Seref Arikan wrote: > Thanks for all the hard work. I'll give it a spin under Linux and > let you know how it goes. > If I had a Mac (cough), I'd do the same for the sugar coated BSD ;)
There is not much sugar on the Mac build unfortunately, Seref, because it doesn't use Cocoa. The Mac build runs under X11 (i.e., X-Windows) and uses GTK, similar to the Linux build. I've built it many times on Linux and the Mac and it runs just as well as on Windows. Apart from the fact that it looks pretty ugly under GTK on the Mac, it is very hard for users to install because they need to install X11 and MacPorts first, and then wait ages for various packages to build. Linux users might say, "So what, that's normal", but it's completely abnormal for Mac and Windows users. Then, having built the packages, it may not run due to the packages they installed being incompatible with the ones that I had on my machine when I built it. DLL hell. The best solution to this would be to forget X11 on the Mac and build it for Cocoa instead. I did do a Cocoa build of it a few weeks ago -- the first time I had ever tried to do that -- and it does compile and run natively on the Mac. Unfortunately, however, it didn't work well. The EiffelVision GUI framework has been ported to Cocoa, but not completely. The docking in particular was very bad. It was bad enough that it's currently unusable, I'm afraid. X11 is still the only option on the Mac. - Peter
