So I figured I'd make a list of things that NeXT had, that didn't make it over in the transition, that IMO, are still better on NeXTSTEP. Hoping others will add to this. Also, I wish when people review NeXT systems, they would show these amazing things.
- Interface look and feel of NeXTSTEP is still just cooler and more pleasant to use than modern hellscape that is macOS Ventura with its brain dead system prefs/iPhone'ization/etc. For example, while Services technically still exist in macOS, they are horribly organized in the UI and way more pleasant to use on NeXT. Lots of other little UI things that are just better thought out, cleaner on NeXT
- Movable tear off menus
- Extendable shelf in Workspace.app that lets you put frequently used items to teleport to those locations on your drive/network with one click
- Displaypostscript, in many ways is superior to display PDF on macOS
- Lip service in Mail.app
- FEE encryption integrated in Mail.app
- Processes panel in Workspace.app that shows and lets you pause/cancel Workspace/Finder processes
- Real time renderman integrated at the system level
- Distributed Objects/Linking (eg you can live copy paste update between documents over networks and things auto-magically update)
- DigitalLibrarian was really great for machine private archives of knowledge which is somewhat subsumed by macOS's spotlight system level search
- Book of quotations app
- Built in apps like Draw.app that let you do cool things like make Fax cover pages etc.
- Zilla.app
- OpenSeasame.app
- ProjectBuilder Interface Builder. The current macOS versions of this obliterated the ease of use and tightness of the development environment into an spaghetti mess of garbage IMO
- MusicKit
- NetInfo which was not just a machine wide, but a network wide system prefs architecture and abandoned by macOS in favor of bupkis
- Worldclass developers. The software on NeXT was just the best of breed. The best development talent made great software. Not iPhone subscription garbage that makes up the vast majority of macOS software today, but real jewels. Virtuoso. Lotus Improv. Concurrence. Even WordPerfect on NeXT was magical. Etc. Etc.
- Efficiency. NeXT takes wastes WAY less storage space, way less memory and basically does everything macOS does at 1/100th the footprint. macOS is a resource pig using more and more to achieve less and less.
Anyway, that's my list so far. I'm sure I missed some other things. Curious what others think.
Thanks for this list Zombie, I did find that quite annoying with Rhapsody DR2 (x86) especially the extendable shelf for shortcuts and I do prefer the NS/OS GUI. I haven't tried Rhapsody DR1 but I hear it's closer to OpenStep?
I think 3D kit was released publicly on Open Step with Misc Kit?
Giving the source code to Draw and TextEdit away on OpenStep as with those two tools it's a good basis to build new tools. (Draw -> CAD software). TextEdit -> HTML Editor/ Word processor / IDE.
Misckit was 3rd party and quite great.
But I forgot MusicKit! It was spun out and went nowhere as far as I could tell.