Video: Developing a NeXTStep App in 2025

[jeffburg]

This may be a little self-serving, but in order to get some content seeded onto the new forum I thought I would post my talk on developing a NeXTStep app in 2025.

If you want to try it on your NeXT Machine or VM, you can grab binaries on my Github
https://github.com/jeffreybergier/MathEdit

[ZombiePhysicist]

Great video and cool project! Thanks for sharing it! Yea a lot of things there make me so super nostalgic and make me want to try to make NeXTSTEP my default desktop environment. Im really just missing modern email, and web browsers. Beyond that, I think I would enjoy it for much of my work!

[Rhetorica]

Hey, you gave it a proper name! Good! "jeffburg's Soulver clone" was always a mouthful. (Also, I have my doubts about the name "Soulver" to begin with...)

Still need an icon? 

[jeffburg]

Hey, you gave it a proper name! Good! "jeffburg's Soulver clone" was always a mouthful. (Also, I have my doubts about the name "Soulver" to begin with...)

Still need an icon? 

I actually did end up making an icon. However, I never tried to make it work for OpenStep. I'm not really sure how icons worked in that system. It's super weird.

[jeffburg]

Great video and cool project! Thanks for sharing it! Yea a lot of things there make me so super nostalgic and make me want to try to make NeXTSTEP my default desktop environment. Im really just missing modern email, and web browsers. Beyond that, I think I would enjoy it for much of my work!

Yeah, I really do think that OpenStep is too old to run as your main desktop. That said, the Mail app in OpenStep is basically the precursor the Mac mail app. I am not sure if the modern version of mail has many more features except for search perhaps? But I think the hard thing with the OpenStep version is the Mail account system is managed outside of the Mail.app itself which I think is an old school unix thing? Not sure. But if you could figure out how to get POP working to gmail, I think it would suffice.

I think the browser is the real killer. As far as I know, OmniWeb did not even support CSS in OpenStep and that will just make things super hard. BUT you could run something like WRP (web rendering proxy) on a different computer to "pre-render" web pages and send them over as image maps. If you have a lot of ram, this should be no problem for OmniWeb to handle.

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

[ptek]

Will this program be a good basis for a IDE that uses auto-completion?

[jeffburg]

Thanks for asking. I don't think so. I think something like IdeKit would be a better starting place. This cold is very old. It runs in Mac OS X 10.1, and I think as long as OpenStep got the ability to Objective-C++ (which I think it did) then it should work.

https://github.com/CodaFi/IDEKit/blob/master/IDEKit/Editors/IDEKit_SrcLayoutManager.mm

For background, you can read the readme. But this project was actually forked in Apple and became the basis for Xcode's text editor.