A patient and good-natured Shari writes: >> The other way is to ship your standalone to someone with OS X and let them >> fix it for you (until you get a copy of OS X of your own). > > Not planning to upgrade in the near future. Too many of my programs > would break :-)
An over-caffeinated Richard responds: OS X is a freaky NeXTish hybrid, a very different world than anything you've known before, with extra bonus points for sucking your machine's clock cycles away with unreadably translucent layered window and menu rendering. I've spent many days sorting out issues unique to OS X delivery, with the added bonus of knowing the Carbon API is still in flux. If you're shipping for OS X, I can't recommend strongly enough getting a copy and experiencing its specialness firsthand. On the flip side, regardless of what Tog wrote at <http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html> or what John Siracusa wrote at <http://arstechnica.com/reviews/01q4/macosx-10.1/macosx-10.1.html>, OS X is here, it ain't going away, and the Classic OS we knew and loved will be phased out of existence the minute Steve & Co. think the market will allow it. And to be fair, I haven't installed Jaguar yet, which is said to boost performance noticeably and tone down the jellyfish-exploded-on-your-monitor motif to something more useful (and thankfully less translucent -- see the Ars Technica review of Jaguar for a comparison). More to the point, reviewers love seeing OS X versions, and many reviewers and even end-users won't look twice at a Mac app that isn't X-savvified, even if they're not running OS X themselves yet (fewer than 30% of Mac users are). So while you have good reason to spend most of your time in OS 9 (I plan to until January), being able to boot into OS X for debugging and UI tweaking is more useful than I can describe, and may well affect your bottom line in good ways. And since you've waited this long to jump on the X bandwagon (smart move, IMHO), you can draw on the experience of those who've already worked through these issues here on this list. One great place to start is with the Apple tech note, "Anatomy of a Bundle": <http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/SystemOverview/Bundle s/_Anatomy_of_a_Bundle.html> Then poke around in MC's bundle, tweak the plist file, etc. to get a feel for the new world. The plist file determines the text in that menu item, along with other Mac-specific metadata -- worth knowing its structure, and easy since you only need to modify the one MC installs in your bundle for you. Also, play with Iconographer for a while and it gets kinda fun. While it's eay to poke fun at an OS whose design goals emphasize lickability over usability, aside from the Dock many things start to grow on you after while. The text rendering is gorgeous, and I've been a fan of the NeXT-style file browser since the much-faster third-party Gregg's Browser premiered many years ago. You needn't think of OS X as an either-or proposition (at least not until 10.3 in January). You can continue to get work done rapidly with the tools you love running in the well-optimized OS 9, rebooting into X for a day or so along the way as needed. Have fun. ;) (Putting the coffe cup down and retreating for some soothing cocoa. It's cold here in Los Angeles - gosh, it must be down around 60 degrees <g>). -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge 2.0: Publish any database on any site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard