Comment by diskzero
9 hours ago
Well, not only former Be but former Finder developer here. The OSX Finder was certainly not a cute Finder-like skin, it was in fact huge amounts of the OS9 Finder source code including a complete copy of a modified Metrowerks PowerPlant C++ framework underneath it all. There was even elements of the old MacApp framework there. It was not a skin; it was a source code behemoth with massive amounts of legacy code.
That is amazing to read. I never knew. I thought it was Workspace Manager, adapted to feel more Mac-like. There is even a clear line of descent:
1. The Rhapsody developer previews, which are NeXTstep with a menu bar at the top and desktop icons, and a Platinum skin.
2. Mac OS X Server 1.x which has cascading finder windows, an icon view by default, and some other things much like that.
3. Mac OS X 10.0, which I used, or tried to use, as a daily driver, with a broadly Mac-like experience with an Apple menu, but with app names next to it containing global "about" and "quit" options, and so on.
It never did acquire any of the nice stuff that came in with System 7 (e.g. drag-and-drop customisable Apple menu stored in folders in the System Folder) or MacOS 8 (e.g. folder drawers that shrink to tabs).
I didn't mean that the 10.0 finder was a reskinned NeXT GUI file management application (as you point out, it clearly wasn't and was a huge thing that had a bunch of heritage code), but that the entire 10.0 GUI was a kinda-MacOS-9-like GUI on top of the NeXT bsd-heritage unix-like base. If you were to take a 10.0 system and put it side by side for comparison with the CLI environment perspective, file tree, system libraries with the last NeXTSTEP releases or rhapsody.
I hear you. Yes, the 10.0 Finder had swaths of commented out code and missing features that were present in 9. Spring loaded folders comes to mind. They came back at some point.