Yellow Box for Windows Still Exists?

[whooleytoo]

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)?

I can't imagine it would be very effective. Asking a Windows developer to start learning Cocoa (which might not be the optimal development environment on Windows) just to make their application cross-platform is a hefty request.

It would only really work for Windows projects just starting off now where cross-platform compatibility is key, and where they don't already have previous cross-platform expertise (for someone like Blizzard it's probably easier/quicker to go with their tried and trusted cross-platform code than try something new).

It's a lot more likely this would appeal to Mac-only developers who want to go cross-platform to Windows.

 

[aafuss1]

I spot a pattern-all of the current Win software from Apple is free.

And no, don't get your Logic on PC hopes up high-Apple is recluctant to port AU/CoreAudio over.

 

[elppa]

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.

With respect, this sounds like a lot of old rubbish.

The system architecture is far more advanced in Mac OS X than Windows. Windows is hardly the gold standard of desktop operating systems. Why you would chuck that away is beyond me.

Mac OS X = envy of industry

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.

I heard it was a Sony Vaio.

Anyhow, one of the Panic developers got an email from him in late 2000 and the client was NeXT Mailer. So this supports those rumours.

 

[GregA]

I'd love to see Cocoa for Windows.
Even more so... cocoa for Mac, Windows, & Linux. Really get developers interested in developing once for multiple platforms.

Unfortunately... it's not something Apple has seemed interested in.

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.

I wonder if Microsoft's push to expand IE & define a new form of internet application forced Apple to do Safari for Windows.

If so.. maybe there is a chance Apple will look at a cross platform cocoa.

 

[nsbio]

Yes, infiltrate windows from within and slowly, one app/library at a time, increase Apple presence in Windows machines, so that one day a PC user boots up his/her black box and realizes that the only things not made by are the viruses and the antivirus.

 

[twoodcc]

this is interesting. i think it's true

 

[eric_n_dfw]

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).

I'll second that opinion!

In 1990-91 I was the Commodore Amiga student on campus consultant at the Univ. of Arizona. I has always touted the strengths of the Amiga (being run by CBM was not one of them!) over the Mac's and PC's of the day.

Then NeXT set up a NeXTCube right next to my Amiga demo area at the bookstore. All I could say was, "wow'! That thing blew every machine in the room away on every level, not the least of which was the NeXTSTEP develoment environment - a direct predecessor of OPENSTEP and Cocoa's Project Builder & XCode.

Back on topic, like a few others here, I've always wondered if Apple was going to make anything of the "Yellow Box", or for those of us who've used it, "OPENSTEP Enterprise" for Win32. Back in the mid 90's I was evaluating it for use at a division of American Airlines - it was promising but the price compared to other technologies was steep and the lack of Objective-C trained developers was a major sticking point.

Screenshot of my WinNT 4 desktop with the OpenStep development environment running in 1997​

Back then I was a fairly green object oriented (OO) developer and I credit my OPENSTEP experience as the major thing that helped me understand OO concepts and helped me become a much better developer. The NS libraries were so well laid out and so far ahead of their time that it made putting applications together a joy. By comparison, the MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) back then were attrocious and their Visual C++ IDE promoted some pretty nasty code. (I've heard MS has come a long way since then with .Net - but I've not played with it.)

I, for one, would love to see Yellow box coming back and might even re-take up my efforts to learn Cocoa, XCode and Objective-C, (especially now that it has garbage collection), since my potential market audience would be huge!

In the past, I would have agreed with most people that such a move would be suicide for the Apple hardware business as there would be no OS X lock-in any more, but now, with the Apple-Intel move complete and people really liking the fact that they can run whatever OS they want to on Mac's - I think they could actually pull it off.

 

[0098386]

This feels strange and different, and beautiful.

 

[MikeTheC]

Without a doubt this has to be one of the wierdest, oddest-feeling topics I've seen here at MacRumors.com. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the situation to try and decide if this is a good or bad thing.

Regarding previous comments about Linux -- Well, considering Apple has yet to produce QuickTime or iTunes for Linux, I think there's probably not even a snowball's chance in hell of them putting Yellow Box out for Linux. I strongly doubt they'll ever put Safari out there for Linux, either.

It's strange how Apple is, technically, a part of the OSS developer community on one level, but refuses to contribute any of their normal-user apps back to it. They just take and take and take. Oh well... Maybe I'm just hopelessly paranoid.

 

[pilotError]

I'm a little surprised to see the reaction to this.

I don't see that Apple had any choice but to port certain aspects to windows.

If you want to be a consumer company, ie iPhone, iPod, iWhatEverElse, and you want to push the network centric vision, they had no choice but to port.

I can't imagine big Steve would like his developers calling Redmond for support on certain aspects of Visual Studio. It would be difficult trying to hide large complicated projects from the competition.

the big question is WHY would they ever release it to third-party developers.

I don't see it happening either. They want to maintain their base of developers, especially now that the Mac base is growing.

I would think it would be a hard sell for folks to develop under Cocoa / Windows just so they could get the Mac platform as a bi-product.

The X-Code stuff on Windows would put an unnecessary strain on the MS-Apple relationship. Especially since MS charges up the Wazoo for their develompent environments. I could certainly see retaliation in the Office Products for something like that.

 

[peharri]

So, my limited understanding of the matter and 1:00 in the morning fogginess has boiled this information down to this: Basically, Apple had a program to port to Windows ten odd years ago, in the event that they chose to port their software to Windows, the project was dead as far as anyone knew for the last decade, but then they seem to have used it to port Safari? And there is a slight possibility that this tool may be made available to developers? If so, this sounds awfully interesting. We'll have to see where this goes.

It's all a little more complicated than that.

"Yellow Box" was a real and shipping product, though not under that name. Back when Apple was NeXT Inc, NeXT sold a product called (something like) OpenStep for NT, implementing their OpenStep API (native to NEXTSTEP) on NT. This eventually formed the base of the NT version of WebObjects. If you can find a copy of the NT version of WebObjects, then you can do old fashioned OpenStep programming with it.

When NeXT "bought" Apple for minus-several-zillion-dollars, the next version of NEXTSTEP became "Rhapsody", an operating system that comprised of the OpenStep API (like older NEXTSTEPs) plus a kind of virtual Mac where the upper layers of Mac OS ran inside a box to provide compatibility with older applications. The native (OpenStep) API was called YellowBox, the Mac OS compatibility environment was, IIRC, BlueBox, and a rumoured third environment was a Windows compatibility layer called RedBox, the exact details of which are, to date, unknown.

For consistency, the OpenStep on Windows product was renamed "YellowBox" in all the comments made at the time, but while WebObjects was sold for a little longer (as WebObjects, with little or no mention of the underlying OpenStep/YellowBox development environment), the entire "OpenStep on NT" concept was massively deprecated and the NT product, ultimately, dropped.

Rhapsody was well received at the time, but it was also widely felt that BlueBox was not an acceptable means of running older applications. Had it replaced Mac OS, it seems likely that most older applications would never have been ported to the modern APIs, and users would have spent most of their time in BlueBox with most of their applications, with only a slow trickle of YellowBox (OpenStep) apps being developed. The YellowBox APIs couldn't have been more different to the Mac OS APIs, and required an entirely different language and approach to use them. Developers were fairly unhappy, particularly those who had been loyal to Apple in the past and felt they'd have to throw pretty much everything out to produce native applications. Rhapsody was commercially released, in a Mac only form (Rhapsody's public betas had been available for both PC and Mac), in 1999 as "Mac OS X Server 1.0" but was barely marketed.

Apple then revamped the system. They used a compatibility layer for Quicktime on Windows as the basis of a new native API for the NEXTSTEP based operating system line. This supported a great deal of the Mac OS's API, and made porting existing Mac OS apps much easier. This was named Carbon, with YellowBox renamed to Cocoa, and BlueBox and renamed to Classic. This is what makes up the OS today, and has done so on the Mac OS X Beta and Mac OS X 10.x versions of the operating system.

So the long and the short is:

1. "YellowBox" (eg OpenStep or Cocoa for Windows) has existed for a long time. It's not a rumour. It is a product that ultimately disappeared from the catalogs with few people even noticing
2. Apple has always had compatibility layers written to allow it to port apps to Windows, the aforementioned Quicktime origins for Carbon being an obvious example
3. This story doesn't really mean a lot. The fact Safari has some of this code doesn't mean Apple is about to release a public development environment for cross-platform apps. Quicktime for Windows and WebObjects both had/have elements allowing this, but that's not how they were sold. Anyone trying to develop using what Apple has publicly released up until now will suffer a lack of documentation and integrated "universal binary" tools.

 

[Jahadeem]

Sorry I have to ruin this with a bad joke post:

"Yellow Box" is the new iPod which does everything the existing iPods do but more. At the request of GreenPeace the new "Yellow Box" iPod will allow you to deposit your urine into it then will filter it for you while your listening to music. This will enable you to drink pure clean water later on.

 

[pickleman94]

CF is C, WebKit is Cocoa-ish, Safari is Carbon-ish

CoreFoundation is C, like someone else pointed out. WebKit definitely has some Cocoa in it, probably a wrapper for Cocoa applications. Safari is 99% C, and iTunes was written without any Cocoa at all, making them easy to port.

There are no real objc compilers for Windows. Developers would have to install MINGW32 and GCC. The developers would also have to make major changes to their apps to get them to work right on Windows (a.k.a., no top menu bar.) Cocoa Foundation is just a wrapper for CoreFoundation, making it easy to port. But AppKit is pure Cocoa, and would have to basically be written from scratch to work on Windows. Apple is too busy with the iPhone, Apple TV, Leopard, ... to worry about this now when most of their core software is C.

In the meantime, you can always run GNUstep through Cygwin, if you dont' care if its ugly and it doesn't fit in with the Windows desktop at all.

 

[bondjw07]

Post Pulled

Did this post get pulled? It isn't on the front page anymore. Pretty interesting topic, I would like to here more about this from apple.

 

[bondjw07]

Did this post get pulled? It isn't on the front page anymore. Pretty interesting topic, I would like to here more about this from apple.

Nevermind, I see now that it has been moved from page 1 to page 2. Maybe page 1 was a mistake when I saw it up there last night.

 

[crees!]

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.

This is Apple being Apple. First with iTunes and now with Safari they're testing the waters. If all goes well I would expect to see more of this. That is more of Apple creating Win32 versions of Mac apps. As for opening this development tool to any old developer. That, I don't know and wouldn't expect to see any time soon.

 

[Ben Kei]

I think quite simply that iTunes was released on Windows to sell iPods and likewise Safari has been released to help with the sales of iPhones.

If people become more accustomed to it, it won't make the move to using it on the iPhone so difficult. Also if it does force developers to make more of their sites more Safari-friendly it means that more people who rely on fully portable internet will make the move to the iPhone because it'll fit the bill for them while giving them a flashy device to pull out and play with.

 

[DoFoT9]

I think quite simply that iTunes was released on Windows to sell iPods and likewise Safari has been released to help with the sales of iPhones.

If people become more accustomed to it, it won't make the move to using it on the iPhone so difficult. Also if it does force developers to make more of their sites more Safari-friendly it means that more people who rely on fully portable internet will make the move to the iPhone because it'll fit the bill for them while giving them a flashy device to pull out and play with.

yea i also believe that view. and that they are giving MS users a preview into the mac world, even if the apps dont perform at their best, or are as stable.

 

[SPUY767]

Seems to me, that with a few high up source code leaks, and people could be shooting Windows versions of iLife around the internet.

 

[admanimal]

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*.

Also not quite right. CoreFoundation is a C framework that underlies BOTH Cocoa and Carbon.

http://developer.apple.com/opensource/cflite.html

 

[skellener]

Mac truists hated Jobs when he came back...

Well I loved the Mac, but I was also using NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP at the time. I loved using that even more! It was more Mac-like than the Mac! Drag and drop everywhere, Postscript everywhere, best email on the planet and once you were set up, everything just worked! As far as computing goes, when Jobs came back to Apple it was one of the best things that has ever happened! For the most part, it has only gotten better and easier to use!

 

[skellener]

I think quite simply that iTunes was released on Windows to sell iPods and likewise Safari has been released to help with the sales of iPhones.

I believe this is EXACTLY the reason why we now have Safari for Windows. You hit the nail on the head! All this Yellow Box talk is completely wrong. Safari for Windows is all about selling more iPhones from both a user and developer perspective. Web apps can be tested now in Safari by Windows developers, users get the look and feel of Safari now on their Windows machines as well as their new iPhones.

It's the iPhone stupid!!

 

[guzhogi]

Check out gnustep.org. It's a port of some of the Cocoa APIs for I think Unix/Linux.

I think Yellow Box can be a good idea. Unfortunately, OSes are very different. You can probably use C or C++ for a lot of OS neutral stuff. But to take advantage of each OS' features would need lots of time to optimize for that OS.

 

[mozmac]

This would be an amazing way for Apple to continue making the most powerful computer for development. They already said that dominating the PC market is not their goal, so why not allow Mac developers to port their software to Windows too? This will in turn inspire some Windows developers to move over to a Mac, because by so doing they get a new market of over 20 million users. They can't lose!

 

[Shadow]

This is also really interesting...

From the page linked to the article...




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

Considering NEXTSTEP and NEXTSTEP both ran on Intel, I would have assumed OS X did too...