NeXTSTEP Release 3 Demo

Yes, based on the NeXTSTEP roots, everything should be object oriented. Think of it like visual copy/paste. Pretty much every on screen item should have a meaning and relationship to everything else. For example, in ▶ this video at 35:00 you can see how an application is loaded from the network and a live chart dragged from one app to another. That isn't a one-off gimmick, it's how the OS and that version of Objective C worked. I bought a Macbook because I was excited by this idea, but I quickly realized it was not even surface deep. I could drag some on screen elements around, but it was inconsistent at best. But I guess there was a conflict with Raskin's idea of making everything resemble a real world equivalent (object as in "toaster app," rather than decomposed feature of "can toast") and they wanted to let third party applications do their own thing. If the whole OS (and network) was effectively the application, what's their product? Never let profound world changing innovation get in the way of a trillion dollar company, I guess. I think of it, in my muddle headed imagineering way, this way: link I suppose by now we would think of it all as a graph rather than OO, just add coordinates (and the required couple decades of cultural development of how they would relate) and you've got your spatial interface.

NeXT, for one. They didn't exactly die miserably, given their technology is what ultimately still runs Apple's OS software and APIs. NeXT's business model was based on objects to some extent at least and they were enthusiastically selling object-oriented software as a business feature, rather than a technical matter only software developers care about. Here's Steve Jobs demoing NeXTSTEP's object-oriented development environment: ▶ this video The way he explains it, it makes perfect sense (as one would expect): In an ideal world, an object-oriented software development approach not only allows non-technical people to define requirements but also enables them to compose and build applications from existing components without having to write a single line of code.