Mac development

[PhilyBoy]

Hello,

I'm a small time software developer looking to get into the Mac scene. I have used PC's exclusively so I don't know didly about Mac's. I was wondering what the differences were between the different Mac OS's (7.x to 10.x and so on) and just how different they are in terms of coding. For example Win95 and WinNT are quite different for coding but Win95 and WinME are not. If I were to get an OS what would be the prefferred?

I ask this because for testing I have a PC with 5 different windows OS's on it which is very useful and needed for testing, do I need to do the same for Mac? Can you have more than 1 Mac OS on the same system with dual boot? How difficult is porting windows code to Mac? I use Visual Studio 6.0 on PC, what would be recommended for similar coding on a Mac (codewarrior?)?

My programs are mostly dialog based and require use the the CD-ROM, as well as the AutoPlay functionality (which does differ from PC OS).

I'm really lost out in the woods here, and I would be very grateful for any help that anyone can give me. I would be willing to give any programs that I create for the Mac for free as well.

I have been looking on **** for used Mac's as well, an iMac 500 has caught my eye so far.

Thanks in advance,

xar

[HelixTheLion]

Hello. I think I can help you out a little here. I'll try to answer the questions in order. There are a couple Apple OSes out there, but not quite the way windows does it. Notice how windows gives different names to their systems. XP, Me, Nt, 98, 2000, ect. That's because they really are very different. In a Mac, anything that works on 7.x will generally work for 8.x and 9.x as well. All of the 7.x - 9.x OSes are very similar, (Of coarse, the newer versions are much better.) Only get one of these. I'd recommend either 9.2, 9.1 or 8.6. (I think there's a 9.2)

OS X is a different story. This is a completely different OS for the mac. Newer, faster, more robust, more features, direct support of dual processors, direct support and acceleration of the G4 velocity engine...(This list goes on and on and on!) Any application developed for 10.x will NOT work for 9.x or under. Currently, 9.x programs are supported in 10.x, but in future releases, this new OS X will not support 9.x or under. To develop programs that will be used for a while, you need OS X.

Oh, and yes, you can have more than one OS on a Mac, and it is VERY easy to switch between operating systems.

For developing programs for Mac, hands down, get Codewarrior. It supports all Mac OSes. As far as porting windows to Mac, from Visual Studio 6.0, lemme put it this way; be prepared!

Autoplay isn't very popular among the Mac crowd. CDs for the Mac are not expected in any way to support any sort of Autoplay feature, so don't worry about it ;)

Hope that answers all the questions. If you have any more, I'll be glad to help. I work a lot on both Macs and PCs.

[c_srishti]

Hi I have been stumbling on the same issue too...
Mostly I want to convert my MFC code on VC 6.0 to work on Mac.
What is the easy solution?
I found on MSDN that VC++ 4.0 used to have an add-on VC++4.0 Cross-DEvelopment for Macintosh thru which u could just compile the code to work on a Mac, sounded pretty simple... but what about 6.0 ? Does .Net have any cross platform devlopment tool?
I haven't been able to find any resources..
Plase Help
Thank u in advance.
Regards
Srishti

PS-> Below are the links for the VC4.0 add-on if anyone interested=>

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dnarvc/html/msdn_fromone.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dnarvc/html/msdn_mfcmac.asp

[HelixTheLion]

I work mostly with console applications, so I don't really have to worry about porting too much...BUT I still have an answer! While Visual C++ is pretty much strictly for PCs, PowerPlant is something that is pretty much strictly for Mac. It comes with Codewarrior. Powerplant is the Mac equivalent to Visual C++. It is very similar to Visual C++ in a LOT of ways, but it does take some getting used to. The only other thing I've heard of is wxWindows. All I know about it is that its an application framework, and works for Macs, PCs, and some other platforms too. That might be worth a look into.

[shatleyb]

Here's a list of cross-platform toolkits - mostly GUI - and supported platforms. Some of them are free.

http://atai.org/guitool/

I vaguely remember hearing of a few projects underway to port MFC over to OSX.

If you're a VB 6.0 developer, you may find RealBasic worth looking into. ...fewer syntactical modifications anyway.

[PhilyBoy]

Thanks Helix, great reply! Just one last question. I am on a tiny budget and need to pick up a Mac to develope on. What would you recommend be the base system I should need to code on (with CodeWarrior as per your suggestion).

Phil

[HelixTheLion]

I'd recommend any G3 350 Mhz or better. I used a Beige 266 G3 for about two years, and it worked just fine. There was a G3 350 Mhz, with Keyboard, mouse, everything with a buy it now for $345 on ****, but it ends in about 2 minutes :p Imacs are generally the cheapest. Just make sure you get all the basics with it such as Ethernet, modem, a good number of PCI slots, ect. to suite your needs. If you buy it on ****, check to see what operating system it comes with. If it comes with 8.5, or higher (Which most probably do), then you only have to worry about getting OS X.

[mdk5]

Just a note since nobody has hit this on the head.. the reason OS X is so different and not backwards compatible is because it is based entirely on BSD unix. There is a console, kernel, and you can boot up in single user mode, as well as build and install many non-GUI unix apps without modification. The mac look and feel is in many ways just a GUI running on top of this similar to KDE on linux, though of course the integration is much tighter with Apple. Also, the Apple Developer Tools are provided free of charge by Apple. This includes a complete IDE which I've used for many projects.

http://developer.apple.com/tools/

-Dustin

[sks04]

Purchase at least a G4-800 Mhz or above. Anything lower doesn't run OS-X well, at all.

I would suggest purchasing an iMac, for cost purposes...they are cheap compared to a G4 desktop.

BTW: Apple changes/modifies OS-X very frequently, which can cause headaches and backward compatibity between the different OS-X versions...seriously, watch for this. Configuration testing will probably be a nightmare (I've done it, it is!)

[atif_ilm]

Originally posted by c_srishti
Hi I have been stumbling on the same issue too...
Mostly I want to convert my MFC code on VC 6.0 to work on Mac.
What is the easy solution?
I found on MSDN that VC++ 4.0 used to have an add-on VC++4.0 Cross-DEvelopment for Macintosh thru which u could just compile the code to work on a Mac, sounded pretty simple... but what about 6.0 ? Does .Net have any cross platform devlopment tool?
I haven't been able to find any resources..
Plase Help
Thank u in advance.
Regards
Srishti

PS-> Below are the links for the VC4.0 add-on if anyone interested=>

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dnarvc/html/msdn_fromone.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/dnarvc/html/msdn_mfcmac.asp



I have the similar problem i want to port my VC6.0 code to macintosh . so i want to ask did u find some add on to VC6.0 , specially some latest version of cross platfrom edition if not what u used for programming macintosh.

[PhilyBoy]

I haven't gotten right into development yet, still playing around wit the Mac and getting used to it. THis site has lots of info:

http://developer.apple.com/macos/macoverview/index.html

Phil