yellow box--cocoa?

[mattmarshall]

hey all,
i've been readin' a bit about "yellow box" (cocoa) on some web sites with info about OS-X. i don't know a thing about programming, but to me this sounds pretty huge.

what exactly does it mean for the mac platform? will programs be able to work on either windows or the mac os? that's what it sounds like, and if that's true, jobs & co. will have removed the average computer purchaser's one major reservation about apple products--i know it's mine.

that's no small feat, and could mean huge things for gaining market share.

am i reading too much into this?

[Mark J Hershenson]

First off, to clarify, YellowBox transformed into Cocoa. Cocoa is a superset of the YellowBox, with additional features, and programming parity with both Objective-C and Java. In Cocoa, ObjC and Java are equal partners to all features OUTSIDE of the features native to each language. (That's a discussion for another time, place, and for most, universe)

Are you reading too much into it...yes. But it's not your fault, really. It's mainly Apple's.

See, Apple had promised a YellowBox runtime for Win 95/98/NT just like they had had an OPENSTEP runtime available for Windows. This would allow a "program once, recompile for each platform" strategy which would allow a developer to leverage a user base of Windows PLUS MacOS X Server. However, for some reason, Apple has kept back the technology from being deployed on Windows.

This has caused considerable angst in the Cocoa development community who had planned to deploy educational and business applications written in Cocoa and deployed on Windows in those areas where no administrator has any intention of replacing Wintel boxes with MacOS X Server boxes. Apple had promised reasonably priced licenses to developers to deploy these YB/Win solutions, but Apple has delayed because of "licensing issues which need to be resolved".

In essence, while this story is long and complicated, YB/Cocoa could very well be a great solution for tons on Wintel users, but if things continue, they'll never know.

Mark J. Hershenson
Senior Editor, The MacOS Xclave
http://xclave.macnn.com/