MiscKit Pre History
A brief history of where the MiscKit came from, as Don remembers it.
The MiscKit has had a very interesting origin. The very first objects found in the MiscKit were originally objects written by Don Yacktman for use in his personal NEXTSTEP projects. Any object that was general purpose was thrown into the kit, so that during project development any of these objects could be called upon. Most of the objects originally came out of necessity for implementing various parts of Don's NEXTSTEP games, class projects at school, or both. Because these objects turned out to be so useful (at least to Don) he released them to the general public. Some of the objects had first been released independently, such as the MiscString. It was released with the name "String". However, shortly after the release of String, Don packaged everything together into a single library which was publicly released with the name "daymisckit", using Don's initials as the prefix for the objects in the kit. Because quite a few people used the DAYMiscKit, you will find that the Headers area contains several daymisckit compatibility headers. This allows DAYMiscKit users to upgrade to the current MiscKit without re-writing their code.Shortly after the release of the DAYMiscKit, Don offered some help to Scott Anguish with an Interface Builder palette that he was working on. After Don fixed a minor bug and sent the palette back to Scott, Scott asked Don if he would be willing to allow other people to make contributions to the kit. Don decided that was a nifty idea and decided to open up the kit in such a way that anyone could contribute to the kit if they wished to do so. Until this point, anything added to the kit was initially written by Don, although several people had contributed snippets of code to the String class. The first submission of a complete object from someone other than Don was Scott's ClockView, which is now found in the MiscClockView.palette, the palette that Don debugged for Scott.
Don made an announcement to the comp.sys.next.announce newsgroup that he was going to allow public contributions to the kit, and set up the MiscKit mailing list for anyone who would be interested in following this software development effort. Through the mailing list the basic charter, license, and other MiscKit policies were refined over a period of time. It turns out that this process was excruciating for Don, which fact is only slightly insinuated by Don in the messages posted to the MiscKit. He wrote all the drafts and updated them according to the suggestions from the list, until everyone was more or less happy with them. It is plain that he would have preferred to have someone else do the License, but there were no willing souls. (Everyone apparently knew better than to volunteer for the hot seat.)
When everything finally settled down, and various submissions had begun to come in, Don began the final preparations for the MiscKit's official distribution. The 1.0.0 version was originally supposed to be released in November 1993, but Don found that getting the initial structure of the kit organized in a nice way took a lot more work than was expected. Now, however, the MiscKit is here and ready for you to use it. It is hoped that it was worth the blood, sweat, and tears necessary to bring it to you.
Because the MiscKit is in a constant state of development, there will probably always be some items in the Temp directory that are in the process of being brought into the MiscKit. The history of the MiscKit is far from complete at this point! If you wish to be kept abreast of new MiscKit releases, send email to Don Yacktman to be placed on a mailing list for release announcements. If you are already on the MiscKit mailing list (primarily for MiscKit developers, but users are welcome) you will automatically get copies of all announcements.
Questions? Contact our webmaster via email to don@misckit.com. .