The old Yellow Box for Windows is alive again – in Safari for Windows.
I don’t know if Apple seriously expects to challenge the browser market for Windows, but what they will get out of this is a good public shake-out of the Cocoa libraries running on all kinds of Windows platforms – nothing they could test in-house.
iTunes still runs as a Carbon app, which runs on a library with lineage from Quicktime, which began with a port of the Mac ROM Toolbox to Windows in the 90’s. Cocoa is the NeXTStep/OpenStep framework, a better tool for writing modern applications of most types. Give it a year, and I expect we’ll see a cross-platform development environment for Mac/Windows/iPhone. Hopefully they’ll lead the way with an iTunes rewrite to show their commitment to to the platform, this time. After they pulled the rug out from under the developers last time they’re going to have to show they’re serious.
There’s really no better way to get applications over from Windows to Mac than to give the Windows developers a better application development environment, that just happens to run on Mac. Then again, I’ve been saying that for the better part of a decade and Apple hasn’t been listening.
Speaking of pulling the rug out from under the devlelopers – I saw this from the keynote today, “No developers outside of the conference will get Leopard Beta.” Wow, so I paid $500 (and Premiere members much more) for early access to Apple OS releases (I haven’t bothered with the alphas) and now they’re not going to send it to those of us who didn’t/couldn’t pony up for the WWDC conference/trip? That is cult-like – what level operating thetan do you have to be to get the beta? Oh, just make the pilgrimage.
How do you *know* that Safari 3 is based on Cocoa?
Fair question Eddie – it’s general knowledge that Safari is a Cocoa app – a google search will show lots of info for safari and cocoa.
So, how do we know that they didn’t just scrap Safari and start over with Carbon (as if, but theoretically possible). I downloaded the Safari 3 beta, opened the package, expanded the Archive.pax.gz, looked in the Safari.app bundle for the MacOS executable, and ran odtool -L on it – it still links in the Cocoa frameworks. Note, it also links in the Carbon framework, so it can handle Carbon Plug-ins.
Bill,
That’s fine for Safari on the Mac but what I’d love to see is if someone can do something similar for the Safari 3 beta for Windows. I downloaded the Windows version and its a “.exe” file. I wonder if there are any Windows gurus who could “look” at the innards of Safari 3 on, say, an XP system?
Safari for Windows comes with Windows DLL versions of CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics. However, I couldn’t find any evidence of the Foundation Kit and the AppKit. That’s not to say that they aren’t there… I don’t really know Cocoa well enough to know what I’m looking for. Perhaps it’s all linked statically into Safari.exe.
Bill, I have the same problem than you. I recently bought €499 ADC select membership – solely for the purpose of getting the Leopard beta. And that’s what Apple have been promising all along with their ADC advertising. The developer website says: “Download the latest pre-release versions of the Mac OS X Leopard and Xcode 3.0 as soon as they become available.” I think the current beta matches very accurately the ‘latest pre-release’ version description.
Also, if WWDC gets 5000+ attendees out of 950,000 registered developers, what’s the point with the limited access?
So I’m just asking, when can I get it? And where can I return my membership if I don’t.
Safari is basically a thin wrapper around WebKit. iTunes has had a windows port of WebKit included in it ever since the iTunes Store went live.
Safari for Windows is less of a big deal than it might seem. Apple could have released it long ago, but lacked a reason. Now, they have a reason- Safari is the development environment for the iPhone.
I’d love to think it means something more, like a new YellowBox push, but I don’t want to have that dream crushed yet again. Safari for Windows exists mainly because Windows developers need an iPhone SDK.
What javaxman says makes sense. Safari on Windows will end up being a great developer tool so that developers can test their iPhone web apps without always needing to test on their iPhones. However, based on Steve’s speech yesterday, I think Apple would love to see Safari take away IE’s market share and/or lead people to become switchers to Mac hardware. Also a lot of people have forgotten that Microsoft stopped making IE for Mac a while ago. The ability to have a consistent user experience (Safari on Vista, XP, OS X Tiger, OS X Leopard, and iPhone) is nothing to sneeze at either (one of the problems developing AJAX apps is trying to support the different DOM implementations whether its IE’s DOM, Opera’s DOM, Firefox (Gecko)’s DOM, etc. With WebKit across the board you are dealing with WebKit’s DOM and furthermore Nokia has taken WebKit into the S60 realm so there is opportunity to have AJAX apps behave similarly on phones using Nokia’s S60 platform. Cool.
The iTunes Store is NOT rendered by WebKit – [so sayeth Hyatt](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_06.html#005666).
It’s unknown what Safari itself is composed of, but the [Windows WebKit](http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/browser/branches/WindowsMerge) contains nary a single Objective-C++ file (`.mm`), just C++ files (`.cpp`). My guess is that Safari *is* written in Objective-C++ on Windows too, especially since it looks like a direct dual-OS port.
Remember, though: Carbon has been ported to Windows for years – it’s what iTunes and QuickTime are written in. That doesn’t mean it’s possible to write Windows Carbon apps. Keep your pants on. 😉
The iTunes Store is NOT rendered by WebKit – [so sayeth Hyatt](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_06.html#005666).
It’s unknown what Safari itself is composed of, but the [Windows WebKit](http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/browser/branches/WindowsMerge) contains nary a single Objective-C++ file (`.mm`), just C++ files (`.cpp`). My guess is that Safari *is* written in Objective-C++ on Windows too, especially since it looks like a direct dual-OS port.
Remember, though: Carbon has been ported to Windows for years – it’s what iTunes and QuickTime are written in. That doesn’t mean it’s possible to write Windows Carbon apps. Keep your pants on. 😉
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