[geruechtekueche] Cocoa on Windows ??!

VonAntwort von Solaris 9.12.05 20:03 Uhr9. Dezember 2005 20:03 UhrFreitag, 9. Dezember 2005 um 20:03 Uhr9.12.05 um 20:03 UhrFreitag, 9. Dezember 2005 um 20:03 Uhr

fands interessant zum nachdenken ne weile :-)

Source: http://forums.macgeneration.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=120691

I know you don’t do rumors anymore, but this one is huge. The Mac community is well aware that Apple going Intel is a two-sided sword. The Mac platform has a lot to win from this audacious move, but a lot to lose, too. In fact, Steve Job’s company know that they are about to face the dreaded ‘OS/2 effect’, which means, as you know it, that binary compatibility, which can be achieved through little or no effort thanks to the WINE framework. In its time, OS/2 was a technically superior OS to Windows 3, but IBM made the tactical mistake to let Microsoft (who were working with them at the time) add a Win16 compatibility layer to OS/2. As we all know today, OS/2 didn’t succeed commercially and many attribute this failure to the fact that programmers didn’t made the effort to port their application to OS/2’s native API, but just relied on its ability to run unmodified Windows 16-bit binaries.

Jobs is well aware of the risk and, as soon as he decided to revive the dormant OS X-on-Intel ‘Marklar’ project, launched a parallel project (now known internally as ‘Dharma’) of reviving (here’s the big thing)… The Yellow Box for Windows. As you probably know it, the Yellow Box for Windows was NeXT’s project of porting Project Builder (known as Xcode today) and the complete NeXT API (known as Cocoa today) to Windows, allowing developers to create a Windows binary by simply ticking a check box. Rings a bell? Yes, it IS what they always meant by ‘Universal Binaries’. Truly universal.

Why bother? That’s simple. By giving those powerful development tools for free, Apple and Jobs hope to give Windows developer a competing alternative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio and thus ‘contaminate’ the Windows environment with Mac-compatible, objective-C applications, instead of letting WINE do just the reverse.

As an example of the power of the Dharma project, Apple has ported Safari to Windows and an internal build of Apple’s browser (2.0.2, v.417.108) actually runs on Windows (XP required), complete with Quartz anti-aliasing. It is reported to be fairly stable, even if the Java and Flash plugins still aren’t working, due to their dependency to third-party code. Apple plan to release the Windows version of its browser for free. In fact, this one was easy to do since they had to port WebKit in order for the Cocoa framework to be complete.

Now you can ask why I give you this information, and not to another website, and that’s fair enough. The reason is quite simple, actually. Some of the information I give you in this mail are strictly confidential (and I mean strictly), and the DMCA would prevent a US-based site to reveal them. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in the US (although I’m an Italian from Canada myself). I trust you enough that you won’t try tracing me and anonymize my mail (you’ll understand that I used a fake name for this). The other reason is that the team in charge of the development of the Dharma project is… French. In fact, Bertrand ‘Mad Eye’ Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering is the lead of this project and Apple France’s engineers (of iCal and iSync fame) are in charge of it. It is to be announced the very day when the first Intel Apple computer is commercially launched.

Sincerely,

John Locke, somewhere near Hawaii