13 Facts About MacApp

MacApp was Apple Computer's object oriented application framework for the classic Mac OS.

MacApp was used for a variety of major applications, including Adobe Photoshop and SoftPress Freeway.

MacApp had a brief reprieve between 2000 and 2001, as a system for transitioning to the Carbon system in MacOS X However, after demonstrating a version at Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2001, all development was cancelled that October.

MacApp was a direct descendant of the Lisa Toolkit, Apple's first effort in designing an object-oriented application framework, led by Larry Tesler.

MacApp was perhaps the first truly usable framework in all meanings of the term.

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Core developers of MacApp continued to work on the system at a low activity level throughout the 1990s.

Things were so bad that a group of MacApp users went so far as to organize their own meeting at WWDC '98 under an assumed name, in order to avoid having Apple staffers refuse them a room to meet in.

MacApp is being kept alive by a dedicated group of developers who have maintained and enhanced the framework since Apple stopped supporting it in 2001.

MacApp has been updated to fully support Carbon Events, Universal Binaries, Unicode Text, MLTE control, DataBrowser control, FSRefs, XML parsing, Custom Controls, Composite Window, Drawer Window, HIView Window and Custom Windows.

MacApp provided a solution to this problem using the command pattern, in which user actions are encapsulated in objects containing event details, and then sent to the proper object to carry them out.

Not only did MacApp relieve the author of having to write this code, which every program requires, but as a side-effect this design cleanly separated code into commands, user-facing actions, and their handlers, the internal code that did the work.

In keeping with its role as an application framework, MacApp included a number of pre-rolled objects covering most of the basic Mac GUI—windows, menus, dialogs and similar widgets were all represented within the system.

MacApp R16 uses standard Carbon controls for all MacApp GUI objects.