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I'm very pleased to be back writing a Stone's Throw after my self-imposed hiatus due to a combination of Apple's non-disclosure agreements and the lack of public announcements vis-a-vis OS X. Now that Steve has set the timetable for delivery and revealed some of the awesome power of the "new" operating system, I can once again sing the praises of X with a clear conscience. It's real and getting better every build. Stone Design has 7 applications that already run on the Developer Preview, and the next six months offer a chance to put the final spit and polish on some exciting new applications.
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© Andrew C Stone. All rights reserved.
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Now, I can't say that the wait has been easy - it's been three years since Dr. Amelio stunned the Macintosh World with the purchase of NeXT instead of Be. And then there is the sobering reality that Apple has been very quietly anti-marketing OSX Server for 7 months. What's kept me going (besides sales of software to the Mac OS X Server users who think that OSXS is also a decent desktop) is faith that against all odds, our beloved NeXTStep will see the light of day in the consumer market, reborn with a beautiful make-over that would make Mary Kay smile!
And the momentum is building from several directions simultaneously. From below, it's the Darwin effort. What was once the purview of the lone ranger Fred Sanchez ("You see that slide with the big piece of pie labeled BSD layer? That's me!") is now open for all to come and contribute. This should help keep the noise down on the macosx-talk mailing list, since the complainers can instead get to work fixing and improving what they don't like! From the core graphics group we're getting the most pristine and liquidy effects ever seen, yet its all built on industry standard favorites PDF and OpenGL. The QuickTime gang's bag of tricks and codecs will be accessible through Cocoa, as well as all the other Mac defining technologies such as AppleScript and ColorSynch. The DriverKit crew will provide us with the keys to every kind of peripheral, at last. And then you have all of us starry-eyed developers beating on the API in ways never considered by the designers. Each team doing incredible work, and its coming together fast and furious!
I'm sure the folks in Redmond are busy drafting catch-up plans and hiring PR flacks to put out a spin that they invented it all first! But alas, money cannot buy the kind of loyalty, dedication and determination that emanates from the Mac faithful. Ladies and Gentlemen, behold, X cometh!
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2000-01-05 22:47:21 -0700
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