blogrium

Presentation Zen just linked to a bunch of presentation related videos, including some classic Steve Jobs demos. I hadn’t seen the NeXTSTEP demo yet, so I had to check it out. It’s really interesting to see some of the features of the circa 1992 NeXTSTEP system because most of them now exist in MacOS X. The dock, services, file sidebar, even an early version of the three column path browser. Spotlight seems to be a system-wide version of something they had called the Digital Librarian.

Something I found very neat and relevant to my work was his demo of their Interface Builder, a Visual Basic-esque graphical programming environment for building applications without writing code. He called it the icing on a cake that others have done before, but without the underlying cake. The cake here is the completely object-oriented operating system. In the demo, he showed assigning behavior to a button by graphically hooking it up to an object and telling it what message to pass.

He also brought up a DOS emulator in a window, showed that it could run DOS apps, and poked fun at its usability compared to the “good applications.”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Web, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.