Comment by WillAdams
1 year ago
What current development environment and language would you like to put forward as a successor to/alternative of NeXTstep?
Some notable applications done in it:
- Altsys Virtuoso --- this became Macromedia Freehand
- Lotus Improv --- cloned to become Quantrix Financial Modeler
- Doom notably was developed on NeXTstep and the WAD/level editor was never ported (though alternatives were later developed)
- Glenn Reid's PasteUp and TouchType --- two of the nicest apps for working with documents and type I ever had occasion to use
and a number of ports were done quite quickly and were arguably the best ever versions --- WordPerfect for NeXTstep was done in six weeks and FrameMaker on the NeXT stands out for an interface which I missed when using it on Mac or Windows.
In particular, I'd really like to have a successor to/replacement for Touchtype.app (and if that could be grown into a replacement for Macromedia Freehand, that would be great) --- what tool would allow developing this easily, and making press-ready files which perfectly match what is seen on-screen?
A further example, TeXview.app was a very nice interface for editing TeX documents on NeXTstep, and has since been succeeded by TeXshop.app on Mac OS X and arguably even surpassed (it has many more features, and I can't recall any which are missing).
Graphical/integrated .tex editing environments are a frequently encountered application type, and there seems to be at least one for pretty much every programming environment --- I'm not aware of a graphical which has feature parity with TeXview.app and which is similarly consistent with its interface (it did win an Apple Design Award back in the day) --- if that's the case, then how can it be that developing with InterfaceBuilder and Objective-C and the NS-objects was so bad? If that's not the case, what development platform would you like to put forward which should have an even better TeX environment?