Confessions of a Microsoft Mac developer
Posted on June 17, 2004
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A great blog entry from Rick Shaut, a Microsoft developer who worked on Word for Mac, that explores why Word 6 was the legendary piece of of malfunctioning bloatware that it was:
Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product. And, we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again. In the process, we learned a few things, not the least of which was the meaning of the term “Mac-like.”
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Starting from the Win Word 2.0 code base presented a couple of technical problems for those of us on the Mac side. The first was that it was written to the Windows APIs. Solving this problem isn’t simply a matter of writing a layer that emulates the Windows APIs on the Mac. The way the two systems handle windows are fundamentally different, though it’s interesting to note that the new Carbon APIs are far more similar to the way Windows does things. The biggest problem is that Windows has the concept of child windows, while the Mac does not. The other is that, on Windows, everything is a subclass of the Window object. Even controls are Windows.
(Via Wired)