I wish that before Steve had left us, someone would have been able to ask him about the lack of a magical user experience for developers. While Apple has always made "closed" hardware, the Apple II and the early Macs were delightful toyboxes for swaths of young people: BASIC, Hypercard, ResEdit, etc. They (we) learned, tinkered, explored, taking the concept of a "bicycle for the mind" to a whole new level.
There's a lot to like about modern Mac and iPhone development: the tools and the documentation are arguably better than they've ever been, and the APIs have become absurdly powerful. But there's very little magic or UX to be found for the young and the new: even if you scrape together the $99 and brave the frustrating certificate process, it still takes a lot of overhead to make anything happen on the screen. (Recent improvements like ARC and storyboards help, but they're a band-aid.)
I think there remains a tremendous unfilled space in the computing world for usable "prosumer" programming, in the spirit of Hypercard. If the FSF types could pull their neckbeards out of their UNIX sphincters for five minutes, they'd see that the real barrier to truly free software is software that's trivial to learn how to edit or create [1]. And if Steve had seen this as a priority, I have no doubt that he could have made it happen.
[1] Obviously, not all software could be written this way; we'd still need engineers. But even web-enabled Hypercard-style apps would allow people to create a great deal of value for themselves and others, and give them the courage to venture deeper.
Steve did see it as a priority: Project Builder/Interface Builder were "prosumer", when launched. NeXT put a lot of effort into the developer tools, and not just for developers: the "Why the World Needs A New Computer" brochure had a whole spread devoted to Interface Builder, explaining how an end user could get most of the way towards creating their app, (with a mention of handing off to an engineer for the tricky parts, admittedly).
They definitely saw creating a magical user experience for developers as a priority. Good thing, too, as at one point WebObjects -- which had a GUI editor to create bindings for HTML in 1996! -- was all that was keeping them afloat.
(The NeXT dev environment is one of the things TBL credits for making him able to start the WWW, incidentally)
Apple, too, had its fair share of UX-work-for-Devs. MPW Worksheets were one of the first attempts in many years to think of a shell as more than just a line printer in a window. Dylan had a clever and elegant UI (when it wasn't crashing). Of course there was Hypercard, as you mentioned.
Unfortunately, it's really hard for such things to get traction with developers, I suspect more than a little because of a "I just need vi" mentality, which reminds me of the hoary "why would I want a toy mouse and pretty pictures when I have MS-DOS like a real man?" nonsense from the WiMP Wars. Some devs do seem convinced that there's no better way of programming a computer than for them to churn out text (apart from maybe getting your IDE to churn out text for you) and so traction is hard to get for "magical" experiences.
As for developing for non-developers, that remains a really difficult problem, because the challenge is not really in expressing your _solution_ to a problem so much as it is in being able to state the problem clearly. Tools can only help so much with that, mostly in giving expressive power to people who didn't realise they were suited to programming.
Even given all that, Apple continues to pour work into Automator, an under-appreciated app which is really bringing the power of basic scripting to people.
> I think there remains a tremendous unfilled space in the computing world for usable "prosumer" programming.
If you are so sure, why don't you start a company to fill that space?
Jobs' brilliance was in recognizing that the needs of both beginners and high-end users are actually quite convergent -- both want a simple beautiful no-nonsense device that just works -- and it's only the insecure "middle-class" who wants something more. He grew a company to prove just that point.
In my lifetime, home computers have moved from being tinker-boxes that blink a few lights to consumer-ready products that non-hackers can use. Jobs helped that transition, much like Henry Ford helped the car make the same kind of transition.
That wasn't a mistake either - read the chapters in folklore.org where he fought tooth and nail against having any expansion or ports in the original mac. The openness of the Apple II was mostly Woz.
As a kid growing up, the Commodore 64 was more than a tinker-box that blinked a few lights. And later, the Amiga won hands down over the Mac that we had in the house. I was definitely no hacker. I was an average kid wanting to get enjoyment out of a computer.
For me, the Commodore stepped up to offer what you describe as "consumer-ready". We bought and swapped heaps of software for C64 and Amiga over many years, as did millions around the world. We would play Summer Games as a family... mum, dad, sis.. we'd have a ball.
Even at high school, the BBC was king in my day.
When I got to Uni, I saw all these Macs everywhere, and apart from the crisper display suitable for word processing, they did not offer anything I would have called a step up my previous experience with computers.
It was around then, that I discovered the 486 PC. I saved up and bought one. Never looked back.
Just trying to balance the perspective here. Let's not get too carried away with the history of computers and what the Apple co-founder did for his company, ok?
The post I replied to was lamenting that products from the "new Apple" weren't good hacker toy boxes like the Apple II. I'm pointing out that the shift was intentional.
I don't think I exaggerated computer history either; Altair 8800 to iPhone is a big leap, and I'm not dead yet.
Agreed on all points, except for the definition of "use". Sure, my mom can now send emails, visit websites, even make her own newsletters with clip art, and that's mindblowingly fantastic. But she can't build a dynamic website herself, or add a new feature to an existing program she uses. (iWeb and Automator are a good start, but not good enough.)
I'd like to think that someday, creating simple software will be something everyone will be able to do. Perhaps it's a situation similar to AI, where a generalized all-purpose solution is a pipe dream, but where narrow domain-specific solutions are more achievable; for example, platforms like ifttt.com or FormStack, which are highly usable to semi-techie prosumers. The future's still wide open, so we'll see what happens. :)
I don't know if the demand is there. Most first-world citizens don't create their own literature, music, art or furniture, even though the tools are readily available. I doubt mom and pop will start programming, because I doubt they want to.
I think there remains a tremendous unfilled space in the computing world for usable "prosumer" programming, in the spirit of Hypercard.
I would argue that such a thing already exists. If you want to do 'easy', low-hanging, easily-prototyped design and development, the kind of experience you had as a kid with Hypercard, you can still do it, and mostly for free: it's the web.
You can't be serious. Web application development is the antithesis of what the OP is talking about, it's a mess.
A hypercard-inspired tool for creating touch applications is going to be disruptive, and is going to happen. It's a glaring gap left open by Apple. In fact, this is the reason I am personally hesitant to start working on one, it's so glaring that I would be surprised if Apple hasn't been working on one that will be released when it's ready.
I couldn't agree more, and it's why I'm so enthusiastic about the web as the lingua fraca of computing. But as Steve might say: "Not good enough yet; make it again." To put it mildly, I think we can do way, way better.
There's a lot to like about modern Mac and iPhone development: the tools and the documentation are arguably better than they've ever been, and the APIs have become absurdly powerful. But there's very little magic or UX to be found for the young and the new: even if you scrape together the $99 and brave the frustrating certificate process, it still takes a lot of overhead to make anything happen on the screen. (Recent improvements like ARC and storyboards help, but they're a band-aid.)
I think there remains a tremendous unfilled space in the computing world for usable "prosumer" programming, in the spirit of Hypercard. If the FSF types could pull their neckbeards out of their UNIX sphincters for five minutes, they'd see that the real barrier to truly free software is software that's trivial to learn how to edit or create [1]. And if Steve had seen this as a priority, I have no doubt that he could have made it happen.
[1] Obviously, not all software could be written this way; we'd still need engineers. But even web-enabled Hypercard-style apps would allow people to create a great deal of value for themselves and others, and give them the courage to venture deeper.