3 HN users recommended this demo3 months2007–2016score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
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.
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.
“There's a video of steve jobs building a fairly complex DB app without a single line of code, including joins.” (HN, 2011)
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]
Well executed? Absolutely. Innovative? Well... not exactly. Seek to 23:10 - [this video] (Man, look at that hair!) I don't mean to downplay 280north's work - I'm very impressed with what they're doing. It just bothers me when people see a derivative work and think it to be original. (Ahem, Chris Hughes)
Apple/NeXT used to have enterprise object framework. There's a video of steve jobs building a fairly complex DB app without a single line of code, including joins. We still have nothing like it. [this video] See about 25 minutes in.
Steve introduces Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) at about 25 minutes in: [this video] EOF was one of the key components of making NeXT such a powerful OS, and why it was so heavily used on Wall Street. When they created WebObjects, they, of course, put EOF behind it, and yes, it is by far the most impressive ORM I have ever used. Thankfully, a well known WO developer, Andrus Adamchik, has developed Cayanne using the same principals behind EOF: [link]
> 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.
Earlier NeXTSTEP demo showing how little AppKit changed.
Having single-handedly invented WWW is a nonsense, put a failed physicist aside reinventing himself. Not to mention [S]GML, the stuff wired though using RPC. Claiming credit for other's hard work and even visions without attribution is even worse, especially in science ("Institute for Web Science"? wtf). There have been lots of prior art graphical networked markup hypertext systems, ie. Xerox, Walker's Symbolics Document Examiner etc. Having used the interface builder to dump the stuff coming from the network? [this video] I am bitter because of the manipulative sociopaths abusing their position and power.
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