Re: SimCAS work for anybody? Whither Rhapsody?

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Miles Parker wrote:

> In any case, the SimCAS beta was ridiculously easy to get running.

I agree. The "beta" that was sent out last week is basically just a demo of the 
fact that Heatbugs and Market run, with no documentation of class interfaces 
etc. it is hard to test any other aspects of the system.

I also noted a significant difference in performance between Swarm and this 
SimCAS, especially GUI operations seem to carry a large overhead  - clicking on 
a probe etc. slows the system noticeably, which doesn't seem to be the case in 
Swarm.

> btw, did anyone catch the Apple WWDC conference keynote? It looks like Apple 
> is basically canning the Rhapsody API and sticking with the Mac Toolbox. This 
> _seems_  to mean no mass market yellow box, and no mass-market apple 
> sponsored ObjectiveC, but I could be wrong. I guess this may be bad, good, or 
> indifferent news, depending on what kind of effect you thought Apple would 
> have on ObjectiveC in the first place.

You are not the only one interpreting the keynote in this manner, but note that 
Apple states explicitly that Rhapsody is their server, internet and publishing 
platform and that MacOS X will be Mach kernel based, containing technologies 
from Rhapsody and MacOS. See:
    http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1998/may/11strategy.html

It has been rumored that programmers in Cupertino have demonstrated  MkLinux 
and Rhapsody running simultaneously on the same Mach kernel and a similar 
integration of MacX and Yellow Box should be possible.

The bad news is we don't know what will be the future of Rhapsody after rel. 
1.0 which is due Real-Soon-Now. And MacOS X will use the so-called Carbon APIs 
instead of the Yellow Box APIs, which are based on Objective-C.

Some of us hoped that Apple would place it's faith in the Yellow Box as a 
long-term set of APIs for Blue Box (MacOS classic), Rhapsody and Yellow Box for 
NT/Win98. Using Metrowerks Latitude one could easily develop applications on 
Yellow Box using any of the platforms named above and port those apps to any 
Unix flavor - in other words Rhapsody + Metrowerks CodeWarrior + Latitude would 
be the ultimate development
environment for Swarm.

The good news is that if Rhapsody will be well received this solution is still 
quite viable.

The reason for the apparent change in strategy is that the Apple developers 
community wanted backwards and forwards compatability - applications for Yellow 
Box don't work on MacOS classic, while Carbon based lifeforms will survive on 
both.

-Benedikt

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