Hello Mac OS X Tiger(bunn.dev)
bunn.dev
Hello Mac OS X Tiger
http://bunn.dev/benchmark/2022/01/16/hello-tiger.html
315 comments
I don't know if it's nostalgia but somehow this interface looks more lively and friendly to me than modern MacOS which feels flatter and has less personality (to me personally).
I always wondered how early Mac OS X developers learned to navigate XCode and Cocoa. Were they all just ex-NeXT programmers?
I bought an old copy of the Hillegass book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but I'm guessing most people learned from Apple developer docs that I never saw (or guess didn't know how to find back then)
As an aside, I don't miss the old programming books where each chapter just showed you how to use some GUI elements and they never got around to showing patterns on how you would actually create a usable application.
I bought an old copy of the Hillegass book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, but I'm guessing most people learned from Apple developer docs that I never saw (or guess didn't know how to find back then)
As an aside, I don't miss the old programming books where each chapter just showed you how to use some GUI elements and they never got around to showing patterns on how you would actually create a usable application.
Tiger was the apex of developer-friendly FOSS-friendly Apple.
You can find the last official guide to modifying and compiling the xnu kernel from that time.
Documentation was fabulous. I miss those times.
You can find the last official guide to modifying and compiling the xnu kernel from that time.
Documentation was fabulous. I miss those times.
OSX 10.4 and 10.5 were marvelous operating systems for so many reasons. Particularly 10.4 in my view due to the compatability layer for legacy MacOS binaries, AND big binary feature that made the same OS usable on PPC AND Intel X86. Also Quartz Composer, which I find really interesting and awesome [0].
0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
> You’re amazed by the brand new Spotlight and Safari RSS, you like your new OS so much you want to develop apps for it.
when i was younger i had a used next slab. it had the same effect, everything was so cool you just wanted to build things for it. next thing i knew i was coming in on weekends to build a from scratch port of my then employer's product. my boss at the time was blown away.
it's no wonder to me that berners-lee wrote the first version of worldwideweb on the next, nor carmack with quake...
edit: i guess it was doom. it was a long time ago!
when i was younger i had a used next slab. it had the same effect, everything was so cool you just wanted to build things for it. next thing i knew i was coming in on weekends to build a from scratch port of my then employer's product. my boss at the time was blown away.
it's no wonder to me that berners-lee wrote the first version of worldwideweb on the next, nor carmack with quake...
edit: i guess it was doom. it was a long time ago!
Maybe I am missing some context here as I have never developed for an Apple platform, but what is the point this blog post is trying to make? That the tooling used to be very complicated?
Wow, that old Xcode UI with "Active Target" and "Active Build Configuration" made a lot more sense than the current layout! I always thought that weird "Scheme" stuff was a left-over from the olden days, but it actually seems to be an intended feature that was introduced at a later time.
Tiger was a solid release from Apple that made me switch to the then-unstable Windows ecosystem. I guess back when you paid for software, Apple made sure to squash bugs so you were happy with it. Nowadays...
I have occasionally tried to put together a basic Mac app. I picked up the basics of Swift easily enough, but I get stuck because XCode seems completely incomprehensible to me, and my basic attempts at finding a "cheat sheet" or "idiots guide" meet with failure.
It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe try again in another year.
Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation?
It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe try again in another year.
Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation?
GUI-driven development is a perfectly fine way to getting started, which is what this guide does. However, does anyone else get an uneasy feeling about developing software that revolves too much around using a GUI/heavy IDE? You can argue that Visual Studio Code is bloated, etc., but at the end of the day, I can clone a project on GitHub and easily run a CLI command to compile and try a project, and maybe use Vim if I have to do a quick edit. Any time I see a development guide that depends on screenshots or requires a specific IDE it makes me feel uneasy, even though I know that's not how most newcomers feel.
Tiger also was the debut of Dashboard widgets, which opened up creating app-like experiences for those who knew HTML/JS/CSS instead of Cocoa (myself included).
In the vintage apple groups and subreddits Tiger is preferred over Leopard because it runs on more hardware and it's the last version that allows Classic mode that runs classic Mac OS applications.
Tiger was the first release of OSX that I was truly proud of. I came to Apple, not as part of the NeXT acquisition, but from the post-pivot Be, which had decided to focus their attention on "internet appliances". My love at the time was operating systems and specifically GUI libraries and components.
Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re-skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring.
After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in creating something great that would ship and be of real value to users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2 building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive. In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to Steve.)
In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be. He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user-friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a startup called Android.
The group who went to the meet and greet contained some significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble, Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history.
All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment time all rolled into my current employment phase.
This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9 group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a functioning software organization, the product lines were much cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop operating system should be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo
Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re-skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring.
After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in creating something great that would ship and be of real value to users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2 building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive. In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to Steve.)
In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be. He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user-friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a startup called Android.
The group who went to the meet and greet contained some significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble, Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history.
All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment time all rolled into my current employment phase.
This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9 group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a functioning software organization, the product lines were much cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop operating system should be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo
For the record to this day I believe this aqua pill styled interface was way more clean and attractive than the flat design. I've never been fan of flat interfaces, it's the reason I hated Windows 8 onwards interfaces. Skeuomorphism was just perfect!
For anyone on an M1 and feeling nostalgic, PPC versions of OS X run quite well in UTM/QEMU: https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger-on-m1.html
I was never able to work in an environment with so many floating windows. I lose focus instantly and can't do much work.
> Apple releasing their first phone, which will likely run some kind of Cocoa in it. Good thing you already know how to write applications for it, right?
Awww. It must have been so shocking to MacOS devs when the iPhone was announced and it was web applications or nothing.
Awww. It must have been so shocking to MacOS devs when the iPhone was announced and it was web applications or nothing.
OSX Tiger running on a Power Mac G5 was my dream setup I never could afford. Time flies.
i really feel the ui in tiger was just great... not perfect of course, but just feels peak (pre-darkmode) osx to me...
btw, taping the rss link doesnt open my rss app on ios, i think it may be the mime-type isnt set?
btw, taping the rss link doesnt open my rss app on ios, i think it may be the mime-type isnt set?
Why would you use Yahoo in 2005? I'm pretty sure Google was already the more popular search engine by then, especially for people looking for developer documentation.
Edit: Best data I can find shows Google was about 35%, Yahoo 30%, and MSN 15%. So I guess it was a toss up if you were using Yahoo or Google, but I seem to recall everyone I knew who was a developer preferred Google because it did a better job finding developer docs.
Edit: Best data I can find shows Google was about 35%, Yahoo 30%, and MSN 15%. So I guess it was a toss up if you were using Yahoo or Google, but I seem to recall everyone I knew who was a developer preferred Google because it did a better job finding developer docs.
I used Rhapsody for a couple years on a Thinkpad. It was very, very limited for what I was doing at the time, and the Lighthouse applications I could get running weren't anywhere near what anything else was, by the time I got them.
My work laptop at the time was a G3 running System 8.6, which remains my favorite Apple OS to this day. I still have a G4 with 8.6 stuffed full of everything for the heck of it. And the Thinkpad.
My work laptop at the time was a G3 running System 8.6, which remains my favorite Apple OS to this day. I still have a G4 with 8.6 stuffed full of everything for the heck of it. And the Thinkpad.
Very nostalgic. I wonder if an old PPC is feasible at all for basic browsing these days. Probably would run into issues updating the browser?
> Next, go back to the MainMenu.xib, right click on your MainWindowController and select Instantiate MainWindowController
.xib – Freudian slip? :)
.xib – Freudian slip? :)
Lovely!
It's just missing the part where half way through, osx and xcode updates and your existing app no longer builds on your machine nor runs on anyone else's.
My ascerbic observations about the platform aside, I love this, both in it's current context, and would have loved it at the time. Thank you!
It's just missing the part where half way through, osx and xcode updates and your existing app no longer builds on your machine nor runs on anyone else's.
My ascerbic observations about the platform aside, I love this, both in it's current context, and would have loved it at the time. Thank you!
During this era Apple sent third party official devs a shirt when the new OS released. I still have mine but they are quite worn out from all the wear. Wish they still did that but I appreciate how much less expensive Apple developer accounts are these days.
This makes me more nostalgic for the old Interface Builder than it does Aqua. So much more straightforward to create actions/outlets and create the files than the current mess.
This was really fun to read. Tiger was before my time - does anyone know of good resources on where things went from here? What were some of the first 3rd party native Mac apps?
I still love the way OSX Tiger looks, even after all these years.
For me it was more like “you have just torrented the Golden Master DVD image and restored it on to your bootable Firewire iPod because you only have a CD-RW drive and nobody has released rips of the six-CD version yet” ;)
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428
e: Siracusa’s review for Ars is still a great read too: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/