Through this period, Symantec's Think Class Library/Think Pascal had become a serious competitor to MacApp, offering a simpler model in a much higher-performance integrated development environment (IDE).
MacApp was a direct descendant of the Lisa Toolkit, Apple's first effort in designing an object-oriented application framework, led by Larry Tesler.
As part of this process, Clascal was updated to become Object Pascal and Lisa Toolkit offered design notes for what became MacApp.
Compiled applications were quite reasonable in terms of size and memory footprint, and the performance was not bad enough to make developers shy from it.
[6][7] By this point, in the late 1980s, the market was moving towards C++, and the beta version of Apple C++ compiler appeared in 1989, around the MacApp 2.0 release.
One of the reasons for this downsizing was Apple's long saga of attempting to introduce the "next great platform" for development, almost always in the form of a cross-platform system of some sort.
Their first attempt was Bedrock, a class library created in partnership with Symantec that ran on the Mac and Windows, which died a lingering death as both parties eventually gave up on working with the other.
But when Bedrock failed and OpenDoc found a lukewarm reception, the Mac was left with tools that were now almost a decade old and could not compete with the newer products from third parties.
At WWDC'98, Steve Jobs announced that the negative feedback about the move to Cocoa was being addressed through the introduction of the Carbon system.
This ongoing support was noticed within Apple, and in late 1999 a "new" MacApp team, consisting of members who had worked on it all along, was tasked with releasing out a new version.
Included was the new Apple Class Suites (ACS), a thinner layer of C++ wrappers for many of the new Mac OS features being introduced from OpenStep, and support for building in Project Builder.
However, in October the product was killed once again, this time forever, and support for existing versions of MacApp officially ended.
MacApp is being kept alive by a dedicated group of developers who have maintained and enhanced the framework since Apple stopped supporting it in 2001.
The logic of mapping the event to the "proper object" was handled entirely within the framework and its runtime, greatly decreasing the complexity of this task.
This was a major problem for developers using earlier systems, including MacApp 2.0, which had no such separation and often led to Apple Event support being left out.
In keeping with its role as an application framework, MacApp also included a number of pre-rolled objects covering most of the basic Mac GUI—windows, menus, dialogs and similar widgets were all represented within the system.
Unfortunately, Apple typically supplied lightweight wrappers over existing internal Mac OS code instead of providing systems that were usable in the "real world".
For instance, the TTEView class was offered as the standard text editor widget, but the underlying TextEdit implementation was severely limited and Apple itself often stated it should not be used for professional applications.