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From: dwallach@soda.Berkeley.EDU (Dan Wallach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Becoming a NeXT Developer (summary)
Summary: easy to do, but not very useful
Message-ID: <1990Nov15.034802.26122@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 15 Nov 90 03:48:02 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Organization: UC Berkeley, CS Undergraduate Association
Lines: 159

(No doubt, people will take issue with some of the statements in here.
 Feel free to e-mail me your thoughts, and I may post a second summary.)

I originally asked about what it's like to be an "official" NeXT developer,
and asked people to tell me what they thought.  Here's the quick summary,
and I've put some of the more interesting comments at the end.

NeXT developer prices are roughly the same as the educational discounts,
unless you plan to buy in bulk, then you save more.

Becoming a "Registered Developer" is a relatively painless procedure of
filling out several pages of forms and mailing it off.  This procedure is
free, and takes only a week to get approved!  NeXT offers a $990 training
course twice a year for developers, which apparently takes place on both
coasts.  The $990 covers the 5 day course, but no mention was made of
hotel/food costs.  I'd like to see NeXT offer this thing "at cost" for
people like me who'd just assume commute to the thing (if it's in the
Bay area) and are starving students.  $990 seems to be not too far out
of wack for the industry, though.  I got some mail from OSF about a
Motif course for around $300, and I don't think it was more than a day
long.  If your company's footing the bill, $990 is fine.  It's not
clear if this course is required or just "a good idea."

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I can become and stay a NeXT
developer, for free, and forever.  (What did your mother always tell
you about getting something for nothing :-)

In essence, NeXT would love you to register as a developer, but it won't
do you much good, and for most home hackers who won't be selling their
wares, most likely isn't worth the hassle, unless you want the developer
price on hardware, roughly the same as the educational discount.

I asked what people thought about the learning curve.  I'm told that
GUI-type work is extremely painless, however, getting used to Objective-C
and it's messages, classing system, and the like takes some time.
Most weren't very familiar with X-windows, but felt NeXTstep was
a significant improvement.

If you buy your machine from NeXT, service is apparently very awful.

Technical information is there, but very hard to get.  See below for
some more insightful comments on NeXT internals.  Unless your company
happens to be Lotus or Ashton-Tate or Aldus or some other big-name,
don't expect them to be very available or useful.

(I'm told) The only availiable program sources are:

GNU sources - NeXT's sources to cc, make, etc.
Mach sources - sources to the kernel - NOT THE UNIX KERNEL, though!
Netinfo sources - sources to NeXT's answer to Sun YP.

That means, you can't get at DPS internals, Unix utility internals,
NeXTstep internals, or device driver internals.  If you're trying
to write a device driver for your neat new gismo, you may be S.O.L.,
unless you just happen to know everything there is to know about Mach.
Don't count on hacking their code to do what you want, or trace
just exactly where things aren't working correctly.

Here are some of the more curious responses I've gotten.  Read
and be enlightened.

Thanks to all who mailed me!

Dan Wallach
dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu

P.S.  So, what am I going to do?  Looks like I'll just buy the normal
      NeXTstation Color, buy somebody else's drive (possibly with a
      SCSI tape drive), and try to find a good book on Objective-C.
      My campus rep mentioned NeXT has a new 200 meg (external ?)
      drive for some more reasonable price than getting the machine
      with the 330 meg.  This merits more investigation.

      I still plan on buying this, despite the recent proliferation
      of older machines suddenly appearing for under $1000, like the
      IBM RT's for $550...  In one sense, a machine like that is hard
      to pass up, but there isn't very much you can DO with it (in
      terms of available, free software).  I could use Mathematica
      for my nasty physics classes...

=========================================================================


From:          asd@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Kareth)
> You would get all the developer manuals and stuff (when you go to the
> course), you would get technical support via phone (and fax I'd
> imagine), you'd get beta OS's and the alike I believe too.  Internal
> source, I don't think so.  But you do get everything FREE after you
> pay the initial $900 for the course, books, etc.  No yearly fees or
> such.  A pretty good deal to me!  Discounts are at about the 30% mark,
> which is what the educational discount is, at least here it is.

From:         declan@remus.rutgers.edu
> I can envision small developers writing lots of small programs which
> interact with each other in an unprecedented fashion.
{ed: sounds lots like Unix with pipes, eh? :-}

> As a developer, you would be able to call (or send email to) NeXT DTS for
> technical support...  Right now, the NeXT developer program is modelled after
> Apple's developer program (except Apple's is a few hundred dollars/year, and
> NeXT's is free), but as NeXT grows, I'd expect the developer program to grow
> with it.

From:         scott@nic.gac.edu
[about NeXTstep]
> Well, I think it's more pleasent than X.  But I don't know if they can
> be so easily compared.  A competent NeXTStep developer is not equal to
> a competent X developer.  The competent NeXTStep developer should be
> able to throw a program's user interface together in about a quarter the
> time, if not less, and is able to modify it in a very small fraction of
> the time it takes an X developer.  The main problem I've seen with X
> developers is that the UI work is painful enough that they do not like
> to rearrange it until the UI itself becomes so painful as to absolutely
> require it.  Meanwhile, on the NeXT, developers almost rearrange too
> _much_, because it's almost not painful enough!

> Of course, none of that affects the basic idea of the program - it is
> something besides UI, right?  But, removing much of the work for the
> part which makes up most of the program can really help.

From:         isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU (Art Isbell)
> I don't know what type of service you mean, but you do get telephone support.
> If I needed equipment service, I would have to deal with NeXT directly.
> I see no evidence of advanced bug fixes, OS patches, or internal sources.  The
> more productive developers receive beta versions of new OS releases so they
> can begin porting their applications before the masses have the new release.
> They are also privy to NeXT's plans for future changes to the degree that
> these changes affect the developer's products.


From:         blackbox!deltos!sstaton@uunet.UU.NET (Steven R. Staton)
> You get the same deal we do, as developers.  NeXT is not pulling
> any ca-ca like Apple did with it's developer/student/retailer pricing.
> And NeXT doesn't hide too much from the development community.

> So don't panic and don't bother with developer status unless you
> got a real product to sell.  Otherwise you are just adding paperwork
> to your life.

From:         "an anonymous NeXT developer"
> We are consultants, and we've had tough times getting info of any sort out of
> them (we've had better luck talking to the folks on the 800 line than we have
> had talking to other NeXT people!).  We were originally advised to not bother
> applying to be developers, but to just go get a machine from Bland and do it.
> For some bizarre reason, we were approved in less than 7 days (and that
> includes US snail!), but to date it hasn't gotten us all that much.  Our copy
> of 2.0 is not legal (a client gave it to us because he wanted his stuff done
> in 2.0), and our upgrades won't be coming through NeXT because we can't wait
> as long as they want us to.

> There are plenty of really great people at NeXT (they're all nice), but either
> a) they're way overloaded or b) they really don't know anything or c) they're
> being messed up by bad management :-) and it causes an interesting chaos to 
> settle on the company.

> Please don't let all this dissuade you - GO FOR IT - it's great.  Just don't
> expect too much from NeXT, Inc., and make sure you forge whatever friendships/
> partnerships you can with other developers to get the resources and info
> you'll need to write compelling apps.