Oliver wrote:
@blakespot
Hi, I'm just curious: what would you say OPENSTEP is particularly good for? Is there a lot of software available for it?
Thanks
While it's a rather functional OS today, it's more of a historical thing, really.
NEXTSTEP was the first UNIX OS (BSD using the Mach microkernel) that was friendly to use. An app could generally be moved from one machine to the other by copying the application directory to the target machine. The bundled e-mail app was called Mail.app. In the Workspace, this was an app icon you could double-click and it would launch. In reality, there was a directory on the disk called Mail.app that contained all of the applications binaries and resources.
Mac OS X does apps exactly the same way, as it is derived from NEXTSTEP. (It went: NEXTSTEP -> OPENSTEP -> Rhapsody -> Mac OS X)
Many feel the system has, even today, a very clean GUI and a very elegant way of doing most things. Even the documentation (printed texts) feel very elegant. Thank Steve Jobs for all that.
The OS is very internet friendly. All the standard net apps exist for the machine, with the biggest weakness being in the browser selection. The most advanced graphical browsers for the machine are an old version of Omniweb and Linx with gfx support compiled in. I keep hoping someone will port Mozilla to the unit.
I am not compelled to use OPENSTEP, today, as my primary OS. But it's rather functional and an interesting exercise to run.
blakespot
