Posted on Thursday 8 December 2005 - Popularity: 2%
Ok, this is a rumor posted on a forum, so don’t take this too serious. The rumor suggests that Apple is developing Dharma, an engine to allow OS X apps written in Cocoa to run under Windows (basically an evolution of the never finished NeXT project “Yellow Box for Windows”). The rumor also suggests that Apple will release a Windows version of Safari for free, made with Dharma.
Jobs is well aware of the risk and, as soon as he decided to revive the dormant OS X-on-Intel ‘Marklar’ project, launched a parallel project (now known internally as ‘Dharma’) of reviving (here’s the big thing)… The Yellow Box for Windows. As you probably know it, the Yellow Box for Windows was NeXT’s project of porting Project Builder (known as Xcode today) and the complete NeXT API (known as Cocoa today) to Windows, allowing developers to create a Windows binary by simply ticking a check box. Rings a bell? Yes, it IS what they always meant by ‘Universal Binaries’. Truly universal.
Why bother? That’s simple. By giving those powerful development tools for free, Apple and Jobs hope to give Windows developer a competing alternative to Microsoft’s Visual Studio and thus ‘contaminate’ the Windows environment with Mac-compatible, objective-C applications, instead of letting WINE do just the reverse.
March 12th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Would Apple be so stupid? It could go two ways, people will buy software for mac and windows and use windows because it’s cheaper, or they buy the software and think they will switch to mac as they already have all the applications. I think they will stick with Windows because it’s cheaper.