Once upon a time, Steve Jobs was the leader of a company called Apple.  Apple was known for being a technology leader, and their latest products were the envy of the industry.  Sadly, though, Apple’s sales figures didn’t seem to be able to keep pace with their reputation.  The board of directors of Apple, thinking that another style of management might be the way to go, decided that they’d had enough of Steve and handed him his walking papers.  The year was 1985.

Steve’s response to the situation was to start another computer company, called NeXT.  The Apple Macintosh was supposed to be the “computer for the rest of us” but with NeXT, it seemed Job’s goal was to create the “computer for the best of us“.  Largely inspired by his experience with getting the Macintosh into the education market, the NeXT Computer was going to be a powerful workstation designed to meet the needs of the scientific and higher educational community.  At the heart of this new computer was going to be NeXTStep, an object-oriented multi-tasking operating system that included tightly integrated development tools to aid users in quickly creating custom applications.

NeXTStep’s Language Of Choice

At the heart of NeXTStep was a fairly new programming language known as Objective C.  It was basically an extension of the C language to add Smalltalk-style messaging and other OOP features.  Conceptually it’s not too far off from where C++ was at the time, but the syntax is fairly different.  However, that simply didn’t matter at the time because most programmers hadn’t done much, if anything, with C++.

In 1985, any sort of object oriented programming was a relatively new thing to most programmers.  Modern languages like Java and C# were still years in the future, and C++ was still largely an experiment, with no standard in place and drastic differences from one implementation to the next.  In fact, most C++ solutions at the time were based on AT&T’s CFront program, which converted C++ code into standard C code that would then be compiled by a standard compiler.  It would be a few years yet before native C++ compilers became commonplace.

There were other OOP languages around, like Smalltalk or Lisp, but they were largely considered acedemic languages, not something you’d use to create shrink-wrapped products.

Since there simply wasn’t any better solution, the choice of Objective C for NeXTStep was completely reasonable at the time.

What Happened NeXT

The first version of NeXTStep was released in Sept. 1989.  Over the next few years, the NeXT computer and NeXTStep made a number of headlines and gained a lot of respect in the industry, but failed to become a major player in terms of sales.  In late 1996, NeXT had just teamed up with Sun Computer to create a cross-platform version called OpenStep, but before that really took off, something else happened.

In 1996, Apple was floundering.  Their stock price was down.  They’d had layoffs.  They had no clear plan for the future in place, and they were in serious danger of losing their place as the master of the graphic user interface.  Microsoft had just released Windows 95, which was a huge leap forward from Windows 3.1 in virtually every way, and PC video cards offering 24-bit and 32-bit color modes had become easily affordable.

Apple CEO Gil Amelio was fairly sure that updating the Mac to use some sort of object-oriented operating system was key to Apple’s future success, but Apple’s internal development had thus far failed to pay off.  Likewise Apple’s investment in Taligent, a company formed in partnership with IBM for the sole purpose of developing an object oriented operating system.  But then Amelio struck a bargain to purchase NeXT Computer and the NeXTStep operating system, bringing NeXT CEO Steve Jobs back into the fold, first as an advisor and then as CEO several months later when Amelio was shown the door.

It took Apple nearly 4 years to integrate their existing operating system with the NeXTStep tools and libraries, but ultimately NeXTStep formed the basis of the new Macintosh OS X operating system, released in March 2001.

Mac Development Tool History

When the Macintosh was first released in early 1984, you pretty much used either 68000 assembly language or Pascal to create programs.  Pascal had always been a popular language with the Apple crowd.  Apple had a set of development tools known as the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop, which was essentially a GUI interface wrapper for a variety of commandline oriented tools, including the 68000 assembler and the Pascal language compiler.

It didn’t take long for the C language became available for the Mac.  Apple released a version for MPW, but it really took off with the release of LIGHTSPEED C (later renamed to THINK C), which had a GUI IDE of the sort that would be completely recognizable as such even today, almost 25 years later.  Think’s compiler quickly became the defacto standard development environment for the Mac.  Support for C++ would be added in 1993 with version 6.0, after the product was acquired by Symantec.

Unfortunately, when Apple made the transition from the Motorola 680×0 processor family to the PowerPC processor in 1994 & 1995, Symantec C/C++ failed to keep pace.  It wasn’t until version 8, released in 1997, that their compiler was able to generate native PowerPC code. 

Fortunately, a new player in the game appeared to save the day.  When Symantec bought out Think, some members of the Think C development team started a new company called Metrowerks.  While Symantec was struggling to bring out a PowerPC compiler, Metrowerks released their new CodeWarrior C/C++ environment.  In many ways, Codewarrior was like an upgrade to the Symantec product, and it quickly supplanted Symantec among developers.  Codewarrior would remain at the top of the heap until Apple released OS X.

The NeXT Development Tool

When Apple released Mac OS X in 2001, there were two big paradigm shifts for developers.  The first was that Apple now included their development tools with the operating system, at no additional charge.  After nearly two decades of charging premium prices for their tools, this was a big change.  Plus, the new XCode environment was an actual IDE, unlike the old Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop environment, with support for Objective C, C, C++, and Java.

The second paradigm shift was that everything you knew about programing the Mac was now old news.  You could continue to use an existing C/C++ codebase with the new Carbon libraries providing a bridge to the new OS, but this did not allow you to use the new tools such as the Interface Builder.  If you wanted to take full advantage of the new tools Apple and the Cocoa libraries, you needed to use Objective C instead of the familiar C or C++.

Objectionable C

I had been a Mac programmer since getting my first machine in 1986, and when Apple released Mac OS X in 2001, I was fully expecting to continue that tradition.  However, while I had no problems whatsoever with the idea of learning a new set of API calls, or learning new tools, I saw no good reason why it should be necessary to learn a new programming language.  Still, at one time in my younger days I had enjoyed experimenting with different programming languages, so I figured why not give Objective C a try?

Upon doing so, my first thought was, this was an UGLY language.  My second thought was, why did they change certain bits of syntax around for no good reason?  There were things where the old-style C syntax would have gotten the job done, but they changed it anyway.  The third thing that occurred to me was that this was a REALLY UGLY language.

After a few brief experiments, I pretty much stopped playing around with Cocoa and Objective C.  I started playing around with Carbon.  My first project was to rebuild an old project done in C++.  But the first thing I ran into was frustration that I couldn’t use the new tools like the Interface Builder.  It wasn’t too long before I decided I wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with all this BS.  Objective C had sucked all the fun out of Mac programming for me.

The shift to Objective C marked the end of Macintosh development for many other programmers I’ve talked to as well.  One can only conclude from their actions that Apple simply doesn’t care… if one programmer drops the platform, another will come around.  I’m sure there are plenty of other programmers around who either like Objective C just fine or who simply don’t care one way or the other.

As far as I’m concerned, Objective C is an ugly language, an ugly failed experiment that simply has no place in the world today.  It offers nothing substantial that we can’t get from other languages like C++, C#, or Java.  Nothing, that is, except for access to Apple’s tools and libraries.

Some Mac developers would tell you that the Cocoa libraries depend on some of Objective C’s capabilities like late-binding, delegates (as implemented in Cocoa), and the target-action pattern.  My response is that these people are confusing cause and effect.   The Cocoa libraries depend on those Objective C features because that was the best way to implement things with that language.  However, I have no doubt whatsoever that if Apple wanted to have a  C++ version of the Cocoa library, they could figure out a way to get things done without those Objective C features.

A Second Look

A few years later when I got my first Intel-based Mac, I decided to revisit the development tools.  I wrote a few simple programs.  I’d heard a few people express the opinion that Objective C was sort of like the Ugly Duckling… as I used it more and became familiar with it, it would grow into a beautful swan.  Nope.  Uh-uh.  Wrong.  No matter what I did, no matter what I do, Objective C remains just as frickin’ ugly as it was when I started.

I really wanted not to hate Objective C with a fiery vengeance that burned from the bottom of my soul, but what are ya gonna do?  Personally, I’m looking into alternatives like using C# with the Mono libraries.  No matter how non-standard these alternatives are, they can’t be any more icky than using Objective C.

Could It Be That Apple Doesn’t Care About Making Life Easier For Developers? 

The real question here is why the hell hasn’t Apple created a C++ version of the Cocoa library?  It’s been 12 years since Apple bought out NeXT.  Why hasn’t Apple made an effort in all that time to adapt the NeXTStep tools to use C++?  Or other modern languages like C#?  Microsoft may have invented the C# language, but even the Linux crowd has adopted it for gosh sakes!

Or why not annoy Sun and make a native-code version of Java with native Apple libraries?

Could it be they are trying to avoid the embarrassment that would occur when developers abandon Objective C en-masse as soon as there is a reasonable replacement?

Does Apple think developers are happy with Objective C?  Personally, I’ve yet to find a single programmer who actually even likes the language.  The only argument I’ve ever heard anybody put forth for using it has always been that it was necessary because it was the only choice that Apple offered.  I know that’s the only reason I use it.

Why does Apple continue to insist on inflicting Objectionable C on us?  I can only come to the conclusion that Apple simply doesn’t care if developers would rather use some other language.  It’s their way, or the highway.

OK, so as of today it’s now been 8 days since I got the new phone and I seem to have fallen into what will be my regular pattern of use. I mentioned battery life as a potential concern, but after a few more days of using the phone, it seems that charging it for at least a few hours every other day or so does the trick. I’m sure that I’ll occasionally have days where it sucks up more juice due to heavy use, but for now it doesn’t seem to be an issue. I do think I’ll look into getting one of those little auxillary power supplies, however. It seems like having one in my laptop bag would be a good idea. It’d be nice to find one with a USB port so I could also charge my bluetooth headset.

iPhone Cases

The last few years when I’ve attended the MacWorld Expo, I’ve been somewhat annoyed at how much of the exhibit hall was taken up by vendors whose main products are cases and accessories for iPhones and iPods.  It’s not that I have a problem with people selling cases and accessories.  I just felt that there was way too much redundancy in product design from vendor to vendor, and that it all took up way too much room at what was supposed to be a Mac show.  I really wasn’t happy at having to do twice as much walking around in order to see the actual Mac-based products.  Also… it kept me thinking that despite how strong the Mac is doing these days, if you go back about 20 years, the MacWorld Expo was about the same size and took up just as much floor space, but that was entirely from Mac-based vendors.

Anyway, so I wanted to buy a case for this thing to protect it from the inevitable bumping around and occasional drop, and after failing to find something at the first few stores I tried, I went to the Apple store and found a nice Belkin neophrene case.  It’s mostly black with some red stripes running through here and there on the back.  It seemed at least $10 overpriced at $24.99 but it’s better than having to buy a new phone because I broke this one.

Apps

I promised some info on the Apps I’ve been using, and I’ll get to that in a moment.  First, however, I’d like to talk about an App that I’m not using.  Not yet, anyway.

Skype For iPhone

The big iPhone news the last few days is the new Skype app.  I’m not currently a Skype user, but it is something I’ve considered trying. 

One of the interesting restrictions of the iPhone app is that you can only send and receive Skype calls when you’re connected to the internet via WiFi.  It won’t use the phone’s cellular data connection.  I’m not sure I understand the logic here, unless maybe it requires significantly more bandwidth to make calls via Skype than it does via the phone’s regular voice call connection.

Theoretically, since I’m not an actual user, I’d have to say that this restriction wouldn’t bother me as long as they have an option to automatically initiate call forwarding from the Skype phone number to the cellular phone number whenever you’re not connected to WiFi. I don’t know if such an option exists.  I’m going to download the App and see if there’s a free trial or something.

Twitter on iPhone

At  last count, something like 57% of all the applications in the App Store were designed to let you access Twitter from your iPhone.  Ha!  I kid!  It’s really only something like 43%.

Seriously though, there are several applications for the iPhone that interface with Twitter.  Two free ones that I tried are TwitterFon and Twitterrific, and they both worked just fine for basic tweeting and following your friends.  They really aren’t all that different in basic functionality, so your choice may simply be a matter of which one looks better to you.  Twitteriffic is ad-supported, but the ads are small and fairly non-intrusive.

The free apps were OK, but then I found Tweetie. This made page 1 of the apps on my phone. It is generally similar to the other two programs, but seemed to be a little more full-featured. Tweetie isn’t free, but at $2.99 it’s not going to overwhem anybody’s wallet.

Voice Dialing

One of the big “missing features” of the iPhone is built-in voice dialing.  This is an essential feature to anybody who uses their phone while in the car, since it’s both illegal and dangerous to do it manually while driving.  I found an app named Say Who Lite that does a really good job.  You speak something like “Scott Miller Mobile” and it will find “Scott Miller” in the contacts list and grab the phone number tagged as “mobile”. 

In addition to dialing, Say Who Lite is also capable of parsing the names of streets and intersections, and then passing that information onto the Maps application.  Unfortunately, it’s limited to the city for your current location, and beyond that it’s more error prone than dialing.  That’s probably since there’s usually a lot more street names to compare against than the contacts list the dialer has to worry about.

The app works really well, and it also made page 1 of the apps on my phone. but I have two complaints. First, one has to hold down a button on screen when speaking.  The button is fairly large, but could easily be larger.  Given that one isn’t supposed to be looking at the phone when using a program like this, it’d be nice if they could either eliminate the button holding altogether, or else make the button take up most of the screen.

There is also Say Who Pro available.  The Lite version I’m using was free, but the Pro version is $2.99.  I’m happy enough with the lite version that I’m considering buying the pro version, which adds a broader voice search function to the mix.  It’s no longer limited to your current city, and it’s also capable of searching for businesses and other points of interest.  The only thing that holds me back is the fact that Google has their free app that also does voice searching.  I’ve also been playing around with that.

In Conclusion…

I’ve installed a lot of other apps too, of course.  There are some game and puzzle apps, for example, and I’ve downloaded several apps for no better reason than because they were featured on one of Apple’s TV commercials.  However, the ones mentioned above are the ones I’ve been using the most.  Other than the basic built-in ones like Safari and Mail, that is.  There are others I may write about once I’ve used them a bit more.  In particular, Vlingo is another voice-command program that looks promising.