blatherskyte
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2007–2016
35:09 · 625K views · Feb 4, 2006
Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.
HN uses it as the classic example of rapid visual app building and of a polished early Jobs presentation, often with timestamps pointing to the database demo.
9 comments from Hacker News
Relevant - this 20 year old video with Steve Jobs giving a demo of NeXTSTEP 3. I first saw this after having bought a Mac running OS X 10.2 and was surprised by how the user-facing stuff was still very similar to its roots (maybe not nearly as much now). this video
Not as relevant but I saw this video a while back: this video It's interesting to see a young Steve Jobs perfecting his presentation style.
I thought Steve Jobs's NeXT demo from 1992-1993 was pretty impressive. this video It certainly would have seemed space-age in 1992.
> How many times do you have to re-learn file IO? What are you defining as file IO? What do you mean by re-learn--do you mean forgetting and having to learn again, or learning some new fact that changes your total understanding of the thing? What has gotten me in the past is learning how some particular language does file IO[1], which might mean learning something new about file IO I didn't know before (but didn't matter for what I wanted to do at the time) that expanded my perception. Though I guess the concepts of "read", "write", "rewrite", and "append" are the same. I really don't think you get any more universality in desktops than you do in the web world. You might get more in the web world if you restrict your universe to the web world, due to a limited selection of choices on the front-end. (And backend too if you go the traditional route of learning LAMP with PHP on a shared host provider.) Related to the other comment on RAD systems, even NeXTSTEP in '89-'95 had the WYSIWYG concept applied to everything as one of its major selling points. this video Around 23:00 Jobs starts to demo making a GUI application that talks to a backend DB and shows pictures, and you don't need to know SQL or joins or anything. So I don't think the desktop world has been any better in regard to keeping abstractions at bay or offering universal modes of thought (hey fork()!). The first time I programmed something with tkinter I kept asking "Where's my user-defined main loop? Where's my event h
Relevant video from 4 years earlier: this video As someone who has developed for Apple platforms for the better part of a decade now, it's pretty amazing just how little Cocoa/AppKit have changed over the years. Only in the past couple of OS releases are we starting to see some larger shifts. The crazy part is that this hasn't really hurt the APIs at all; sure, some bits are starting to look a little dusty and could use some attention, but even so Cocoa (both mobile and desktop variants) remain the best UI toolkit for consumer-facing application development. Qt, GTK, etc get the job done but aren't nearly as pleasant to use.