Programming Macintosh applications was difficult from the start and got harder as the Mac family expanded; the ease of use you enjoy in Mac applications dictates extra challenges for the programmers who write them. Over the years, programmers have narrowed down the set of capable programming tools to a mere handful—the MPW (Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop) products, Symantec’s Think C and Think Pascal, Metrowerks’s Modula 2, and versions of Smalltalk from Digitalk and ParcPlace.
Object Master from ACIUS is an attempt to combine the superior object-management facilities typically found in Smalltalk with a first-rate programmer’s editor, and bring the whole package to the most popular languages—C, C++, and Pascal (Modula 2 with P1 object extensions are also included). Object Master started life as the personal project of Loïc Vandereyken, a software engineer at ACIUS, but was soon found so valuable that many programmers began using it in-house, and then it was dressed up a bit, outfitted with a manual, and released as a commercial product. Although this mode of product development may sound informal, it has yielded the advantage of unbeatable telephone support—typically you talk to Mr. Vandereyken or product manager Mike Graves, who both can answer questions authoritatively and also write small bug-fixes and send you the modified code.
The first recommendation for Object Master is its editor, which will also be useful to non-object programmers. Besides automatically adapting to the format conventions of specific languages, it supports customizable search and replace. You can paste procedure and method calls by name, with Object Master automatically searching your project’s dictionary and the related MPW 411 files for templates. The second strong point is navigation capability. The Browser window displays scrolling lists of the classes, methods, and fields used by a project, with a separate on-screen editing area that brings up the text of highlighted methods. All types of modification of objects and methods can be performed directly through editing or menu choices in this window. Object Master here also includes some conveniences for non-object work—Pascal records and C stnicts in procedural programs will appear in class lists as bulleted pseudoclasses, for example. The Class Tree window displays the class hierarchy in a variety of ways (you can collapse, expand, and change node presentation), and lets you enter the hierarchy at any point, so the Tree window becomes an overview working with the Browser. Finally, the project Make/Build facilities, which work with MPW Shell 3.3 Tool Server and the Incremental Build System from Jasik Systems, are particularly efficient, I used to think I would be happy with Think C’s admirable project-management tools, but Object Master simply has more power—under System 7, for example, it can use Apple events to communicate with ResEdit 2.1.1 (the Resources Map itself is pretty helpful, too).
Seiter, Charles. (January 1993). Object Master 1.0.2. Macworld. (pg. 194).