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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

>But Jobs never lost his vision that Apple should sell appliances, and people who wanted to "wrench their own devices" should buy PCs.

You present an excellent historical case of how Apple got here, but here's where I see a dichotomy: Back in the day, tools like RezEdit, Hypercard, AppleScript came included. There were countless "apps" to reconfigure how the Mac looked and felt to create a personalized experience. Average users had developer-like tools that enabled them to become producers. Even today, things like Swift Playground send a message that Apple wants a technically-enabled user base.

Perhaps this is really an issue like centralized vs decentralized computing, states vs. federal, IE: there will always be a fundamental fight where some people within Apple want a black box appliance, and others want a fully customizable hackable device.

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Speaking of HyperCard:

Inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985, I designed the HyperCard authoring system that enabled non-programmers to make their own interactive media. HyperCard used a metaphor of stacks of cards containing graphics, text, buttons, and links that could take you to another card. The HyperTalk scripting language implemented by Dan Winkler was a gentle introduction to event-based programming. Steve Jobs wanted me to leave Apple and join him at Next, but I chose to stay with Apple to finish HyperCard. Apple published HyperCard in 1987, six years before Mosaic, the first web browser.

—Bill Atkinson https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

My recollection of HyperCard is that it was a grassroots success, Apple did not invest in it, Apple never made a compiler to turn stacks into Mac apps, &c. I personally did two professional HyperCard stacks. One was an internal tool used by a consulting client. The other was a configuration tool for a very successful (at the time) Java development suite. I wrote it in a weekend to meet a deadline, which is why it was written in HyperCard and compiled to run on all our supported operating systems using a third-party compiler.

My employer was aghast at this, our mantra was that if we’re selling Java tools, wherever possible we would write them in Java. I thought I was a decent programmer at the time, but no way I could bang out a robust customer-facing tool in a weekend using Swing or AWT or whatever.

It was eventually rewritten in Java by a co-op student, it took their entire work term. So eventually, everyone was happy. But HyperCard got the job done when shipping fast mattered.

speed is important to you. I can tell because you abbreviated an abbreviation.

> &c

for those not in the know, "etc" is an abbreviation for "et cetera" which is Latin for "and so on."

the Ampersand character itself evolved from the shape of the word "et" which alone is "and" in Latin.

what do you do with all the time you save? :D

Others may not know the origin of &c., so it's great that you explained. But here's a thought: Abbreviations are not about saving time typing for me. Other reasons for abbreviations:

1. Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms are a kind of jargon that compress long words into single tokens that communicate something in a single chunk. That is more efficient for _readers_ to parse... If they are in the know.

2. Speaking of being in the know, abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms communicate which tribe you belong to, and this strengthens social bonds between writer and readers.

3. Some mediums have limited space available. Newspaper headlines, SMS messages, and the original Twitter tweets are examples of mediums with limited space. Abbreviations help compress longer messages to fit the medium.

I happen to be a very slow author compared to just about every professional I know. Since it takes me a while to think about what I write, I find that trying to find shortcuts is not helpful with code or the written word.

Cheers...

And these days, every Mac comes with a full Unix terminal built-in. Xcode is a free download (remember, if you wanted to develop Macintosh applications back in the day, you had to buy something like CodeWarrior!), and, as you say, they've developed Swift Playgrounds specifically to make a nicer onramp for people interested in developing their own stuff.

It's never been trivial to configure the Mac in terms of things like skinning, but third-party tools to do so have always existed for those who cared enough to look, and today, if you want to install Linux on your Mac, you can. If you want to install Windows on your Intel Mac, you can even do that. Those options were, at best, incredibly niche back in the pre-Intel days (though I remember toying with SuSE Linux for PowerPC in the early 2000s), and nearly nonexistent in the pre-MacOS X days.

So it's definitely not a simple case of "Apple in the '90s was in favor of customization; when Jobs came back, he locked them all down and made them toasters."

Even though its now probably 20+ years old, the CodeWarrior experience was vastly superior to XCode.

For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.

Oh my god, I’ve been using Xcode to make something recently and holy moly it’s where energy and ambition goes to die. The sheer number of bugs in both Xcode and in apple’s APIs is astounding.

Constant crashes, unreliable and underdocumented apis. Urgh.

I’ve been doing web programming for the last decade or so. When I started web programming, it was a mess of browser incompatibilities and jquery. But now I’d take modern web development over apple’s hellscape any day. MDN, caniuse, flexbox & grid CSS, modern bundlers, svelte and solidjs - this stuff is a delight in comparison.

Oh maaaaaahn, do I remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior[1] fondly! Thank you for bringing it up. I also remember using Lightspeed C, which later became Think C.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C

Still got my Code Warrior tee shirt, showing a chunky dude holding a floppy disc...

The ironic thing is that today, Codewarrior is just a crappy reskin of Eclipse for developing for NXP chips.

I’m fleshing out these thoughts more in a longer form - but I think Jobs was heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model.

If it weren’t for the AppStore, it would’ve been the end of Apple. The iPhone wasn’t released with it at the outset - because this “make your own” wasn’t a part of the ethos. The Mac also suffered tremendously with no love to Final Cut, snipping Aperture, and leaving the hardware to bit rot for the longest.

iPod was a hugely profitable windfall and iPhone was too - somehow the AppStore slipped in there and became the lone remaining ember that reignited the hacker mindset - Swift I believe is that true rekindling; everything else follows M series, OSX continuities, etc

I’m starting to rethink everything I thought I knew.

It’s difficult to square creating both the most successful product and the most successful company in history with the idea Jobs heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model.

I'm fine with saying "the abyss of rent-seeking" even when rent-seeking behavior by corporations makes them a lot of money.

AppleScript was a far more effective way of scripting your computer’s GUI apps than anything on a competing platform (even if AppleScript the language was terrible, Cocoa and Carbon made it incredibly easy for GUI apps to add AppleScript support) further strengthening the idea thst Apple was in favor of making macs programmable by the average user, even under Jobs. Heck, the AppleScript language was terrible precisely because it attempted to be approachable to regular users and resemble English.

The Apple Macintosh was released in 1984. Jobs was pushed completely out of the company in 1985. When did RezEdit, Hypercard and AppleScript come out? Without looking it up, I would say after Jobs left Apple.

Yes, but MacBASIC was worked on under Jobs' leadership -- until it was taken at gunpoint by Bill Gates:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt

ResEdit: May 85

Jobs resigns: September 85

HyperCard: August 87

AppleScript: October 93

Counterpoint:

NeXTStep: September 1989.

And then there's Automator: April 2005

https://support.apple.com/guide/automator/welcome/mac

Apple between 1999 and 2012 seemed to put out one banger after another. But I could smell the garbage coming with the original iPhone. It's funny because the iPhone is lovely ... until you get down to the many many desperate attempts at vendor lock-in, the "meh" quality software (NOT compared to Android software, just compared to well-written computer software), and the way everything's locked down. Mehhhhhhhh.

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