PowerPlant wasn't the first framework to appear in the traditional Macintosh Toolbox world. MacApp was the original, and is about as old as NeXTstep.
I also spent many years working on the Think Class Library, which started off in a pseudo-language that was basically C with Object Pascal extensions.
Frameworks like MacApp, TCL or PowerPlant certainly made doing Toolbox development palatable. Of course, they never had tools nearly as sophisticated as Interface Builder.
Apple has always had this problem of providing interfaces to satisfy everyone. Back in 1991, they were stating that if you weren't using object programming in the future, you wouldn't be able to program the Mac. But, since then, few APIs, other than a handful of Cocoa ones, have gotten the complete object-oriented wrapper.
Collecting something like QuickTime into a consistant, coherent object API (regardless of Objective-C, C++, Java, whatever) is a daunting task, one that Apple is never likely to complete.
We'll just have to be happy building, buying or borrowing object wrappers from others.
by Bill Coleman — Oct 09
I also spent many years working on the Think Class Library, which started off in a pseudo-language that was basically C with Object Pascal extensions.
Frameworks like MacApp, TCL or PowerPlant certainly made doing Toolbox development palatable. Of course, they never had tools nearly as sophisticated as Interface Builder.
Apple has always had this problem of providing interfaces to satisfy everyone. Back in 1991, they were stating that if you weren't using object programming in the future, you wouldn't be able to program the Mac. But, since then, few APIs, other than a handful of Cocoa ones, have gotten the complete object-oriented wrapper.
Collecting something like QuickTime into a consistant, coherent object API (regardless of Objective-C, C++, Java, whatever) is a daunting task, one that Apple is never likely to complete.
We'll just have to be happy building, buying or borrowing object wrappers from others.