Diva Stubs Her Little Toe

Do like Robin Hood: a Good Thing™.

Get It Try It

So it's come to threats again. As in threats of physical bodily harm. It always does. And Diva Stubs Her Little Toe. That's expected too.

For the record this is what happened.

A Diva present at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference 1997 with tangible interest in the platform independent OPENSTEP reported the following.

What was clear today is that Apple have got the cross-platform idea and are going to be very clear on this from now on. This is probably the best piece of news many of us have heard in a while on this topic. There is no unclear message here. This is being spelled out for everyone. If you don't hear it it's because you aren't listening.

Then he said this.

Apple are focused on cross-platform and made that very clear today.

Then he said this.

Windows runtime pricing announced. 'Free'. Developers will be able to ship cross-platform Yellow Box apps on Windows 95/NT boxes with no licensing fees!

Then he said this.

OpenStep 4.2 is proven. It is based on NEXTSTEP technology that has been shipping for 8 years now. Every developer here went away with stable polished copies of these technologies to get started using and learning. If they don't take advantage of this there are definitely others that will.

At the Apple World Wide Developers Conference 1998 he reported this.

I will point out again Apple have commited to Yellow Box on Windows long term. DR2 does run in the Windows 98 beta and there are versions in the labs running on NT 5.0 betas.

And we thereby know what happened 'behind the scenes' as the stellar OPENSTEP was bastardised into what it is today - what Anandtech derisively called a 'hodgepodge'.

But the lack of logical followup started to worry even this person.

The lack of mention of Yellow Box or Intel has raised a large number of questions. In speaking to Apple folks here I get the distinct impression they know the cross-platform story is very important to Apple's success but until we are given a clear statement of intent people will be concerned.

Clouds on the horizon. Of course by this time the attendees had held on for dear hope a year and a half.

Finally by the time of the Apple World Wide Developers Conference 1999 people started getting nervous. Not only had they waited another full year to see the reincarnation of a 'technology that has been shipping for 8 years now' - 9 by this point - but Apple had yet to come good on their repeated promises - and at the end of the conference people finally dared say 'more sir'.

During this session it was repeatedly brought up by developers that Cocoa on Windows is an important part of their strategy and Apple need to rethink their current backtracking on this.

There was a good deal of clapping in the audience when one of the comments was Cocoa/Yellow Box on Windows NT is definitely needed by developers.

I hope Apple are getting the message. I think Apple have a great feeling for the future of Yellow Box/Cocoa but they just don't know what to do with the Windows side of things.

We still need a deployment solution on Windows, especially for those of us who followed Apple's Yellow Box on Windows mantra for the past two years.

This is admittedly a scary narrative. Probably akin to reading a naive account of how the Nazis took over Germany in the 1930s. And comparing pics of the stellar OPENSTEP January 1997 at the time of the 'Anschluß' and pics of 'Rapture' some nine months later is depressing to say the least.

But Diva didn't want this information to resurface. He's since gone and not only hidden the links but blackholed all search engines (including of course the Wayback Machine) and taken the extra precaution of blackholing Google TWICE. Obviously Diva is embarrassed. Dare one speculate frightened. The bread's namely buttered on the other side today.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 59
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Who is Diva?

Obviously he's a (former) NeXT developer of some sort. Or was. In fact he contributed to the 'Cocoa bible' (now out of print). And if you can get it then do - for despite Diva's name on the cover it's a good book - perhaps the only good book.

Diva wasn't overly active in the creation of the book of course. Of the sixty five (65) programming projects available through the download only nine (9) are his work. But that doesn't matter - only to assure that his influence is not annoyingly present on each page.

It matters little what goes down at this point. Diva's been quoted - and not only by this site but at last count by over two thousand other sites as well. The difference is those other sites - Maccie to the core - wanted to bring good tidings about yet another hopeless Beige Feature™ about to be implemented in The Long and Winding Road to OS X and this site chose to read between the lines.

Diva's no longer a programmer today. If he ever really was. No software titles to speak of. After years of dire straits and the shadow of impending unemployment from his institution of higher learning (where he was an admin and not a professor or anything classy like that) he got himself a job in Cupertino.

Writing documentation.

And his old site went largely ignored. It hasn't had any significant updates in almost eight years. And then the other evening - purely by chance - someone wandered by. And found the gems quoted here. And sent them on to this site.

And Diva Stubs Her Little Toe.

Do like Robin Hood: a Good Thing™. Take from the rich; give to the poor. Just don't give to the fanboys.

To all those who replied to my first piece I have this to say: Steve Wozniak is one of those I respect greatly but I don't think he ever meant to create a community of snobs around the computer he designed. He is one of the better human beings who were part of the technology revolution that has taken place over the last 30 years. The current batch of Apple users - at least most of the sample I've been exposed to - are an embarrassment to a gentleman like him.
 - Sam Varghese

Postscript: Scott Anguish has begun a typical fanboy attack at this site for publishing excerpts from his WWDC accounts and linking to his own articles - all comfortably within the realm of 'fair use'. He's attempting to cover this in assertions something was 'stolen'. Talk about a wimpy baby: his real issue is he was caught with his panties down and he doesn't want to admit 1) he really wrote what he wrote; and 2) even more importantly that he's so hypocritically changed tack now that Apple took his food bowl away.

It doesn't really matter where you read what Whine Anguish wrote - it matters that you read it. As long as he's blocking access to his web pages this site will continue to spread the truth. As will other sites who mirror it. It's in your interests to read it.

And if you didn't realise it already: the candid Whine Anguish of 1997-1999 is no more, having been replaced by a prevaricating zombie who doesn't mind flinging baseless ad hominem attacks around him. No one at this site is vengeful; no one at this site has ever even had contact with Whine Anguish; Whine Anguish doesn't have the faintest most helpless and hopeless clue what's going on in the 'free world' about him; and anything ever commented on his person or any of his 'friends' is more than justly deserved - they're all dregs in the barrel, every last one of them.

Read - and digest - what's on this page. And learn for yourself how Apple duped the NeXT software vendors - how Apple led them down the garden path.

See Also
Hotspots: Apple's Open Source Bait & Switch
Hotspots: Apple's Cross-Platform Bait & Switch