Think C was definitely used to make commercial software. Apple developers probably used "Macintosh Programmer's Workshop", which is more like a command line. Whether it gave more feedback I can't really say. But again, this is not comparable to an early 90's 486 system at all. This is an 8 MHz machine that maxes out at 4MB RAM.
The big constraint on IDEs in the first few years of Macs, including this system, is the screen size. 512x342 pixels is not a lot. In the early 90's people most developers would have had something more like a desktop Mac with more real estate, so the editors evolved fairly quickly. But the first version of Photoshop was written on this exact machine (Mac Plus) according to Wikipedia.
I've never heard of anyone cross-compiling end-user software from Unix, except for pre-1984 system bring-up. In the first year or so, I think you needed a Lisa to code for the Mac, but it became self-hosting quite quickly. Mac applications until OS X need a bunch of Mac-specific stuff that lives in the file's so-called "resource fork", and the final artifact (application file) can therefore only exist on the Macintosh file system.
Think Pascal — superior to Think C’s IDE by all accounts — was also used to ship commercial Mac software. It would be interesting to see a video like this done with Think Pascal.
By circa 1990, it became clear that C was the future of Mac app development, though. IIRC, one of the big selling points of CodeWarrior when it arrived was that it had a Pascal compiler that would compile to native PowerPC code, so existing apps didn’t need to be rewritten completely in C.
The big constraint on IDEs in the first few years of Macs, including this system, is the screen size. 512x342 pixels is not a lot. In the early 90's people most developers would have had something more like a desktop Mac with more real estate, so the editors evolved fairly quickly. But the first version of Photoshop was written on this exact machine (Mac Plus) according to Wikipedia.
I've never heard of anyone cross-compiling end-user software from Unix, except for pre-1984 system bring-up. In the first year or so, I think you needed a Lisa to code for the Mac, but it became self-hosting quite quickly. Mac applications until OS X need a bunch of Mac-specific stuff that lives in the file's so-called "resource fork", and the final artifact (application file) can therefore only exist on the Macintosh file system.