NeXTSTEP Release 3 Demo
Why Hacker News recommends it
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.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2007 to 2016.
What Hacker News said
Recommends henning · 2007-04 · on “The greatest Demos/screencasts you've seen”
I thought Steve Jobs's NeXT demo from 1992-1993 was pretty impressive. [this video] It certainly would have seemed space-age in 1992.
Recommends _frog · 2011-03 · on “Steve Jobs on Apple's brand strategy in 1997”
Not as relevant but I saw this video a while back: [this video] It's interesting to see a young Steve Jobs perfecting his presentation style.
Recommends ben1040 · 2012-12 · on “The legacy of NeXT lives on in OS X”
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]
Cites ynniv · 2009-10 · on “Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for Creating Web Apps”
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)
Cites spitfire · 2011-05 · on “Ask HN: Is there software for building software?”
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.
Cites lr · 2011-08 · on “Play on Heroku”
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]
Cites Jach · 2011-12 · on “I’m too lazy to be a HTML developer”
> 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
Cites kitsunesoba · 2016-06 · on “NeXTstep Manual, Systems Programming with Objective-C and Driver Kit (1995)”
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.