[Mono-osx] 3 cross-platform questions

[Matt Emson]

Joanna Carter wrote:
> On the other hand, Cocoa comes from the Taligent project, 

An, no. The Cocoa framework originated at Next Computer (Steve Jobs 
company) on the NextStep platform. It has nothing to do with Taligent. 
Indeed, if you read the Aaron Hillegass book "Cocoa programming for Mac 
OS X" (which is, incidentally, one of the best Cocoa tutorials out 
there), in about chapter 2 or 3 he laments the Taligent development 
environment in an anecdote - essentially, he challenged a Taligent team 
member to write him a "Hello world" app, and after 45 mins of 
subclassing and writing classes and subclasses and handlers and reams of 
code, the guy was still struggling to get it to work. Aaron apparently 
walked away before he'd managed to get it to run.

Nextstep and Openstep had pretty much the same base framework - the 
Foundation kit is extremely similar to the final Openstep specification. 
I used to tinker a lot in Openstep and the tools there "Project Builder" 
and "Interface Builder" are the direct (ish) ancestors of the current 
XCode tools. Project Builder existed (and looked exactly the same for 
the most part) up till Mac OS X 10.2. With the 10.3 release, XCode 1.0 
was released. XCode isn't really all that different from the Project 
Builder, in the same way that any IDE evolves over time. I remember 
there were odd difference, but on the whole, it was very similar. 
Interface Builder was absolutely identical till XCode 3.0, even having 
the slightly oddly shaped control images instead of the list type 
pallette thing it does now. IIRC, XCode 2.5 still uses the old Interface 
Builder, so you can install that under Leopard and take a look if you 
really want to :-)

Cocoa itself is pretty similar to the Openstep Kits. Main things that 
have changed are in fleshing out the controls and adding new 
functionality. Probably a little pushing towards Mac standards too - as 
the Next/Openstep desktop looks and feels very different from Aqua. 
Having said that, you can still see the underpinnings - spinning beach 
ball (colour one, nemesis of all Mac OS X users) is straight out of 
Openstep, the filer column view is straight out of Openstep as is the 
notion of dragging directories to an area on the filer window that 
persists them (tho the Openstep one was at the top, not side.) All the 
Netinfo networking stuff is from Nextstep/Openstep.

So, no Taligent, bar features they might have integrated in to Mac OS 
8.x or 9.x and migrated to OS X.

M