Holy Shit! I had to post today because I just looked at the timestamp for the first commit to MathEdit for #OpenStep and it was exactly 1 year ago today! On this 1 year anniversary for this toy project, I am happy to have completed the final milestone!

This little app which started as a "hello world" calculator app for OpenStep 4.2 from 1996 turned into a fully fledged and useful integrated text editor and calculator that works on every version of Mac OS X and is now its...

On the Mac App Store

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mathedit/id6747867773?mt=12

Its amazing to think that an application that uses literally 0 modern features of Objective-C is still allowed to be sold on the Mac App Store. Thats some insane source code stability!

Of course MathEdit is still a free and open source app on Github. But if you want to support its continued development, please buy it on the App Store!

https://github.com/jeffreybergier/MathEdit

There is still so much I want to do like adding unicode and RTF document support. But I am going to use this milestone to pause for a while and work on something modern with Swift, SwiftUI, and the Foundation Models framework.

That is unless I start getting so much money from interested fans

Thanks so much for following along on this journey!
-Jeff

Holy crap! The long saga is over! I finally removed all of the NIBs from [Not]Soulver for #OpenStep!

This reinforces what I think about Mac development. ALWAYS start with a NIB. MainMenu.nib was particularly hard to replace as there is a lot of magic going on in the menu.

But I did it! I basically tried to copy the menu from TextEdit. Not all features work in all OS versions, but all the TextEdit features work including zooming which is awesome!

So, there are all new builds for all OS's so give it a try. I'll drop in the Notarized Universal Build link here: https://github.com/jeffreybergier/NotSoulver/blob/main/Builds/Z15%20-%20Sequoia/2025-07-05%20-%20Soulver.zip

If you want to see what a pain doing the menu yourself is, read it and weep! https://github.com/jeffreybergier/NotSoulver/blob/3ab8c341bc6f7f52aaabfe37e7c6ae1a07d09abb/Soulver/SVRAppDelegate.m#L413-L703

I admit that I have never added an NSSlider in code before, but I saw in the #OpenStep documentation that it has a -setTitle: property. However, I tried to use this and in Xcode I got this quite stern warning

'setTitle:' is deprecated: first deprecated in macOS 10.9 - -setTitle: had no effect since 10.0

But after trying it, it appears it has no effect in OpenStep either. I want to know the back story here. What happened?? lol

Omg. This is so dangerous. A bunch NeXT black hardware just dropped on Japanese Yahoo. I must resist. I have no space for this stuff… but I want it so badly! #OpenStep

It doesn't look great, but yes [Not]Soulver for #OpenStep builds and runs with no issues in Xcode 26 and macOS 26. I think I just need to pick some new button styles and it will be fully up and running again #wwdc25

Finally finished removing the NIB for the About, Keypad, and Settings windows in [Not]Soulver for #OpenStep. I think it came out really well. Things line up super nicely now.

Everything is pixel perfect except for the General page on OSX. At some point, Apple stopped letting you set an arbitrary height for an NSPopupButton... which is good because they were ugly... but now my layout is meh for that page. I will need to come up with a new design.

Earlier I said I did some Vibe coding by asking Gemini to convert the XIB file into objective C code. I did NOT end up using any of that code, but I can report that Gemini produced 1,577 lines of Objective-C slop and I ended up producing 915 lines of code.

So yay for human programmers! Less code is better code IMHO

https://github.com/jeffreybergier/NotSoulver/pull/44/files

Ok, so I admit the view is not very complex, but in [Not]Soulver for #OpenStep, I don't need any overly complex autolayout code. Just a few autoresizing masks will allow for the expected behavior. Here is a video of the same Objective-C code running 30 years apart with the exact same result! Pretty cool!

https://github.com/jeffreybergier/NotSoulver/commit/c70a7ffe564a46e4158ba9587526b1bc661b76c6

And there it is folks! [Not]Soulver for #OpenStep is now Universal binary that runs natively on my M1 MacBook Air! Wow, what a journey! I will still be polishing some small problems but I have now accomplished my goal!

I am now running a native OpenStep app written in Objective-C with:
No Swift
No Automatic Reference Counting
No Property Synthesization
No Blocks
No Fast Enumeration
No Collection Literals
No Dispatch Queues

Quite amazing that Apple has been able to maintain source compatibility in Foundation and AppKit for 30 years!

Please try it yourself! It’s not notarized (that will come later), but it should run on your Apple Silicon Mac.

https://github.com/jeffreybergier/NotSoulver/commit/6afe081c7a7dc8f3895ce730a534366d996c6a19

Does this work? I’d make it look better too.

I’m always embarrassed to see a recording of myself, but here it is… My try! Swift Tokyo 2025 Talk!

“I made a NeXTSTEP App or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Objective-C”

https://youtu.be/dwpsVqsQG5s?si=lpV4nFQmyplFlbXU

Thinking of NEXTSTEP this morning...I'd guess many aren't aware of the unusual color display arrangement.

The NeXTstation, which was the first "affordable" color solution for NEXTSTEP, has a 16-bit framebuffer, but instead of rendering the desktop in 65,536 colors (as per Windows or Mac hardware, say), it rendered in 12-bit color with 4-bits of alpha channel (transparency).

That means it had a palette of 4096 colors, with all colors available at once on the display (not like, say, the Amiga or Apple IIgs with a 4096 color palette, but video modes with a small subset of those colors available (yes, yes, HAM mode excluded). Additionally, anything on the screen had 16 levels of opacity available.

It's interesting to see in person, on the actual hardware (especially on a good LCD display). With dithering, it looks very close to 24-bit truecolor.

(The NeXT Dimension color board for the Cube allowed 24-bit color with 8-bits alpha, but that was not so frequently used -- less so than most NeXT hardware even...)

But that's not nearly the weirdest that NEXTSTEP-capable hardware got, when it came to color video display...

Remember if you have one of the elderly #sun #sparc systems and the OBP asks for a pwd. Boot into OBP then remove the idprom (THEN press n) and you can setenv security-mode none .. My SS5 with S24 and #openstep 4.2 SPARC. As beautiful as my #amiga 3000 pizzabox

Ok folks, I know you've all been waiting in anticipation for more [Not]Soulver for #OpenStep updates!

But now that I got my Virtual Machine monster of an Intel iMac server going I have a big and beautiful 1080p OpenStep workspace. So please enjoy this update.

I added Root and Logarithm support to [Not]Soulver.

https://github.com/jeffreybergier/NotSoulver/pull/10/files

I was powering up this weird old convertible tablet (Compaq TC1100) to see if it actually works, and if I could sell it, and... IT HAD OPENSTEP INSTALLED!

So cool. I do NOT remember doing that, though it's obviously the sort of thing I would do.

Goddamn gorgeous UI.

Short trip to my retro outpost. Yes, we had #openstep on #solaris runtime back then. The dev tools never left the building the reason we never had further apps and #java was the strategy for #sun. So if you are a #macOS user, yes we had something in common for not too long.

In the museum, we also have a well-preserved box containing the NeXTSTEP 3.1 operating system and its documentation. Originally developed for NeXT workstations, version 3.1 was the first to support the i386 architecture.

Infinite Mac is a collection of classic #Macintosh and #NeXT system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a (modern) web browser.

Pick any version of #System Software / #MacOS or #NeXTStep / #OPENSTEP from the 1980s or 1990s and run it (and major software of that era). You can also run a custom version with your choice of machine and virtual disks. Files can be imported and exported using drag and drop.

https://infinitemac.org/