IE For Mac OS X == MS Apps For UNIX? 29
A nameless mouse slipped this one under the door a bit ago: "Just a quick question ... If Mac OS X is based on Unix, and Microsoft creates applications eg IE for Mac OS X, how much work is involved in getting those applications working in *nix??" Y'know, I hadn't thought about it this way before, but I bet you Microsoft has. What do you think?
There already is IE for UNIX (Score:1)
Solaris IE redefines "slow". (Score:1)
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Solaris/HP-UX ports... (Score:2)
Oh well. I'm still waiting for the Linux Media Player which will be released "in a few weeks"!!! I can HARDLY wait!
(don't bother if you don't get the joke.)
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
Re:GUI (Score:2)
Not so. MS Office for KDE is quite a bit more likely, especially if there's an MS breakup but even if there isn't. MS is NOT utterly opposed to writing software for other platforms. They're not entirely stupid. If there becomes a significant market for it, it'll eventually happen...
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Re:OS X is not Unix (Score:3)
On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms? I don't. I'd love to see StarOffice become a viable competitor (or KOffice - don't want to start any more GUI jihads here) to Office, considering it is responsible for a disproportionately large part of their bottom line...
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Not quite... (Score:2)
It technically runs on a Unix, but so do some Windows apps in Wine. About the same kind of thing, but it's an officially blessed API. You won't be seeing Apple release their APIs any time soon (I wouldn't blame them), and stuff would still need to be recompiled to X86 for most Unix/Linux people to make use of it.
Of course, it doesn't use stuff like X anyhow, so Microsoft would be in for quite a rewrite...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
OS X is not Unix (Score:3)
GUI (Score:2)
They'll use Apple's GUI system.
And, the likelihood of Apple making their GUI available, is the same as the likelihood of MS Office for KDE.
Re:OS X is not Unix (Score:1)
This is the MacOS9 version of IE which is carbonized. It has nothing to do with UNIX. It is MacOS9 running in avirtual machine on MacOSX
Re:will other apps port? (Score:1)
I think that's what you're thinking of. Carbon is the updated set of APIs. Applications will still have to be recompiled to use Carbon; it's not automatic.
Cocoa is what Apple will be pushing after everyone's made the transition, but both Cocoa and Carbon will be "native" and "true" OS X.
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Re:Carbon... (Score:3)
Carbon is there so Developers don't have to do a complete rewrite to get well-performing apps in OS X. I don't see them getting rid of it for years, simply because it's *that* much easier to make real OS X apps.
As for the CarbonLib for OS 9 and 8.5, that's just so developers who don't have a developer preview can still build Carbon apps... and it also allows Carbon apps that would normally only be able to be run on OS X to be run on OS 9. It's not stripped down at all (any more than is due to the limitations of OS 9 anyway, but on OS X, it rockets on like it should), just an abstraction layer.
As for Microsoft, I don't see them doing any pure Unix stuff anytime soon (aside from what they have done). OS X isn't exactly the stepping stone its BSD layer makes it out to be.
... just in case anyone cared.
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Of course MS has thought of it... (Score:3)
Yes, completely.
The story circling on sites like Macintouch [macintouch.com] is that, despite press releases [apple.com] suggesting otherwise, there is no Mac IE team at Microsoft anymore, as they've been reorged into a WebTV group.
I can only guess that the fact that OS X is shaping up to compete with Windows with Unix-like features is one of the data points Microsoft used to axe the Mac IE project.
Oh, and for the record, Microsoft has been making Unix software for years. They worked on XENIX with SCO (which is why you see a MS copyright notice on OpenServer). They've even made versions of IE for Solaris [microsoft.com] and HP/UX [microsoft.com], in a very half-assed, security-ignorant, binary-only way, since 4.0.
Re:GUI (Score:1)
Mike van Lammeren
Re:The Solaris/HP-UX ports... (Score:2)
Re:Anyone tried *nix versions of IE? (Score:2)
I've tried IE in Solaris. It was ugly at first but survivable later, enough so I don't mind using it too much when I rember I have it
will other apps port? (Score:1)
Apple is supporting the carbon api for maintaining compatibility with "classic" apps. The cocoa api is supposed to be for Mac OS X natively.
The fact that the Mac remains a "mainstream alternative" to windows lies in it's developer support. Once those companies start to make the transition to designing apps for the FreeBSD environment, I don't see a very difficult time writing an appropriate GUI API (perhaps working with Eazel) to be able to easily port over applications to other *nix platforms.
Re:OS X is not Unix (Score:1)
But remember that IE also runs on Solaris and HP-UX... in fact I've heard that rather than porting the IE code, they ported the Win32 API. If this is true, then it's certainly possible (though unlikely IMHO) that they might release Office, Outlook, etc, for Unix as well.
Re:OS X is not Unix (Score:1)
Please don't get the impression that I care one way or another whether or not I can get MS products on Unix. I stongly prefer Netscape (probably since the first graphical browser I used was Mosaic) for browsing, pine for mail, and LaTeX or flat ASCII for papers and presentations, and, oh, yeah, Unix for my OS. So MS really doesn't have anything to sell me (or that they could give away to me, for that matter). Especially in the case of Office vs. LaTeX, I find my self being absolutly horrified at the formatting Office produces. I was helping one of my housemates proofread a 30 page paper for one of her classes, and the formatting was just awful!
Though it might be good thing if Office was ported to Unix, just to provide competition with the free {beer/speach} Office-clones. That'll make both the free versions and MS's better (well, assuming MS doesn't just crank up the FUD instead). I think competition is a good thing. Hell, it made IBM into a pretty decent company (though I wasn't around in the old days to know for sure how bad they were in their prime). Maybe it'll eventually do the same for MS.
Re:OS X is not Unix (Score:1)
Close. Except MS didn't port the Win32 API, they used MainWin from MainSoft [mainsoft.com].
More info can be found here. [microsoft.com]
Re:Of course MS has thought of it... (Score:1)
Carbon... (Score:1)
But, Carbon is essentially a stepping stone to Cocoa, which is the real POSIX stuff, IIRC, and likely Apple intends to slowly supplant Carbon - it was introduced with OS 9, downloadable for OS 8.5 +. This presumably means that it doesn't use the full power of Mach, BSD, etc.
So, my (highly uninformed) guess is this will mean IE 6 for UNIX, since that will likely line up with Mac OS XI or 11 or whatever they decide to call it, which will be the one where they're really phasing out Carbon.
Re:There already is IE for UNIX (Score:1)
My guess is that IE 5 for Linux/BSD is a compile away. But the greatest barrier won't be technical...
MacOSX == bsd with a fruit flavouring (Score:1)
Yup, bsd, despite all the POSIX support that Wilfredo Sanchez has been building in.
IE5/MacOSX will be/is a Carbon app. As others have mentioned, this is a technology added by Apple so that people with existing MacOS projects can protect their investment by porting to the environment with "less than ten percent" change required to the codebase.
There are other, more exciting rumours about a version of Office being built on the (new, exciting, NEXTSTEP-derived) Cocoa APIs. This is only a wild rumour, which I personally do not believe, but either way, as with the Carbonised IE5, it would be only an infinitesimally small step on the way towards having it up and running on any sort of *nix other than MacOSX.
Re:Anyone tried *nix versions of IE? (Score:1)
Re:Of course MS has thought of it... (Score:1)
Incidentally, MS didn't just work on Xenix -- they used to own it. SCO was originally just a VAR. MS went through a "DOS as junior Unix" phase in the early 80s.
Re:GUI (Score:1)
Anyone tried *nix versions of IE? (Score:1)
Re:Anyone tried *nix versions of IE? (Score:1)
Re:Anyone tried *nix versions of IE? (Score:1)