Nostalgia tripping

I just spent a half-hour sitting in front of Ika's Mac Mini, exploring the Xcode and InterfaceBuilder development tools. Xcode is the modern equivalent of the old NeXTStep ProjectBuilder tool (introduced in NeXTStep 3.0 in 1992), InterfaceBuilder is amazingly similar to the InterfaceBuilder which shipped with the first NeXT computer I ever played with, running NeXTStep 0.8 in 1989.

Pretty quickly I was able to put together a very simple GUI application for converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit. This was a first day exercise when I taught five-day NeXTStep bootcamps back in '93-'94.

Of course, some advancements have been made such as alignment guides within InterfaceBuilder. There are probably many more, but I didn't find them in my 30 minutes of play time. (I also had to get used to a one button mouse.)