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Lollypop

macrumors 6502a
Sep 13, 2004
829
1
Johannesburg, South Africa
Even if Apple doesn't port the GUI stuff having the more "core" stuff available on windows will make it easier for Apple to develop their software for windows, in turn allowing for better features on both platforms.. maybe the big delay of the new iLife is Windows compatibility issues! :eek: :rolleyes: :D
 

moonislune

macrumors regular
Sep 11, 2005
157
0
Even if Apple doesn't port the GUI stuff having the more "core" stuff available on windows will make it easier for Apple to develop their software for windows, in turn allowing for better features on both platforms.. maybe the big delay of the new iLife is Windows compatibility issues! :eek: :rolleyes: :D

I think Apple is going to stay focused on Safari and iTunes. Any further integration sounds like a conspiracy
 

treizep

macrumors newbie
Jun 14, 2007
1
0
Core* is the base of Cocoa

The people saying that Core* is not Cocoa are wrong.

Cocoa is an objective-c layer over the Core* frameworks.

Carbon is another framework and has nothing in common with Core*.
 

Hombre

macrumors newbie
Jan 5, 2007
25
0
Although I don't believe Safari is a true YellowBox app, I don't know why it should be so surprising that Apple has not killed YellowBox completely.

I really thinkn they have updated it with every major release of Mac OS X, and have a stable, mature and up-to-date version running internally.

YellowBox could be a very usefull option in the future. They simply haven't put it on the market yet, and perhaps never will do. This is about options, though.
 

samh004

macrumors 68020
Mar 1, 2004
2,222
141
Australia
maybe the big delay of the new iLife is Windows compatibility issues! :eek: :rolleyes: :D

Haha... could be, but wouldn't that take away the whole reason to switch to the mac.

Without knowing too much about it, I do think there's a chance Safari could be a Yellow Box app as it's basically just a copy of the mac version, right down to the preferences looking the same... or still incorporating mac elements, while running on windows.
 

jbh001

macrumors member
May 14, 2003
82
1
If this is true why didn't they actually at least talk about it on WWDC?! It would have made it interesting at least!
Ahh, but now maybe this was one of the "super secret features" of Leopard. No need to announce Xcode for Windows until Leopard actually ships, now do we?. :p

Prior to the switch to Intel, Apple kept saying: move to Xcode, move to Xcode, move to Xcode. Those that did were ahead of the game when Apple switched to Intel. Those that didn't had to play catch-up. I think there might be more to Steve's touting CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, CoreThis, and CoreThat, than just a simple surface level "Don't we have an awesome OS." I sense some ominous foreshadowing in the works.

If the developer tools are good enough, and the user experience excellent enough, then the underling OS might actually become largely irrelevant--much as it is with the Internet.

I remember seeing one of the first NeXT computers demonstrated. It made Apple, Microsoft, and IBM look like they had been asleep for twenty years--and this was only 5 to 7 years (1989-1991) after the Mac was introduced (1984). Apple and IBM panicked and tried to create Taligent as a response, and Microsoft started spreading FUD and blathering on about Cairo which sort of became Windows 95, Windows NT, and some of it (WinFS) is still under development 16 years later.

Apple now seems poised to pull a "NeXTSTEP" in the cell phone market with the iPhone.

Might they also have their sights set on other targets. I'd be awfully anxious about Apple if I were Google or Microsoft.
 

darwen

macrumors 6502a
Apr 12, 2005
668
13
California, US
I thought the quotes in the article were clear to explain the significance of "Yellow Box". Basically, Apple promised when Mac OS X was first being developed that they would deploy technology to allow a developer to code-once, deploy everywhere. In that they could write their application once under Mac OS X and compile an OS X version, a Windows version etc...

Apple would provide the libraries/frameworks on Mac OS X and Windows to allow their app to run.

At one point, Apple said... no, we're not doing this.

So, this article is just some background and some speculation that Apple's still got that in place.

arn

I understood it! (11:40 pm here :))

This is kinda cool. It would be awesome if it got running but from the sounds of it Apple has kinda killed the idea. Maybe they are just gonna keep it internal. I dont know, just a guess.
 

Undecided

macrumors 6502a
Mar 4, 2005
704
168
California
Combined with Jobs' statements that MS won the desktop war and that if he were in charge of Apple he would milk the Mac for all its got and move on to the next big thing, I think he's doing just that.

We are incrementally being moved to Windows.

Quicktime, iTunes, and now Safari on Windows are not there to bring Windows users to the Mac; they are there to bring Mac users to Windows, ultimately.

We will have NeXT - er, Mac OS X - on Windows.

That's OK - Macs are great today, and the incremental movement will be painless. In the end, we'll have a Mac-like experience on top of Windows, running on Apple hardware. The Apple GUI on Windows will only work on Apple hardware. This relieves Apple of all the development costs and problems with developing the underlying OS. They can focus on the innovative hardware (little things like bluetooth, motion sensors, magsafe, etc.) working in harmony via the Mac GUI on a Windows core (kernel).

Edit: I should add that this is just my opinion, and I could be completely wrong.
 

seenew

macrumors 68000
Dec 1, 2005
1,569
1
Brooklyn
wtf is yellow box??

yellow_box.gif


:p
 

bankshot

macrumors 65816
Jan 23, 2003
1,367
416
Southern California
Red box was the windows version of Yellow box.

Actually, no. Yellow Box was Yellow Box regardless of the platform it was running on. It's essentially what became Cocoa, from my understanding. It was to be available on both Rhapsody (later Mac OS X) and Windows.

Red Box was a environment in which to run Windows apps on Rhapsody, just as Blue Box provided the environment to run old MacOS apps on Rhapsody (now known as Classic in Mac OS X). It's unclear whether Red Box would have reimplemented the Win32 API, like WINE, or if it would have used virtualization like Parallels/VMware.

See http://lowendmac.com/musings/boxes.shtml for more information. Also a very interesting read is http://www.roughlydrafted.com/0506.redbox1.html which contends that Red Box was a myth and never existed. Kind of like the PowerBook G5. ;)
 

JFreak

macrumors 68040
Jul 11, 2003
3,151
9
Tampere, Finland
We are incrementally being moved to Windows. Quicktime, iTunes, and now Safari on Windows are not there to bring Windows users to the Mac; they are there to bring Mac users to Windows, ultimately. We will have NeXT - er, Mac OS X - on Windows. I should add that this is just my opinion, and I could be completely wrong.

It's a possibility, but not a probability.

The big picture is that historically Mac OS has been "the choice" while Windows has been the defacto standard that everyone has been buying (because "everything" has been developed for Windows and fewer software titles for Mac). Now what Steve Jobs is trying to do is reverse the situation: Imagine Mac OSX being "the platform" where you can run and compile for "everything". That makes using Windows a choice of not having all options open! That makes more (technology conscious) people switch to OSX — and more importantly; that makes more developers switch to OSX and/or XCode.

You can already see signs of this happening as game houses are coming back to Mac. Once these compile-for-all-platforms development tools are ready and games are developed with XCode (which is likely to happen, because if something is easier for a company like in developing software once instead of twice, that will happen), it makes Windows a 2nd grade platform. But there's no chance for it unless XCode can also compile for Windows. Until that happens, Mac games will always be ported.
 

sw1tcher

macrumors 603
Jan 6, 2004
5,282
17,856
wtf is yellow box??

Yellow Box:

Cocoa is derived from the NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP programming environments developed by NeXT in the late 1980s. Apple acquired NeXT in December 1996, and subsequently went to work on the Rhapsody operating system that was supposed to be the direct successor of OPENSTEP. It was to have an emulation base for Mac OS applications, called Blue Box. The OPENSTEP base of libraries and binary support was termed Yellow Box. Rhapsody evolved into Mac OS X, and the Yellow Box became Cocoa. As a result, Cocoa classes begin with the acronym "NS" (for the NeXT-Sun creation of OPENSTEP[1]): NSString, NSArray, etc.
 

poochy12358

macrumors newbie
Jun 15, 2007
4
0
Yellow Boxes - Viruses?

Wouldn't this 'yellow box' enable Windows viruses to be ported to Mac OS X? Who would ever want 114 000 viruses on a Mac!
 

alandail

macrumors 6502
Jul 23, 2002
257
0
Ohio
Haha... could be, but wouldn't that take away the whole reason to switch to the mac.

Without knowing too much about it, I do think there's a chance Safari could be a Yellow Box app as it's basically just a copy of the mac version, right down to the preferences looking the same... or still incorporating mac elements, while running on windows.

Safari on the Mac is a Cocoa app (open the nib files in interface builder and they are using Cocoa classes). Yellow Box is Cocoa on windows. Either they rewrote the user interface for windows or they are using cocoa in windows.
 

iMeowbot

macrumors G3
Aug 30, 2003
8,634
0
Combined with Jobs' statements that MS won the desktop war and that if he were in charge of Apple he would milk the Mac for all its got and move on to the next big thing, I think he's doing just that.

We are incrementally being moved to Windows.
It's going to be a little hard to keep on milking that Mac for R&D money if they kill it off. For that reason, if nothing else, Apple will keep it around. Another thing is that the other Apple product lines are mostly luxury items, few if any people actually need them. The Mac line is a little more resistant to consumer fads, a more reliable income stream, and a move to a commodity operating system would break the dependency that keeps the hardware margins up.

Quicktime, iTunes, and now Safari on Windows are not there to bring Windows users to the Mac; they are there to bring Mac users to Windows, ultimately.
Apple did hype the iTunes port as some kind of unprecedented move, and they're likewise making a big deal of the Safari port, but really they've been dabbling on the Windows side for ages. FileMaker is still there, and ClarisWorks/AppleWorks was there for a long time too. And of course, there's QuickTime.

Safari on Windows will (if Apple don't blow it) increase the browser share and coerce more Web developers into supporting it. The compatibility issue is not a new area for them to be worrying about. Not only will the resulting better browsing experience make the Mac more attractive, it helps make the iPhone look good too.
 

MacFan25863

macrumors 6502a
Jun 20, 2004
557
0
This is also really interesting...

From the page linked to the article...
Apple confirmed it plans to ship a version of Rhapsody for computers based on Intel chips

:eek:

So we actually KNEW about OS X on Intel 8 years before it was announced?
 

Papercut

macrumors newbie
May 26, 2004
19
0
Well known secret

Mac truists hated Jobs when he came back, there were rampant rumors (and we know those are always true) that he was running Nextstep on a ....gasp... IBM Thinkpad in the iCEO office before the launch of OSX (which is actually Nexstep). Aren't friendly takeovers great?

His RDF does not fear time- Fire me? So what, you're gonna pay me, Pay Me, to give me your company!!! Just you wait! Hehehe!

Wow, he is kinda like a supervillain, in fact watch the D dicussion with Gates and you will see a bit of madness seeping through Jobs' usually casual veneer.
 

Xgreed

macrumors newbie
Jan 6, 2004
21
0
Check the source

As anyone can check by this link:

http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/browser/trunk/WebKit/win

the windows 'port' of Safari does not use one line of Objective-C/Cocoa but is programmed in C/C++ against C-libraries from Apple (CoreFoundation/CoreGraphics) and Microsoft (Win32).

Actually, any Safari browser consists roughly of two parts - a system (and Cocoa) independent rendering engine which is the same for Mac, Windows, Symbian, etc. and a system dependent 'shell' which uses whatever fits the target system best (which is Cocoa in the case of the Mac and Win32 in case of Windows)

This also explains why the Windows 'port' of Safari is so much more buggy than the Mac counterpart as the 'shell' is complete new and untested code.

cheers
marc
 

philoscoffee

macrumors member
Jun 11, 2007
41
0
UK
Why would Apple release Yellow Box?

It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has a fully working copy of Yellow Box tucked away somewhere in Cupertino, but the big question is WHY would they ever release it to third-party developers. This would instantly destroy one of the main advantages of the Mac platform: its unique software. Apple use software to sell hardware, and if the same apps were available on Windows then there would be little or no incentive for users to switch to the Mac.

That's not to say that Apple won't continue to use Yellow Box (if it exists) to distribute the occasional strategic app on Windows from time to time, such as iTunes or Safari. Maybe we'll even see a Windows version of iWork as a competitor to MS Office one day, but I seriously doubt that iLife or any of Apple's Pro apps will ever be released for Windows, even though this is no doubt technically feasible. It just doesn't make business sense unless Apple decides it wants to sideline the Mac and turn itself into a software company.
 

Foocha

macrumors 6502a
Jul 10, 2001
588
0
London
Gill Amelio was the CEO at the time of Rhapsody. It was an ultimately failed strategy to migrate the Apple installed userbase over to NextStep, rebranded "Rhapsody". The shortcomings were:

1. Mac OS 7 applications would run in a "blue box" environment - similar to what ultimately became "Classic"

2. Developers would have to completely re-write their applications to run natively in the Yellow Box (NEXTSTEP) environment. To try and sweeten the deal, Apple promised Yellow Box for Windows - a daft idea in the "tail wagging dog" sense, where Gill presumably imagined the likes of Adobe scrapping all Windows development in favour of Yellow Box, presumably accepting a second-class experience for their Windows customers. Not one major Mac software developer ever committed to doing this, and as a result the Rhapsody project was a failure.

When Steve Jobs took over as CEO, one of his most important decisions was to scrap Rhapsody (and Yellow Box for Windows with it) and instead announce Mac OS X - the key difference with this strategy was the introduction of "Carbon" and new environment that offered a smoother transition for developers from OS 9 applications to OS X, since it shared many of the same libraries. In addition, Apple offered support for Carbon apps in Mac OS 9.

It was a brilliant move, and Adobe, MS and Macromedia quickly got on board. The rest is history.

Killing Yellow Box for Windows was a smart move, and I think it's unlikely we'll ever see it return - it's not like there's a shortage of developers or developer tools for Windows!
 

Mr Skills

macrumors 6502a
Nov 21, 2005
803
1
Correct me if this sounds silly, but couldn't you see Apple using Yellow Box to "do a Microsoft"?

Microsoft have made Silverlight cross-platform in an effort to make it the de-facto standard. But if you want to *develop* for it, it has to be on Windows. They want to have their cake and eat it - make the standard universal, but keep Windows dominant.

Couldn't Apple attempt to do the same thing with Yellow Box? In fact, aren't they already doing the same with Safari (in as much as it's a development platform for web apps)?
 

2ndPath

macrumors 6502
Feb 21, 2006
355
0
Wouldn't this 'yellow box' enable Windows viruses to be ported to Mac OS X? Who would ever want 114 000 viruses on a Mac!

No. It might rather allow people to develop viruses for OSX that can also be run on Windows. But then again, viruses often depend on particular bugs or features of the host system, so just writing one virus which works the same on both systems might be more than just recompiling it for the each system.
 

Much Ado

macrumors 68000
Sep 7, 2006
1,532
1
UK
In fact, aren't they already doing the same with Safari (in as much as it's a development platform for web apps)?

That's perhaps a little ambitious.

Apple want to keep Safari at least compatible in the face of IE's widespread use, not make it the default standard.

The ideal for end users would be split market-share between IE, FF and Safari to keep web standards from being unfairly manipulated.
 

granex

macrumors member
Jul 23, 2002
82
0
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has a fully working copy of Yellow Box tucked away somewhere in Cupertino, but the big question is WHY would they ever release it to third-party developers. This would instantly destroy one of the main advantages of the Mac platform: its unique software. Apple use software to sell hardware, and if the same apps were available on Windows then there would be little or no incentive for users to switch to the Mac.

The original purpose here was to make sure that at least a few people would indeed still develop software that ran on the Mac at all. These were pretty dire days for Apple and it was possible that all developers would flee the platform entirely. This was the tremendous importance of the Microsoft investment deal -- it established stability.

The idea would be for developers to be able to use a single solution of both operating systems, thereby ensuring that Mac software would be an easy by-product of normal development. This was basically motivated by the fact that NEXTSTEP had the best software development system in existence.

With Adobe and Microsoft still using there own proprietary cross platform development systems (which incidentally has always led to tremendous lags in both of those companies rolling out Mac products), the impetus for yellow box faded pretty quickly. However, would it still be good to have every piece of software available for Vista available for the Mac? Yes it would. The unique aspects of the software can still be driven by the interaction with the operating system, not just the stand alone features of the software (although Services, for instance, were way, way better on the NeXT).

The thing that might spell trouble for Mac software is the Redbox (running Windows programs directly under Mac APIs), which is essentially what a lot of people thought BootCamp would evolve into in Leopard. It could still be done. It would be a roll of the dice whether the draw of seamlessly being able directly run Windows software on the Mac (and thus eliminating the need for Windows) would compensate for people potentially halting development of Mac specific software. My view has always been that Mac specific software can always win because it can be way better. There is no challenging Adobe and Microsoft, however. If MS ever decided to drop Office support for the Mac, Apple could immediately roll out Redbox as a solution (although MS would work hard to break it, which is why they should have been broken up under the antitrust ruling years ago).
 
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