the Human Interface Guides, paid Developer Connection accounts got you tools mailed to you and DVDs of WWDC seminars. But it’s a profession, selling shrinkwapped desktop applications or the modern equivalent takes a lot.
- rapind 5y ago
  Depends how early you mean. The Big Nerd Ranch osx book has been around for a while.
- carlosrg 5y ago
  Apple’s developer documentation was much, much better and complete back then. There was several introduction documents, guides, etc. For example: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/Introduction/Introduction.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
  - varunprasad 5y ago
    This was key. I built a couple of minor, but useful for me, apps by simply following the docs at the time. The major difference between Apple docs, and Javadocs at the time (Java was the actual language I used to program in), was that Javadocs was basically API references, whereas Apple docs had API references but they also had guides that went into the why, and the best practices, and even occasionally alternatives for edge cases, etc. And the fact that it was available offline as an optional download with XCode was a massive bonus at a time when ubiquitous Wifi and internet was not a thing. It was a real surprise to me, after having stepped away from any sort of Apple development for a few years that Apple's docs were considered bad.
ralphc 5y ago
In the vintage apple groups and subreddits Tiger is preferred over Leopard because it runs on more hardware and it's the last version that allows Classic mode that runs classic Mac OS applications.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  Can you link to a few such subreddits. Thank you.
  - vintagedave 5y ago
    The one I read is https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple . If there are more I'd love links too!
    - ralphc 5y ago
      Yes, vintageapple is the main one. There's also powerpc, with some rare appearances in vintagecomputing.
  - rvense 5y ago
    There are some good forums, tho mostly with a pre-OS X focus: 68kmla.org tinkerdifferent.com
PascLeRasc 5y ago
This was really fun to read. Tiger was before my time - does anyone know of good resources on where things went from here? What were some of the first 3rd party native Mac apps?
randallsquared 5y ago
> Apple releasing their first phone, which will likely run some kind of Cocoa in it. Good thing you already know how to write applications for it, right? Awww. It must have been so shocking to MacOS devs when the iPhone was announced and it was web applications or nothing.
- draw_down 5y ago
  Real heads wrote Cocoa apps for it anyway!
- Lammy 5y ago
  Probably less so if they’d written a Dashboard widget (also a new feature in Tiger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode
Lammy 5y ago
> 2005! The future is here! You have just spent $129 for the newest release of Mac OS X: Tiger. For me it was more like “you have just torrented the Golden Master DVD image and restored it on to your bootable Firewire iPod because you only have a CD-RW drive and nobody has released rips of the six-CD version yet” ;) https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428 https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428 e: Siracusa’s review for Ars is still a great read too: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/
- quijoteuniv 5y ago
  I had a disc i bought at the end of line to fix a mac of a friend, some decade ago! and when refurbishing old macs to Linux become very handy, as before i could install linux sometimes i needed eEFInd.
- lostgame 5y ago
  I don’t think I ever paid for a MacOS (OSX, at the time) upgrade. I still remember buying a RapidShare account for a month to get Snow Leopard off those multi-split files because I couldn’t find a torrent. The 00’s were such a different time for tech.
  - varunprasad 5y ago
    I paid for alternate OS X versions (and then jumped on the snow leopard wagon immediately due to the $29? price). That meant shelling out $129 after about 3 years (2 year lifecycles, and I think I bought my first mac almost a year into the then OS lifecycle). This provided me with excellent stability and a very reasonable price. I'd save up a few hundred $s, and then upgrade the software and hardware at around the same time, so I also added additional RAM and moved the HDD to the CD-RW and inserted an SSD instead of the HDD (I am 100% sure I made these changes for my macbook, but I'm not sure if I made them, or if they were even possible, for the iBook I owned before). That was almost a decade+ of highly stable, highly effective, and almost cutting edge of computing that I haven't even come close to replicating in the almost decade since, despite earning real money. I did switch to Linux for my personal computing a few months ago, and I have hopes that this may allow me to do so, once I really set something up once I get to my Mar-Apr spring cleaning. Linux is giving me that Mac feeling for the first time in a long time, although the major challenge here appears to be restraining oneself. It seems so easy to get lost trying to distro hop constantly, or try a new terminal for marginal benefits, etc. The new shiny in Linux shines very bright, and restraint seems to be the core challenge required to have a stable, outcome focused computing experience with Linux.
unixhero 5y ago
OSX 10.4 and 10.5 were marvelous operating systems for so many reasons. Particularly 10.4 in my view due to the compatability layer for legacy MacOS binaries, AND big binary feature that made the same OS usable on PPC AND Intel X86. Also Quartz Composer, which I find really interesting and awesome [0]. 0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
andrethegiant 5y ago
Tiger also was the debut of Dashboard widgets, which opened up creating app-like experiences for those who knew HTML/JS/CSS instead of Cocoa (myself included).
- sharikous 5y ago
  Also it introduced the canvas element and opened the way for HTML 5. To this day I miss being able to enter Dashboard with a single keypress like in the old days. I used that mini calculator, note taking app and weather widget constantly. By I seem to be alone. For dome reason most people hated Dashboard.
  - andrethegiant 5y ago
    I didn’t hate it :-) I actually made the Gas widget, which fetched local gas prices. It was a popular widget at the time, and ended up on a slide (amongst other third-party widgets) during the 2006 WWDC keynote.
  - ProfessorLayton 5y ago
    I’m with you here! I still miss Dashboard to this day, and regret that such a great idea never caught on. Having widgets merged with Notification Center (!) is such a worse experience, especially on smaller screens. Never mind the fact that apps like Calculator only allow a single instance/window for no reason. Only way around that is to literally duplicate the app!
marbletiles 5y ago
This makes me more nostalgic for the old Interface Builder than it does Aqua. So much more straightforward to create actions/outlets and create the files than the current mess.
Shinchy 5y ago
I still love the way OSX Tiger looks, even after all these years.
rayiner 5y ago
Still the best version of OS X.
ad-astra 5y ago
Hah, I’m so glad that my team writes 100% of our UI programmatically instead of using IB.
johnebgd 5y ago
During this era Apple sent third party official devs a shirt when the new OS released. I still have mine but they are quite worn out from all the wear. Wish they still did that but I appreciate how much less expensive Apple developer accounts are these days.
jonpalmisc 5y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962004
diskzero 5y ago
Tiger was the first release of OSX that I was truly proud of. I came to Apple, not as part of the NeXT acquisition, but from the post-pivot Be, which had decided to focus their attention on "internet appliances". My love at the time was operating systems and specifically GUI libraries and components. Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re-skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring. After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in creating something great that would ship and be of real value to users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2 building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive. In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to Steve.) In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be. He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user-friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a startup called Android. The group who went to the meet and greet contained some significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble, Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history. All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment time all rolled into my current employment phase. This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9 group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a functioning software organization, the product lines were much cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop operating system should be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo
maxpert 5y ago
For the record to this day I believe this aqua pill styled interface was way more clean and attractive than the flat design. I've never been fan of flat interfaces, it's the reason I hated Windows 8 onwards interfaces. Skeuomorphism was just perfect!
miles 5y ago
For anyone on an M1 and feeling nostalgic, PPC versions of OS X run quite well in UTM/QEMU: https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger-on-m1.html https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger-on-m1.html
Brian_K_White 5y ago
Lovely! It's just missing the part where half way through, osx and xcode updates and your existing app no longer builds on your machine nor runs on anyone else's. My ascerbic observations about the platform aside, I love this, both in it's current context, and would have loved it at the time. Thank you!
sophiebits 5y ago
> Next, go back to the MainMenu.xib, right click on your MainWindowController and select Instantiate MainWindowController .xib – Freudian slip? :)
victor106 5y ago
What resources do people here recommend to learn Mac OS development?
- jamil7 5y ago
  It depends what you want to do, if you're playing around building apps for a hobby and friends and family and you can target Monterey, you could go with SwiftUI and Apple's official tutorials (it runs on older versions but a lot is missing). If you've got experience in React or any other of the declarative frameworks you'll pick it up quickly, it's actually much nicer than React.
- mrbombastic 5y ago
  I have only read their books on iOS dev but have had good experiences with Big Nerd Ranch books: https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-OS-Ranch-Guides/dp/0134076958 https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-OS-Ranch-Guides/dp/... Ray Wenderlich tutorials are also iOS biased but have been great: https://www.raywenderlich.com https://www.raywenderlich.com
marstall 5y ago
funny I was thinking this would demonstrate that Xcode and Interface Builder were easier to grok for a beginner than they are today, but it seems it was just as particular then as it is today.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
I have occasionally tried to put together a basic Mac app. I picked up the basics of Swift easily enough, but I get stuck because XCode seems completely incomprehensible to me, and my basic attempts at finding a "cheat sheet" or "idiots guide" meet with failure. It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe try again in another year. Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation?
- mrbombastic 5y ago
  it isn't just you, I've been doing iOS development for the last few years which generally gets preference for docs these days but I have still found over the years even if most things have documentation 1) it is pretty difficult to find 2) it is lacking. A lot of times you are better off going to 3rd party tutorials to get what you are looking for, I would recommend the Big Nerd Ranch books and Ray Wenderlich tutorials. I don't know if I have come across a general Xcode intro tutorial, maybe because Xcode is massive, most stuff is task oriented and you pick up the Xcode quirks along the way.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Did you have a go at Appcode from Jetbrains?
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    It’s been a while since I tried it, but iirc you had to context switch between XCode and AppCode if you wanted to use storyboards or whatever they’re called.
- Austin_Conlon 5y ago
  Under the Help menu and in the Xcode Help menu item it's thoroughly documented.
- MagerValp 5y ago
  If you tried to build a Mac app based on Storyboards, which iirc has been the default for the past few years, then yes. All the docs are for iOS and the Mac side is completely under documented. The classic way of building building apps is quite well documented though. It has been modernized quite a bit since Tiger and Xcode 2.0, but the general structure and workflow is the same as in this article, and there’s plenty of docs. The new SwiftUI stuff is still under heavy development, and starting with the wwdc sessions is probably the best approach.
srinathkrishna 5y ago
That was such a fun nostalgic ride! :)
jedberg 5y ago
Why would you use Yahoo in 2005? I'm pretty sure Google was already the more popular search engine by then, especially for people looking for developer documentation. Edit: Best data I can find shows Google was about 35%, Yahoo 30%, and MSN 15%. So I guess it was a toss up if you were using Yahoo or Google, but I seem to recall everyone I knew who was a developer preferred Google because it did a better job finding developer docs.
smm11 5y ago
I used Rhapsody for a couple years on a Thinkpad. It was very, very limited for what I was doing at the time, and the Lighthouse applications I could get running weren't anywhere near what anything else was, by the time I got them. My work laptop at the time was a G3 running System 8.6, which remains my favorite Apple OS to this day. I still have a G4 with 8.6 stuffed full of everything for the heck of it. And the Thinkpad.
dhofer 5y ago
[dead]
usui 5y ago
GUI-driven development is a perfectly fine way to getting started, which is what this guide does. However, does anyone else get an uneasy feeling about developing software that revolves too much around using a GUI/heavy IDE? You can argue that Visual Studio Code is bloated, etc., but at the end of the day, I can clone a project on GitHub and easily run a CLI command to compile and try a project, and maybe use Vim if I have to do a quick edit. Any time I see a development guide that depends on screenshots or requires a specific IDE it makes me feel uneasy, even though I know that's not how most newcomers feel.
- brundolf 5y ago
  I don't really mind it if that IDE works seamlessly without issues, is freely available, and the project data is all in plaintext. I wasn't programming in 2005 but I have reason to think the Xcode experience really was that tight at the time When I lose faith in the IDE and its abstractions, that's when I get really antsy for the ability to opt-out/do everything directly without its help
- wruza 5y ago
  All this guide shows is an Interface Builder, basically. Either you use one of these, or walk through a boring process of setting up controls and their properties and their bindings in code. Eventually IB just interferes or breaks your layouts, but at this time you have a good visual idea of its workings. This is a good thing, even if you're a senior newcomer. What they've got wrong is that IB is not a tool, but only a tutorial.
slackfan 5y ago
Geocities was dead by 2005, and web 2.0 was in full swing.

377 points by ronyfadel 5y ago

Very nostalgic. I wonder if an old PPC is feasible at all for basic browsing these days. Probably would run into issues updating the browser?

Pamar 5y ago
Pretty sure it would: I replaced my old PPC iMac in (IIRC) 2017 and it was already basically impossible to get an updated browser version (let alone most if not all the other apps).
fredoralive 5y ago
Until recently there was TenFourFox, a Firefox fork for old Macs, if you wanted a modern browser although it's now mostly dead.
- djxfade 5y ago
  It has been forked as InterWebPPC
- classichasclass 5y ago
  I'm still doing security updates, but you have to self-build, and any new development would be "when I get a round tuit." Some people are doing downstream forks and there are build-it-for-you scripts/Automator packages you can use.
sneak 5y ago
You can emulate it on modern hardware, faster than it would run on the real deal, if you truly want to go that route.
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  Not quite. My M1 is running Tiger in QEMU and it’s a little slower than my 1.2GHz eMac.
cellularmitosis 5y ago
The problem is mostly slow JavaScript performance on this era of ppc machines

varispeed 5y ago

I was never able to work in an environment with so many floating windows. I lose focus instantly and can't do much work.

throwmeback 5y ago
Same, this feels absolutely dreadful! "Where do I start? Why is there so much stuff screaming at me? What's my first move here? Oh shoot it, I don't want to do this anymore."

andrekandre 5y ago

i really feel the ui in tiger was just great... not perfect of course, but just feels peak (pre-darkmode) osx to me... btw, taping the rss link doesnt open my rss app on ios, i think it may be the mime-type isnt set?

coolandsmartrr 5y ago

Tiger was a solid release from Apple that made me switch to the then-unstable Windows ecosystem. I guess back when you paid for software, Apple made sure to squash bugs so you were happy with it. Nowadays...

Hamuko 5y ago
Switch to or switch from?
- coolandsmartrr 5y ago
  Good catch.
matheweis 5y ago
About 20 years or so ago, I actually got Apple to replace an out of warranty motherboard for a paid os upgrade. Can’t find a reference to it now [1] but there was some sort of somewhat known issue with the powerbook g3 that I had at the time that presented under os x, but not os 9. I argued successfully that it should be fixed under the “software warranty” because it said it was compatible with that powerbook, but the processor issue made it incompatible, and it worked. Imagine that happening today… [1] This CNET article alludes to it but doesn’t go into much detail: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lombard-powerbook-the-processor-is-the-problem/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lombard-powerbook-the-pr...
- Lammy 5y ago
  It’s kind of remarkable there weren’t more issues than that considering Lombard was their very first “New World” portable, “PowerBook1,1”! Even the OG toilet-seat iBook comes afterward as “PowerBook2,1”: https://macintoshgarden.org/apple-powermac-line-of-computers#PowerBook https://macintoshgarden.org/apple-powermac-line-of-computers...
  - philistine 5y ago
    That New World switch is such an Earth-shaking change and it’s basically forgotten. It was Steve Jobs’ first big software transition before OS X was even decided on as the future of the company.

dmitriid 5y ago

An interface where all elements are distinguishable from each other..

carlivar 5y ago
Because Jobs was still in control. As I understand it, this was a constant tension between Ive and Jobs. Of course Ive design eventually dominated after Jobs' death.
- grishka 5y ago
  It appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions, slowly but surely. There are skeuomorphic icons in Monterey, and I think there's fewer borderless crap. The one thing that does really grind my gears though — they've replaced all purpose-made icons in toolbars and such with some "universal" ones that completely disregard the existence of the pixel grid. There's literally not a single line in these icons that isn't blurry af.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions, slowly but surely And yet there's the completely washed out BigSur and Monterrey for which I recommend turning on contrast mode: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1456894618000400385?s=20 https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1456894618000400385?s=20

sharikous 5y ago

Tiger was the apex of developer-friendly FOSS-friendly Apple. You can find the last official guide to modifying and compiling the xnu kernel from that time. Documentation was fabulous. I miss those times.

easton 5y ago
It’s kind of sad when you find a great Apple doc that there’s a 90% chance the top of the page says “Documentation Archive”.
azalemeth 5y ago
Also, the GUI for building GUIs was great. Nothing really made you appreciate why they wanted objects so much as dragging buttons around and instantiating the class. It made sense internally to me as a university student at the time. Objective C was a "relatively simple" set of extensions (which I never really understood) over C (which I claimed to understand at the time) and the language made you aware of both "the magic" of what you were doing and, at the same time, how it related to the bare metal. I learnt a lot from it. I'd love to know what this looks like to a straight-out-of-university developer of an Electron app, though.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code, there was a cottage industry of custom NSSplitView classes. Even just making a button a different color involved reinventing the wheel a substantial amount. The current Electron/React approach has no happy path - everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to have to write a novella.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    > Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, but the moment you needed to do something different you were back to writing reams of code I'm making this up, but perhaps this was beneficial for UI consistency across apps anyway?

kailuowang 5y ago

Yeah I was there. Some people may think it's just the norm in the old times. It's not. It's just Apple obsession with being "user friendly", and for some reason, they think Gui is more friendly for programmers than code.

toyg 5y ago
It did work though, the developer drain from MS to Apple around that time was massive. They were giving easy tools to low-skill developers, and command-line access to high-skill developers, a win-win. Whereas MS around that time was busy overcomplicating Visual Studio in their quest to merge web and desktop development for lock-in purposes.
anthk 5y ago
Where would you put TCL/TK? It merges the best of both worlds.

alisonkisk 5y ago

Is that iPhone a legit early Apple mockup before, or just a joke?

someotherperson 5y ago
Neither -- it appears to be a third-party mockup of what an Apple phone could have looked like.
callahad 5y ago
Just a joke. There were plenty of rumors about an Apple phone around that time, but it was generally referred to as the "iTunes Phone." And the mockups were significantly more hideous: https://web.archive.org/web/20070630183849/http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/05/06/28/motorola_itunes_phone_revealed.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070630183849/http://www.applei... Five months after Mac OS X Tiger's release, the iTunes phone was unveiled: the Motorola ROKR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR). You can find some fun things in the old MacRumors archives (https://www.macrumors.com/archive/ https://www.macrumors.com/archive/). For example, a post (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/07/29/steve-jobs-on-itunes-phone-and-carriers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2005/07/29/steve-jobs-on-itunes-ph...) from July 2005, two months before the ROKR, and two years before the iPhone: > When questioned about the lifespan of the iPod and why the functionality won't eventually move into the cell phone, Jobs answers, "I'm going to leave the answer to our actions in the future." Or this (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/09/20/jobs-on-motorola-itunes-video-ipod-bluetooth-and-more/ https://www.macrumors.com/2005/09/20/jobs-on-motorola-itunes...), from September 2005: > - Feels that Bluetooth isn't a good option. Sound isn't good. Recharging headphones is a pain. Eleven years later: AirPods.

flohofwoe 5y ago

Wow, that old Xcode UI with "Active Target" and "Active Build Configuration" made a lot more sense than the current layout! I always thought that weird "Scheme" stuff was a left-over from the olden days, but it actually seems to be an intended feature that was introduced at a later time.

RandallBrown 5y ago
The scheme stuff was added because Xcode became able to do a lot more stuff beyond "Run app" and "Debug app". There were a lot of hoops you had to jump through to get unit tests working and there weren't iOS apps that could be run in a simulator or device.

Liquid_Fire 5y ago

Maybe I am missing some context here as I have never developed for an Apple platform, but what is the point this blog post is trying to make? That the tooling used to be very complicated?

toyg 5y ago
Actually the opposite, likely. The tooling was preinstalled and ready to go, and you could largely click your way through building interactive experiences. Compare this GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable flow with the incantations you need to know to set up a React interface, for example. It's night and day.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Xcode/dev tools were not preinstalled, but just cost a registration on their site to download and install.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    When OS X was still distributed on optical discs, it came with a dev tools disc for the first several releases. That how I personally stumbled upon Project Builder, Cocoa, etc. I may have never found it if I had to seek it out and download it.
- addandsubtract 5y ago
  What does macOS / iOS / iPadOS development look like today? Do you not have XCode with a GUI-driven workflow anymore? I only poked around iOS development during the iPhone 1/3G days, but I thought tooling has been constantly improving since then.
  - AndroidKitKat 5y ago
    Disclaimer, I'm only a wannabe Apple platform developer, but the GUI-driven workflow is still the predominate way to develop for Apple platforms. The most radical change is the introduction of SwiftUI, which has you writing interfaces entirely with code, rather than using drag-n-drop components with Storyboards.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Not sure why alisonkisk's comment is dead, as that's the only thing interesting in this post. It's funny to see, because the first Android versions were similar / no touch

skhr0680 5y ago
If someone asked me what I thought an iPhone would look like in 2006, that’s what I would have come up with

_teyd 5y ago

I don't know if it's nostalgia but somehow this interface looks more lively and friendly to me than modern MacOS which feels flatter and has less personality (to me personally).

nly 5y ago
I agree. Modern UIs are soulless
- petepete 5y ago
  I agree to an extent but the thought of having an application spread across seven or eight windows makes me feel nauseous.
  - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
    It can be a good way to make use of smaller screens (e.g. on laptops). Multiple "virtual desktops" makes it easier to manage
  - dijonman2 5y ago
    I use many, many windows and tools to help me switch including virtual desktops. Carryover from X11 days.
  - ptx 5y ago
    It helps that you can press Command+Option+H to hide all other windows (from other applications) to reduce clutter.
- abraxas 5y ago
  Yeah, it's like everyone fell in love with the X/Athena widgets all of a sudden. I'd never have guessed that after all these years we'd go back to UIs looking like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets#/media/File:Screenshot_of_%22Xman%22_program.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets#/media/File:S...
sneak 5y ago

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

My favorite version of OS X was El Cap. Nothing since has been enjoyable. I get it, my preference, but I'm allowed.

sgt 5y ago
My favorite is Mojave.. coincidentally the one I am running.
- Normille 5y ago
  Me too.
- pcdoodle 5y ago
  Same.
grishka 5y ago
My favorite is Mavericks, the last one with skeuomorphism.
godDLL 5y ago
10.8 was the last of agreeable direction for OSX for me. I'm running 10.12, for software compatibility reasons. Likely here our paths will split. Versions beyond this are of no interest to me.

seumars 5y ago

OSX Tiger running on a Power Mac G5 was my dream setup I never could afford. Time flies.

flatiron 5y ago
Someone had one of those g5s on eBay for a few hundo. Ones with the wheels. I regret not picking it up and at least putting bsd on it.
chrizel 5y ago
I bought my first desktop Mac back in 2004 after owning an iBook 3G since 2002. And as a 19 year old software developer from Germany who finished his apprenticeship, I wanted the best Mac I could afford. I bought a Power Mac G5 - one of the first dual core models with water cooling. Was a lot of money back then and I waited months for it to arrive, but it was a great machine. Played a lot of World of Warcraft on this thing. :-) And did some Cocoa/Objective-C development. But it was never the big investment that I thought it would be. After the Intel switch in 2006, the Power Mac G5 didn't have much more use for me personally because the new Intel machines were so much better... Today I'm more into buying the cheaper machines for myself. Should have put the money from the Power Mac G5 into Apple stocks...
- Normille 5y ago
  My first desktop Mac was an 8500. I bought it when I was a student and took out a loan to buy it at £3500 second hand. Unbelievable how cheap computing power has become in such a relatively short time.

mfollert 5y ago

I really love this, thank you. This was so much me back then ... the switch from Windows to a Mac basically was my "awakening" as a dev.

throwmeback 5y ago

I... don't get the nostalgia. Just for context, I'm 26, from a post-commie country, have been around computers since birth thanks to my dad. He wasn't technical, he just liked the new tech. What stinks to me: - I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone) - Skeuomorphism was always very "uncanny valley" for me; I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones, the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend to lose my focus quickly - I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those old IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default - most of them were never used by anyone and everyone would just click through to the main window; being a small child I didn't know what to do or where to start and nobody around me could help - this memory kept me disinterested with programming until I literally went to a programming bootcamp after my finals. - I really mean it! IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those supposedly golden times.

ptr 5y ago
Nostalgia is irrational and often felt for things that were objectively worse. I feel nostalgic about a lot of crap. Including Tiger.
vintagedave 5y ago
> I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those old IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default... Tiger and Xcode 2 is quite old and I think is not really the version of macOS many people yearn for. It was the first version many started using (10.0-10.3's graphics were terrible - pinstripes! - and 10.4 was the 'Redmond, Start Your Photocopiers' release which was genuinely exciting. Although I'd used OS X at uni, I bought my first Mac with 10.4 Tiger. Since for many it was the first used, it's what's remembered - but using Tiger this month, I realised that several things I fondly remembered were actually in newer versions.) The 'best' version is very likely 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009), or possibly Mavericks (2013), the last pre-flat-design OS X. Snow Leopard had a clean, fairly modern UI (so your concerns about multi-window were heard) yet was still joyful. > I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone) The iMac G4, which runs 10.4 Tiger and 10.5, has a 16:10 aspect ratio screen if you buy the 17" screen option. (Source: just bought one, to investigate if it's truly nostalgia or things really were better back then.) > I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones Much of OS X was bright and colourful, with pretty graphics, which as you note is very different to Win95/OS 7. However the skeuomorphism wasn't as strong as its reputation is these days. Much of the interaction (say, Cover Flow) is what we'd today call skeuomorphic but really was just a fairly natural way to interact. The real skeuomorphic elements, like the Calendar app using stitched leather, were fairly rare. > the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend to lose my focus quickly 100% agreed. I personally find it very hard to distinguish elements at a glance in modern macOS. > IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those supposedly golden times. I think early 2000s OS X was not as golden as remembered, but mid-2000s to 2012 was extraordinary. OS X really ramped up and improved in those years. Then when they switched to flat design, they lost a lot of usability tweaks along with it. Running current and old OSX/macOS side by side on one desk, as I'm doing, you can clearly see it's the same OS, but today's has much more onscreen, taking more space, but has many small UX indicators missing, and yet despite the amount onscreen the design feels austere and soulless. I find UIs with UX hints built in to their design, and designed for visual beauty, both usable and pleasing for my mind the same way any beautiful object is, and I dearly miss them.

a-dub 5y ago

> You’re amazed by the brand new Spotlight and Safari RSS, you like your new OS so much you want to develop apps for it. when i was younger i had a used next slab. it had the same effect, everything was so cool you just wanted to build things for it. next thing i knew i was coming in on weekends to build a from scratch port of my then employer's product. my boss at the time was blown away. it's no wonder to me that berners-lee wrote the first version of worldwideweb on the next, nor carmack with quake... edit: i guess it was doom. it was a long time ago!

mietek 5y ago
It was both Doom and Quake!

bluedino 5y ago

I always wondered how early Mac OS X developers learned to navigate XCode and Cocoa. Were they all just ex-NeXT programmers? I bought an old copy of the Hillegass book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but I'm guessing most people learned from Apple developer docs that I never saw (or guess didn't know how to find back then) As an aside, I don't miss the old programming books where each chapter just showed you how to use some GUI elements and they never got around to showing patterns on how you would actually create a usable application.

fundad 5y ago
The most useful non-source code resources at the time were about GCC, BSD and Apple’s PDF guides on how the OS works, and the Human Interface Guides, paid Developer Connection accounts got you tools mailed to you and DVDs of WWDC seminars. But it’s a profession, selling shrinkwapped desktop applications or the modern equivalent takes a lot.
rapind 5y ago
Depends how early you mean. The Big Nerd Ranch osx book has been around for a while.
carlosrg 5y ago
Apple’s developer documentation was much, much better and complete back then. There was several introduction documents, guides, etc. For example: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaFundamentals/Introduction/Introduction.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...
- varunprasad 5y ago
  This was key. I built a couple of minor, but useful for me, apps by simply following the docs at the time. The major difference between Apple docs, and Javadocs at the time (Java was the actual language I used to program in), was that Javadocs was basically API references, whereas Apple docs had API references but they also had guides that went into the why, and the best practices, and even occasionally alternatives for edge cases, etc. And the fact that it was available offline as an optional download with XCode was a massive bonus at a time when ubiquitous Wifi and internet was not a thing. It was a real surprise to me, after having stepped away from any sort of Apple development for a few years that Apple's docs were considered bad.

ralphc 5y ago

In the vintage apple groups and subreddits Tiger is preferred over Leopard because it runs on more hardware and it's the last version that allows Classic mode that runs classic Mac OS applications.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
Can you link to a few such subreddits. Thank you.
- vintagedave 5y ago
  The one I read is https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple . If there are more I'd love links too!
  - ralphc 5y ago
    Yes, vintageapple is the main one. There's also powerpc, with some rare appearances in vintagecomputing.
- rvense 5y ago
  There are some good forums, tho mostly with a pre-OS X focus: 68kmla.org tinkerdifferent.com

PascLeRasc 5y ago

This was really fun to read. Tiger was before my time - does anyone know of good resources on where things went from here? What were some of the first 3rd party native Mac apps?

randallsquared 5y ago

> Apple releasing their first phone, which will likely run some kind of Cocoa in it. Good thing you already know how to write applications for it, right? Awww. It must have been so shocking to MacOS devs when the iPhone was announced and it was web applications or nothing.

draw_down 5y ago
Real heads wrote Cocoa apps for it anyway!
Lammy 5y ago
Probably less so if they’d written a Dashboard widget (also a new feature in Tiger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode

Lammy 5y ago

> 2005! The future is here! You have just spent $129 for the newest release of Mac OS X: Tiger. For me it was more like “you have just torrented the Golden Master DVD image and restored it on to your bootable Firewire iPod because you only have a CD-RW drive and nobody has released rips of the six-CD version yet” ;) https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428 https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428 e: Siracusa’s review for Ars is still a great read too: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/

quijoteuniv 5y ago
I had a disc i bought at the end of line to fix a mac of a friend, some decade ago! and when refurbishing old macs to Linux become very handy, as before i could install linux sometimes i needed eEFInd.
lostgame 5y ago
I don’t think I ever paid for a MacOS (OSX, at the time) upgrade. I still remember buying a RapidShare account for a month to get Snow Leopard off those multi-split files because I couldn’t find a torrent. The 00’s were such a different time for tech.
- varunprasad 5y ago
  I paid for alternate OS X versions (and then jumped on the snow leopard wagon immediately due to the $29? price). That meant shelling out $129 after about 3 years (2 year lifecycles, and I think I bought my first mac almost a year into the then OS lifecycle). This provided me with excellent stability and a very reasonable price. I'd save up a few hundred $s, and then upgrade the software and hardware at around the same time, so I also added additional RAM and moved the HDD to the CD-RW and inserted an SSD instead of the HDD (I am 100% sure I made these changes for my macbook, but I'm not sure if I made them, or if they were even possible, for the iBook I owned before). That was almost a decade+ of highly stable, highly effective, and almost cutting edge of computing that I haven't even come close to replicating in the almost decade since, despite earning real money. I did switch to Linux for my personal computing a few months ago, and I have hopes that this may allow me to do so, once I really set something up once I get to my Mar-Apr spring cleaning. Linux is giving me that Mac feeling for the first time in a long time, although the major challenge here appears to be restraining oneself. It seems so easy to get lost trying to distro hop constantly, or try a new terminal for marginal benefits, etc. The new shiny in Linux shines very bright, and restraint seems to be the core challenge required to have a stable, outcome focused computing experience with Linux.

unixhero 5y ago

OSX 10.4 and 10.5 were marvelous operating systems for so many reasons. Particularly 10.4 in my view due to the compatability layer for legacy MacOS binaries, AND big binary feature that made the same OS usable on PPC AND Intel X86. Also Quartz Composer, which I find really interesting and awesome [0]. 0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer

andrethegiant 5y ago

Tiger also was the debut of Dashboard widgets, which opened up creating app-like experiences for those who knew HTML/JS/CSS instead of Cocoa (myself included).

sharikous 5y ago
Also it introduced the canvas element and opened the way for HTML 5. To this day I miss being able to enter Dashboard with a single keypress like in the old days. I used that mini calculator, note taking app and weather widget constantly. By I seem to be alone. For dome reason most people hated Dashboard.
- andrethegiant 5y ago
  I didn’t hate it :-) I actually made the Gas widget, which fetched local gas prices. It was a popular widget at the time, and ended up on a slide (amongst other third-party widgets) during the 2006 WWDC keynote.
- ProfessorLayton 5y ago
  I’m with you here! I still miss Dashboard to this day, and regret that such a great idea never caught on. Having widgets merged with Notification Center (!) is such a worse experience, especially on smaller screens. Never mind the fact that apps like Calculator only allow a single instance/window for no reason. Only way around that is to literally duplicate the app!

marbletiles 5y ago

This makes me more nostalgic for the old Interface Builder than it does Aqua. So much more straightforward to create actions/outlets and create the files than the current mess.

Shinchy 5y ago

I still love the way OSX Tiger looks, even after all these years.

rayiner 5y ago

Still the best version of OS X.

ad-astra 5y ago

Hah, I’m so glad that my team writes 100% of our UI programmatically instead of using IB.

johnebgd 5y ago

During this era Apple sent third party official devs a shirt when the new OS released. I still have mine but they are quite worn out from all the wear. Wish they still did that but I appreciate how much less expensive Apple developer accounts are these days.

jonpalmisc 5y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962004

diskzero 5y ago

Tiger was the first release of OSX that I was truly proud of. I came to Apple, not as part of the NeXT acquisition, but from the post-pivot Be, which had decided to focus their attention on "internet appliances". My love at the time was operating systems and specifically GUI libraries and components. Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re-skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring. After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in creating something great that would ship and be of real value to users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2 building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive. In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to Steve.) In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be. He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user-friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a startup called Android. The group who went to the meet and greet contained some significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble, Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history. All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment time all rolled into my current employment phase. This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9 group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a functioning software organization, the product lines were much cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop operating system should be. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo

maxpert 5y ago

For the record to this day I believe this aqua pill styled interface was way more clean and attractive than the flat design. I've never been fan of flat interfaces, it's the reason I hated Windows 8 onwards interfaces. Skeuomorphism was just perfect!

miles 5y ago

For anyone on an M1 and feeling nostalgic, PPC versions of OS X run quite well in UTM/QEMU: https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger-on-m1.html https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger-on-m1.html

Brian_K_White 5y ago

Lovely! It's just missing the part where half way through, osx and xcode updates and your existing app no longer builds on your machine nor runs on anyone else's. My ascerbic observations about the platform aside, I love this, both in it's current context, and would have loved it at the time. Thank you!

sophiebits 5y ago

> Next, go back to the MainMenu.xib, right click on your MainWindowController and select Instantiate MainWindowController .xib – Freudian slip? :)

victor106 5y ago

What resources do people here recommend to learn Mac OS development?

jamil7 5y ago
It depends what you want to do, if you're playing around building apps for a hobby and friends and family and you can target Monterey, you could go with SwiftUI and Apple's official tutorials (it runs on older versions but a lot is missing). If you've got experience in React or any other of the declarative frameworks you'll pick it up quickly, it's actually much nicer than React.
mrbombastic 5y ago
I have only read their books on iOS dev but have had good experiences with Big Nerd Ranch books: https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-OS-Ranch-Guides/dp/0134076958 https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-OS-Ranch-Guides/dp/... Ray Wenderlich tutorials are also iOS biased but have been great: https://www.raywenderlich.com https://www.raywenderlich.com

marstall 5y ago

funny I was thinking this would demonstrate that Xcode and Interface Builder were easier to grok for a beginner than they are today, but it seems it was just as particular then as it is today.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

I have occasionally tried to put together a basic Mac app. I picked up the basics of Swift easily enough, but I get stuck because XCode seems completely incomprehensible to me, and my basic attempts at finding a "cheat sheet" or "idiots guide" meet with failure. It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe try again in another year. Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation?

mrbombastic 5y ago
it isn't just you, I've been doing iOS development for the last few years which generally gets preference for docs these days but I have still found over the years even if most things have documentation 1) it is pretty difficult to find 2) it is lacking. A lot of times you are better off going to 3rd party tutorials to get what you are looking for, I would recommend the Big Nerd Ranch books and Ray Wenderlich tutorials. I don't know if I have come across a general Xcode intro tutorial, maybe because Xcode is massive, most stuff is task oriented and you pick up the Xcode quirks along the way.
jjtheblunt 5y ago
Did you have a go at Appcode from Jetbrains?
- the_only_law 5y ago
  It’s been a while since I tried it, but iirc you had to context switch between XCode and AppCode if you wanted to use storyboards or whatever they’re called.
Austin_Conlon 5y ago
Under the Help menu and in the Xcode Help menu item it's thoroughly documented.
MagerValp 5y ago
If you tried to build a Mac app based on Storyboards, which iirc has been the default for the past few years, then yes. All the docs are for iOS and the Mac side is completely under documented. The classic way of building building apps is quite well documented though. It has been modernized quite a bit since Tiger and Xcode 2.0, but the general structure and workflow is the same as in this article, and there’s plenty of docs. The new SwiftUI stuff is still under heavy development, and starting with the wwdc sessions is probably the best approach.

srinathkrishna 5y ago

That was such a fun nostalgic ride! :)

jedberg 5y ago

Why would you use Yahoo in 2005? I'm pretty sure Google was already the more popular search engine by then, especially for people looking for developer documentation. Edit: Best data I can find shows Google was about 35%, Yahoo 30%, and MSN 15%. So I guess it was a toss up if you were using Yahoo or Google, but I seem to recall everyone I knew who was a developer preferred Google because it did a better job finding developer docs.

smm11 5y ago

I used Rhapsody for a couple years on a Thinkpad. It was very, very limited for what I was doing at the time, and the Lighthouse applications I could get running weren't anywhere near what anything else was, by the time I got them. My work laptop at the time was a G3 running System 8.6, which remains my favorite Apple OS to this day. I still have a G4 with 8.6 stuffed full of everything for the heck of it. And the Thinkpad.

dhofer 5y ago

[dead]

usui 5y ago

GUI-driven development is a perfectly fine way to getting started, which is what this guide does. However, does anyone else get an uneasy feeling about developing software that revolves too much around using a GUI/heavy IDE? You can argue that Visual Studio Code is bloated, etc., but at the end of the day, I can clone a project on GitHub and easily run a CLI command to compile and try a project, and maybe use Vim if I have to do a quick edit. Any time I see a development guide that depends on screenshots or requires a specific IDE it makes me feel uneasy, even though I know that's not how most newcomers feel.

brundolf 5y ago
I don't really mind it if that IDE works seamlessly without issues, is freely available, and the project data is all in plaintext. I wasn't programming in 2005 but I have reason to think the Xcode experience really was that tight at the time When I lose faith in the IDE and its abstractions, that's when I get really antsy for the ability to opt-out/do everything directly without its help
wruza 5y ago
All this guide shows is an Interface Builder, basically. Either you use one of these, or walk through a boring process of setting up controls and their properties and their bindings in code. Eventually IB just interferes or breaks your layouts, but at this time you have a good visual idea of its workings. This is a good thing, even if you're a senior newcomer. What they've got wrong is that IB is not a tool, but only a tutorial.

slackfan 5y ago

Geocities was dead by 2005, and web 2.0 was in full swing.