Someone has unearthed a video on YouTube of Steve Jobs demonstrating NeXTSTEP way back in 1992.

The video is long (35 minutes) but begins with Steve talking up how NeXTSTEP has “much, much better productivity apps” than other operating systems.

That includes NeXTMail, the precursor of Apple Mail, which Steve puts through its paces after demonstrating the revolutionary NeXTSTEP Dock:

After watching how far ahead of the pack NeXTMail was, you can read more about Mail in NeXTSTEP (Apple Mail: The Early Years) and about the origin of bundles, which live on in today’s Mail.app as plugins.

[Via Global Nerdy ]steve jobs, apple, nextstep, nextmail, productivity, mail.app, apple mail

Once upon a time, Mail.app was the email application for an operating system known as NeXTSTEP. (For more on this, see the earlier Hawk Wings post, “Apple Mail: The Early Years“).

Then NeXTSTEP became OpenStep/OPENSTEP and Mail.app went with it. And OPENSTEP begat Rhapsody. And Rhadsody begat OS X. (Full genealogy on Wikipedia).

Steve Jobs, ever the polished salesman (image from Puckman )

Don Yacktman , then a OpenStep developer, wrote an article in 1997 which outlines how bundles or plugins worked in Mail.app and what they did.

He describes plugins like Cryptor (PGP encryption) and URLifier which placed a clickable icon in front of URLs:

Colorizer scanned headers for keywords and patterns and enabled you to modify the summary of messages (what we call the List View) according to the matches.

For example, you could place a big red arrow next to emails from your boss or colour the background of emails from your spouse pink.

Other plugins opened HTML email in the browser of your choice.

But the greatest of them all was EnhanceMail:

It collects a number of cool hacks into a single bundle. In displayed messages, it can turn smilies such as “:-)” into graphic smiley-faces. (There are over a dozen smiley graphics it uses to display the various types of smilies.) It has a wide variety of options for appending signatures (including “rich” signatures with graphics and various fonts) and options for quoting text from the original message. A user can even highlight a passage in a message, hit “Reply”, and only that passage will appear quoted in the response, making it easier to trim down quoted text. It also adds support for X-face graphics and adds an X-Image-Url: header which can be used to supply a better looking mail face picture. (It automatically looks up the images and displays them instead of the xfaces. And it caches them on your hard drive, too.) It adds several other highly useful features as well.

It’s amazing, he says, that in 1997 there were so many great plugins for Mail.app:

That’s a lot of modification for an application that doesn’t have a published API.

Despite this, he regards the design decision by NeXT which allowed Mail.app to load bundles on start-up as a crucial one in the app’s development:

A bundle developer can walk outside of the published API and make changes to applications that the application’s authors never even considered in their wildest dreams. In other words, by loading bundles, applications are throwing the door to future customizations wide open.

Amen to that!

Fulfill your wildest dreams on the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.OPENSTEP, OpenStep, NeXTSTEP, mail.app, apple mail, history, plugins, bundles, API

No doubt the Internet will be soggy with self-indulgent nostalgia today. Here’s my contribution.

Hawk Wings spluttered into life at the end of July this year as a way to learn about blogging and as a tribute to a little app that I quite like.

It was relaxing and a pleasant distraction from the real world, so I continued. Over the last five months, a few of my posts proved popular (by Hawk Wings’ standards) with readers:

Top Five Most Popular Posts

1. MacFreePOPs: Getting emails from hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, SquirrelMail, AOL, etc. MacFreePOPs just seems to run and run. I don’t know where the hits come from, but it is by far the most popular thing I ever blogged.
2. Top ten things every Mail.app user should have. Recent and popular, some people found this a useful entry point into the world of plug-ins and/or fun to disagree with.
3. Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail. With help from Andreas Amann, this post collected some helpful ways to make the break from Thunderbird.
4. Getting Things Done in Apple Mail. Never was a niche market focussed on time-efficiency willing to spend so much time reading about how to do it :-)
5. Apple Mail: The Early Years. My first blogging “triumph”. The pre-history of Mail.app as NeXTMail in NeXTSTEP.

But sometimes it happens — on blogs and in life — that the best things are not the most popular ones.

Here are five posts that added something which wasn’t there before:

Top Five Best Posts

1. Apple Mail: The Early Years. With help from Don Yacktman and John Kheit, I was able to gather together some oral history before it disappears.
2. Putting your Apple Mail on an iPod. Jeffrey Glover was kind enough to share a step-by-step walk-through on storing your Mail folder on a iPod.
3. What’s in your Mail folder?. A Cook’s Tour of your Mail folder. Poking around in order to write this was fun.
4. Services and Apple Mail. A small contribution to a much neglected aspect of Mac OS X and of working smarter in Apple Mail.
5. Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I and Part II. Blogging is often about being a magpie, picking shiny things out of the never-ending piles of other people’s posts.

   Here I think I really wrestled something to the ground, got some understanding of GTD, and produced two posts that added a bit to the ways in which Mail.app can be used.

Of course, there were less successful moments too.

I discovered several new Mail features that have been around since Jaguar and completely misunderstood what the new iChat SSL certificates were about. Also my arguments in favour of top-posting proved more persuasive to me than anyone else.

Since its birth in July, Hawk Wings has served 901,547 pages and moved up 3,099,986 places in Technorati’s rankings. Nothing to be too proud of, as there are still 22,669 blogs people would rather read than this one.

See you in 2006 (unless 10.4.4 sees us first).

Buried deep in Mail.app‘s Resources folder is a file called senders.tiff. If you view it in Preview, you will be greeted by pictures of nine people (well, eight people and an insect).

I don’t know for sure, but it’s my hunch that these are the programmers who work on the development of Apple Mail. You could hunt it out on your own computer (they’re hidden away inside every copy of Apple Mail), but here they are:

Does anyone know who they are? If they are the programmers, we should pass the hat around and buy them a beer. Or possibly a piña colada.

UPDATE: A source close to Apple tells me that these are (or to some extent, were) the Apple engineers who work on Mail. And a nice job they do too ;-)

The senders.tiff file functions a bit like NeXTSTEP‘s X-Faces did in NeXTMail. When one of these people sends you an email, Mail calls their image from the file and displays it in the message.

The mail client we know and love has a long history. It was written from scratch for NeXTSTEP, the operating system created by NeXT Inc, a company Steve Jobs founded in 1985 and which was bought up by Apple in 1996.

Known as NeXTMail or simply Mail.app, it was a powerful and fully-featured program, more powerful than its descendant Mail 2.0 in some ways, although less powerful in others.

The importance of NeXTMail for OS X’s Mail.app is clear at once from a screenshot of NeXTMail’s interface:

Read on to take a look at Apple Mail in its early years, see what it could do, and hear what some people remember about using it.

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