 printer was 2K and you had to go to NeXT camp for a week at HQ, another 2K. But that investment changed my life. I began working with Objective C and began having Object Satori - I totally got it, how liberating and powerful 'black box' engineering was. As a developer, I could assemble amazing software using the heavy lifting provided by the AppKit - the predecessor of Cocoa.
And, here's the non-obvious take home of living on the cusp of the Now: We are always, always at the brink of being on the ground floor for the next big thing. You'll have a deep feeling, just as I did in '89. Go with it!
I immediately wrote a fun text styling app named TextArt - and in October 1989, I was the first indie developer to ship a title for the 0.9 release of NeXTStep. Steve loved it, and then he asked Kris & I to write a Filemaker like database for the NeXT. We agreed, but only if it could be a full media database to take advantage of the sound and image files now possible on the cube. Thus was born DataPhile.
Simultaneously I evolved TextArt into Create - a full multipage design and layout program - it was featured in the first edition of NeXTWORLD - the magazine devoted to all things NeXT and the fledging NeXT community. Create is now in version 14.4 available for Mac OS X, having been ported from NeXTSTep to OpenStep to Rhapsody and to Cocoa.
DataPhile and Create began making us some serious money and bringing serious
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