Changed Direction Under Jobs
Apple's financial losses continued and the board of directors lost confidence in CEO Gil Amelio. The board of directors asked him to resign. The board convinced Steve Jobs to lead the company on an interim basis. Jobs was, in essence, given carte blanche by Apple's board of directors to make changes in order to return the company to profitability. When Jobs announced at the World Wide Developer's Conference that what developers really wanted was a modern version of the Mac OS, and Apple was going to deliver it, he was met with thunderous applause. Over the next two years, major effort was applied to porting the original Macintosh APIs to Unix libraries known as Carbon. Mac OS applications could be ported to Carbon without the need for a complete re-write, while still making them full citizens of the new operating system. Meanwhile, applications written using the older toolkits would be supported using the "Classic" Mac OS 9 environment. Support for C, C++, Objective-C, Java, and Python were added furthering developer comfort with the new platform.
During this time, the lower layers of the operating system (the Mach kernel and the BSD layers on top of it) were re-packaged and released under an open source license. They became known as Darwin. The Darwin kernel provides an extremely stable and flexible operating system, which rivals many other Unix implementations, and takes advantage of the contributions of programmers and independent open-source projects outside of Apple; however, it sees little use outside the Macintosh community. During this period, the Java programming language had increased in popularity, and an effort was started to improve Mac Java support. This consisted of porting a high-speed Java virtual machine to the platform, and exposing OS X-specific "Cocoa" APIs to the Java language.
While the first release of the new OS — Mac OS X Server 1.0 — used a modified version of the Mac OS GUI, all client versions starting with Mac OS X Developer Preview 3 used a new theme known as Aqua. Aqua was a fairly radical departure from the Mac OS 9 interface, which was an evolution of the original Macintosh operating system. Aqua incorporated full color scalable graphics, anti-aliasing of text and graphics, simulated shading and highlights, transparency and shadows, and animation. A key new feature was the Dock, an application launcher which took full advantage of these capabilities. Despite this, OS X maintained a substantial degree of compatibility with the traditional Mac OS interface and Apple's own Apple Human Interface Guidelines, with its pull-down menu at the top of the screen, familiar keyboard shortcuts, and support for a single-button mouse.
The development of Aqua was delayed somewhat by the switch from OpenStep's Display PostScript engine to one that was license free, known as Quartz.
Read more about this topic: History Of OS X
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