Cocoa (API) - Cocoa History

Cocoa History

Cocoa continues the lineage of several frameworks (primarily the App Kit and Foundation Kit) from the NeXTSTEP and OpenStep programming environments developed by NeXT in the 1980s and 1990s. Apple acquired NeXT in December 1996, and subsequently went to work on the Rhapsody operating system that was supposed to be the direct successor of OpenStep. It was to have had an emulation base for Mac OS applications, called Blue Box. The OpenStep base of libraries and binary support was termed Yellow Box. Rhapsody evolved into Mac OS X, and the Yellow Box became Cocoa. As a result, Cocoa classes begin with the acronym "NS" (standing either for the NeXT-Sun creation of OpenStep, or for the original proprietary term for the OpenStep framework, NeXTSTEP): NSString, NSArray, etc.

Much of the work that went into developing OpenStep was applied to the development of Mac OS X, Cocoa being the most visible part. There are, however, some differences. For example, NeXTSTEP and OpenStep used Display PostScript for on-screen display of text and graphics, while Cocoa depends on Apple's Quartz (which uses the PDF imaging model, but not its underlying technology). Cocoa also has a level of Internet support, including the NSURL and WebKit HTML classes, and others. While under OpenStep there was only rudimentary support for managed network connections through NSFileHandle classes and Berkeley sockets.

Before its current use, the "Cocoa" trademark was the name of an application that helped children create multimedia projects. Originally known as KidSim, as of 2011 it is licensed to a third party and marketed as Stagecast Creator. The program was discontinued in one of the rationalizations that followed Steve Jobs' return to Apple. The name was re-used to avoid the delay while registering a new trademark, with Stagecast agreeing to market the older Cocoa under a new name.