this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
151 points (82.1% liked)
Technology
59472 readers
3484 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Other systems did have double-click, and app bundles (which I still think are just fantastic) were a NeXT thing. (which of course became Apple, but they weren't at the time). But yeah, Apple way refined and brought those to a mass market.
App bundles were just a better implementation of resource forks, which were invented by Apple and pre-dated NeXT.
NeXT was founded by people who worked at Apple (not just Steve) and they were largely put in charge when they came back to Apple. I wouldn't call them separate companies. Just a weird moment in the history of the company. A lot like what just happened at OpenAI.
App bundles have virtually no relationship with resource forks. I guess you could say that App Bundles COULD include SOME metadata that you could have included in Forks, including the idea that something was an application or not. But that's about it.
On the NeXT always being Apple thing - I mean, some of it maybe was spiritually Apple, and eventually it was 100% Apple. But we're splitting hairs.
Eh, the difference between app bundles and resource forks isn't the functionality itself, but rather how the filesystem interface cuts through the functionality.
An OSX bundle is a Unix directory, whereas a classic Mac application is a file in a filesystem that supports multiple forks within a single file. Either way, you have typed objects (files or resources) that get carried around with a master object (the application).
The first Mac came out in 1984; NeXT didn't have a product until 1988.
NeXT was later bought by Apple and their tech became the foundation of Mac OS X in 2001.
But I was referring to the original '80s Macintosh System, not OS X. :)