lynnfredricks.com

There is an interesting discussion about the history of Mac OS development. Most prehistoric mac apps originated a couple of steps before xcode. Don’t forget that Codewarrior saved Apple when Apple moved to the PPC architecture and the available tools for it were simply terrible. Before Codewarrior – ancient history. Quite a few apps still around originated on Apple’s interfaceless MSW (sorry, I only tried it once) or even Symantec’s Think tools. Many Adobe/Macromedia products predated Codwarrior. Carbon is/was there to act as a transition. It was a sudden about face after SJ came back and developers were thinking they would have to entirely rewrite their apps with some foreign NextStep thing right away (I think some of the bigger vendors had a lot to say about that) or they’d be out of the market. The last thing Apple needed at that point was all of its key software developers to drop the Mac.

Almost every vendor I do business with made good use of that time – we certainly did at Paradigma. Now xCode is a very good development environment. But now the OS vendor has a big influence over cross-platform version control, or control over your minimum operating system requirements for your applications. Or they can simply change the terms of their EULA in ways that make your business impossible.