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Tiger and the (r)evolution of Mac OS X. When Steve Jobs announced (at the WWDC Keynote last week) that the next version of Mac OS X (code-named Tiger) would not be out until 'the first half of. The 2013 Mac Pro was an engineering feat, but Apple eventually acknowledged that it did its customers wrong and went back to a tower design for the Mac Pro in 2019. —Roman Loyola iPod Socks. The Revolution Of Plastic is a fiction film about the overconsumption of plastic in our everyday lives. Leo, a ten year-old girl who loves dolphins, rebels against her father Mister Risso, the Manager of Detergents at Willy Supermarket.

The votes are in. PPC Linux is here to stay, but please don’t expect a weekly column (unless you all want to micropay me individually).

The first Apple iPhone is now 10 years old. Over that time it has become a revolutionary piece of hardware. But its gesture-based iPhone OS software - now called iOS - has been just as. After four releases that cost $129, Apple dropped the operating system’s upgrade price to $29 with 2009’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and then to $19 with last year’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Today I want to look at a specific application program named Runtime Revolution – it runs not only on Linux, but also in Mac OS, Mac OS X, Windows, IRIX, Solaris, and more.

I am not a programmer, but I do produce a lot of multimedia applications. In the old days, I used Apple’s HyperCard, but this great little application is a letdown on a number of fronts, including the fact that it won’t run in any OS other than the Classic Mac OS.

As time passed, most HyperCard developers moved on – the arty types like myself moved to Macromedia Director (where is the OS X version?), and the rest settled for either SuperCard or REALbasic.

There was a cross platform alternative, MetaCard, but it was difficult to use and cost the earth, so it was a minority interest. It therefore came as a surprise to me that someone had developed a port of MetaCard which promised ease of use whilst also maintaining true cross-platform development.

It’s called Runtime Revolution, is produced in Scotland by a company called (in a fit of originality) Runtime Revolution Ltd. As this is the PPC Linux column, I downloaded the PPC/Linux free trial version (as well as Mac OS X and IRIX versions).

Revolution is actually based on the MetaCard code base, but it is enhanced in a number of important ways, most especially in the area of user interface. Anyone who has used a stack-based Rapid Application Development tool, be it HyperCard, SuperCard, or MetaCard, will be in familiar territory. Scripting is handled by MetaTalk, MetaCard’s native scripting language, which has syntax familiar enough to most Mac scripting languages from Lingo to HyperTalk.

Runtime Revolution on Mac OS X

Revolution is of most interest to me because Macromedia haven’t yet released a version of Director for Mac OS X, but also because I can work on my SGI machine, which is equipped with a 20″ screen, and see the results in Mac OS X and Linux on my iMac.

The nature of my work is such that Revolution is almost too capable – Director is much more my style, but that doesn’t mean that Revolution is difficult to use. In fact, though I’ve grown used to Director’s stage- and cast-based theatrical metaphor over the years, Revolution is probably easier to use if you’re starting from scratch.

The realities of the graphic and new media design industry mean that I won’t be ditching Director anytime soon, but on the other hand, I may just invest in a full copy of Revolution and use it when the design brief is wide enough to allow me to work on my platform of choice.

The biggest boon is the write once, run anywhere nature of Revolution. Sure, Java is also cross-platform, but the only Java application I’ve ever used that isn’t a total nightmare of sloth and bloat is the X-Ray software, ImageJ. Besides, Java is just too complex for non-programmers like myself.

If you develop for PPC/Linux in Revolution, all you need to port your application to other systems – such as IRIX, Solaris, Windows, or the Mac OS – is a suitable machine and a copy of Revolution appropriate to the OS. No rewriting or debugging will be necessary, and remember that it’s perfectly possible to run Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and Linux on a single machine, so an iMac can become a development platform for three different operating systems – imagine how you’ve expanded your potential audience, literally at the click of a button.

Runtime Revolution on Windows

You may not have heard of it before, but with some publicity Revolution could give REALbasic and even Director a run for the money.

Okay, so it runs in Linux, but why is this in the PPC/Linux column instead of elsewhere on Low End Mac? Well, I am issuing a challenge. Revolution can import HyperCard stacks, so if you’re an ex-HyperCard developer and run Linux (or OS X), why not port your old stacks and apps to Linux (and OS X)? You could even start a small company making shareware applications that not only run in the Mac OS, but also in Windows and Unix.

People always complain that Linux hasn’t got enough applications. Well, with Revolution we now have the tools at hand to change that perception forever.

Further Reading

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Steven Levy
Senior editor, Newsweek, New York City. Author of Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology and others.
Alternative Titles: Apple Computer, Inc.

Apple Inc., formerly Apple Computer, Inc., American manufacturer of personal computers, smartphones, tablet computers, computerperipherals, and computer software. It was the first successful personal computer company and the popularizer of the graphical user interface. Headquarters are located in Cupertino, California.

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Garage start-up

Apple Inc. had its genesis in the lifelong dream of Stephen G. Wozniak to build his own computer—a dream that was made suddenly feasible with the arrival in 1975 of the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which came as a kit and used the recently invented microprocessor chip. Encouraged by his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, a San Francisco Bay area group centred around the Altair, Wozniak quickly came up with a plan for his own microcomputer. In 1976, when the Hewlett-Packard Company, where Wozniak was an engineering intern, expressed no interest in his design, Wozniak, then 26 years old, together with a former high-school classmate, 21-year-old Steve Jobs, moved production operations to the Jobs family garage. Jobs and Wozniak named their company Apple. For working capital, Jobs sold his Volkswagen minibus and Wozniak his programmable calculator. Their first model was simply a working circuit board, but at Jobs’s insistence the 1977 version was a stand-alone machine in a custom-molded plastic case, in contrast to the forbidding steel boxes of other early machines. This Apple II also offered a colour display and other features that made Wozniak’s creation the first microcomputer that appealed to the average person.

Commercial success

Though he was a brash business novice whose appearance still bore traces of his hippie past, Jobs understood that in order for the company to grow, it would require professional management and substantial funding. He convinced Regis McKenna, a well-known public relations specialist for the semiconductor industry, to represent the company; he also secured an investment from Michael Markkula, a wealthy veteran of the Intel Corporation who became Apple’s largest shareholder and an influential member of Apple’s board of directors. The company became an instant success, particularly after Wozniak invented a disk controller that allowed the addition of a low-cost floppy disk drive that made information storage and retrieval fast and reliable. With room to store and manipulate data, the Apple II became the computer of choice for legions of amateur programmers. Most notably, in 1979 two Bostonians—Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston—introduced the first personal computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, creating what would later be known as a “killer app” (application): a software program so useful that it propels hardware sales.

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While VisiCalc opened up the small-business and consumer market for the Apple II, another important early market was primary educational institutions. By a combination of aggressive discounts and donations (and an absence of any early competition), Apple established a commanding presence among educational institutions, contributing to its platform’s dominance of primary-school software well into the 1990s.

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Competition from IBM

Apple’s profits and size grew at a historic rate: by 1980 the company netted over $100 million and had more than 1,000 employees. Its public offering in December was the biggest since 1956, when the Ford Motor Company had gone public. (Indeed, by the end of 1980, Apple’s valuation of nearly $2 billion was greater than Ford’s.) However, Apple would soon face competition from the computer industry’s leading player, International Business Machines Corporation. IBM had waited for the personal computer market to grow before introducing its own line of personal computers, the IBM PC, in 1981. IBM broke with its tradition of using only proprietary hardware components and software and built a machine from readily available components, including the Intel microprocessor, and used DOS (disk operating system) from the Microsoft Corporation. Because other manufacturers could use the same hardware components that IBM used, as well as license DOS from Microsoft, new software developers could count on a wide IBM PC-compatible market for their software. Soon the new system had its own killer app: the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which won an instant constituency in the business community—a market that the Apple II had failed to penetrate.

Macintosh and the first affordable GUI

Apple had its own plan to regain leadership: a sophisticated new generation of computers that would be dramatically easier to use. In 1979 Jobs had led a team of engineers to see the innovations created at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto (California) Research Center (PARC). There they were shown the first functional graphical user interface (GUI), featuring on-screen windows, a pointing device known as a mouse, and the use of icons, or pictures, to replace the awkward protocols required by all other computers. Apple immediately incorporated these ideas into two new computers: Lisa, released in 1983, and the lower-cost Macintosh, released in 1984. Jobs himself took over the latter project, insisting that the computer should be not merely great but “insanely great.” The result was a revelation—perfectly in tune with the unconventional, science-fiction-esque television commercial that introduced the Macintosh during the broadcast of the 1984 Super Bowl—a $2,500 computer unlike any that preceded it.

Quick Facts
date
  • 1976 - present
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  • Co-founder Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake in Apple for $800.
  • Apple was founded on April Fool's Day in 1976.
  • The Apple logo was designed with a bite so that it wouldn't be mistaken for a cherry from afar.
  • Apple's market cap is greater than the GDPs of the Netherlands, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, and Norway.
  • In 2011, Apple's financial reserves were greater than the U.S. Treasury's operating cash balance.