Does Apple Computer Inc’s announcement of Mac OS X mark a retreat from Apple’s original plan to migrate its user base over to NeXT Software Inc’s NextStep environment, aka Rhapsody? It’s a question that needs to be asked, given that Steve Jobs, now interim CEO of Apple, was the man who sold the NextStep software to Apple’s then CEO Gil Amelio for over $400m at the end of 1996. Apple admitted pretty openly on Monday that its developers weren’t too enamored with the prospect of a total re-write in order to get native applications over to Rhapsody. Instead they now face only a ten percent tune up to get existing applications running on the new generation, and now Macintosh stalwarts such as Adobe Systems Inc face porting efforts measured in months or weeks, rather than years. But Apple developers at the show have been hitting back at claims in the media that the announcement is a major Apple U turn, and say instead that Mac OS X simply marks a convergence of Apple’s previously separate YellowBox and BlueBox compatibility efforts. Killing the Mac OS was just not going to happen writes Mac developer David Every on his Apple advocacy web site (http://www.mackido.com). Apple has its entire past built on that legacy code. Why throw it all away? The answer is, they won’t and they wouldn’t. Every argues that YellowBox, the former OpenStep, would have taken a year for software developers to port to. BlueBox, for running older applications, was supposed to help with the transition, but included no provision for the further development of original MacOS – something that would have effectively killed it off. Apple’s new Carbon strategy provides that means, by getting rid of two thousand bad application programming interface calls, leaving 4,000 existing core APIs and adding a few new ones. Mac OS X will still run old applications, using BlueBox or a newly named equivalent, but it will be easier to get developers to gradually evolve newer applications over to the Carbon calls and eventually to Mac OS X – really the old Copland operating system under a different name. YellowBox, argues Every, will still be the best method of writing brand new applications for the Macintosh, with the resulting applications also running on Windows. YellowBox, he says, still does what Apple said it would originally do with the NeXT technology, namely converge the Mac look and feel with the NeXT interface, and implement a Unix-based microkernel as underpinnings – at the same time adding some new technologies, such as QuickTime. Both routes end up in the same place – Mac OS X. In the Mac world there will be Mac applications. Some will use different technologies (Mac APIs, the Carbon subset of MacAPIs which adds features, or YellowBox APIs which has similar features), but users won’t have to know the difference. Their apps will just work. Just how idyllic this situation will actually be remains to be seen, and as Every himself warns, there are bound to b further refinements ahead and plans for MacOS 11. But developers, at the moment, do not appear unhappy with Apple.
