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Comment by srtjstjsj | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything in NeXT that didn't get ported to OS X / Objective-C ?

Display Postscript in NeXTSTEP was replaced with Quartz in OS X and iOS. DP has licensing issues with Adobe, and I believe there were performance issues with the client/server architecture of DP that were resolved with Quartz.

The NeXTSTEP "Workspace" and file manger were replaced with Finder in OS X. Finder was a direct port of the classic Mac OS Finder, implemented in C/C++ using the gnarly but powerful Carbon file manager APIs rather than Objective-C, Cocoa, and the comparatively limited NSFileManager APIs (limited icon support, no file alias support, no asynchronous or interactive file operations, etc.)

The Carbon Hot Key APIs came from Classic Mac OS and are still the only way to do global hot keys in OS X. They're one of the few bits of Carbon still supported in 64-bit OS X.

The Finder and all its functionality was ported to Cocoa in 10.6. All related functionality has eventually made its way into Cocoa: NSWorkspace, NSURL, NSFileManager, and NSFileCoordinator. The Carbon file management APIs are long, and thankfully, dead.

Wow, that's an interesting bit of trivia. I didn't realize old Finder code (well, Carbon stuff) was kicking around that long.

Enterprise Objects Framework, NeXTSTEP's File Viewer and Shelf (better than Finder), Digital Librarian (nice concept they should have kept), and a lot of utilities.

I also miss the NeXTSTEP menus, as for a big display, they are much easier than scrolling up to the top of the screen.

I was going to mention NeXTSTEP menus. I liked how you could tear them off, arrange them around the screen as desired and the app would remember your customizations for next time.

I used WindowMaker for years because of those very menus. Of course, these days it looks a bit dated... And Étoilé seems to have died off, too..

My work desktop is FreeBSD 10.1 running WindowMaker and I personally love the "dated" look. Reminds me of my teenage years, running Redhat 6.x, listening to nu-metal with XMMS and spending way too much time on IRC.

In terms of the operating system and included apps, it's remarkably similar after over 26 years.

NeXTMail evolved into Apple Mail. Preview and Terminal retained their functions and their names. Digital Librarian (indexing specified files) was succeeded years later by Spotlight. Unfortunately we lost Digital Webster, a nice thing to have before the days of always-on Internet connections, which I think was linked to all apps via the command-equal-sign. Interface Builder survived. WebObjects survived. There was a TextEdit-precursor, but the very nice lightweight word processor WriteNow from a third party did not survive to be included in OS X.

The OS X Finder is recognizably similar to later versions, maybe >2.0?, of NeXT's Workspace Manager, with the primary navigation the same (albeit with the scroll bar on the bottom instead of the top and favorites on the top instead of the left). The original NeXT design was probably cleaner. And I still miss a dock that you can flick up and down.

I have a NeXT cube in my home office closet. I've turned it on in the last few years and it works, but the original 660MB hard drive -- a monstrosity for its time! -- has failed. :(

How did Digital Webster differ from the dictionary in OS X today? You can look up any word on your screen by pressing cmd-ctrl-D

We lost EOF. It's partially there in Core Data, but a lot of the functionality is lost.

WebObjects, a Objective-C EE stack if you will.

It got ported to Java, back when Apple still wasn't sure to keep Objective-C or port everything to Java.

Nowadays I think it is in life support.

SoundKit and MusicKit were lost (thus an app I wrote which relied on them couldn't be ported to OS X beyond Rhapsody).

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