
OpenDoc - taylorbuley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
======
eschaton
The OpenDoc sources were on the developer CDs at the time as well. It wasn't
really Open Source and as far as I recall you couldn't change and redistribute
it, but it could be quite handy for debugging as well as for seeing how
everything fit together.

One of the biggest difficulties with OpenDoc development was the marriage to
IBM's System Object Model (SOM) because C++ didn't support the required level
of dynamism. That meant everything interfacing with OpenDoc components—which
was ideally supposed to be everything!—had to round-trip through an IDL layer
with a bunch of machine-generated glue code. Theoretically "direct-to-SOM"
compilers were coming, where a class could be annotated and get SOM API & ABI
compatibility, but I don't recall if one ever shipped for the Mac.

OpenDoc would have been far leaner and more comfortable to develop for if it
had embraced a dynamic language like Objective-C, instead of immediately
reaching for maximum language agnosticism and an IDL. Everyone who demanded
cross-platform wasn't really going to develop for it anyway, and giving in to
that just slowed it down.

(Incidentally, Dylan had the same problem: The "It needs infix syntax for me
to even look at it!" developers were never going to use it anyway because it
wasn't and never would be C, so the people working on it shouldn't have
squandered multiple years of effort trying to please them instead of improving
the tight, simple Lisp-syntax version.)

------
Detrus
And then [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-
tKLISfPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE)

Don't forget Cyberdog
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xjkm_fSM1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xjkm_fSM1g)

You could drag and drop files into that browser in 1997! Sadly some Youtube
videos are hard to find.

Should be here somewhere
[https://www.youtube.com/user/EveryAppleVideo](https://www.youtube.com/user/EveryAppleVideo)

~~~
setpatchaddress
CyberDog was actually compelling for end users, unlike most OpenDoc
components. Best Mac web browser UI until Safari, and best mail client for a
long time. Became obsolete due to the progression of web standards very
quickly, though.

~~~
abrowne
I remember finding and using CyberDog for while. I think one of the features
was the "back" action was fast (instead of basically reloading the previous
page from scratch), which sounds boring, but then noticeable when using
another browser.

I also seem to remember that much the team went on to work on IE for Mac,
which was an entirely different code base from Windows IE.

------
nateberkopec
Steve Jobs' response to "What about OpenDoc?" at WWDC in 1997:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udyy2gQyNso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udyy2gQyNso)

