Q: Is it difficult to port a Win or OS/2 app over to the I..

I've pretty much given up on my old standby, OS/2, and now a devoted
and very happy Intel iMac user - but I miss a few things such as a
comprehensive all-in-one easy to use graphics viewer and editing
program like PMView (pmview.com). This product comes in an OS/2 native
and Windows software offering.

The author of PMView has not made a Mac version of his popular product
but I'm sure he would do so or allow it to be done if the information
on how it could be accomplished were provided.

I'm not a programmer by any means and hope my entry into this newsgroup
will provide some insight on how easy or difficult such a task may be.
Is it hard to port other non-Mac software over to the Mac platform or
has Apple made it pretty easy to generate a "Universal Binary" from
non-Mac software?

Anyone have any suggestions, advice or comments?

Tim...

In article ,
"The OS/2 Guy©" wrote:

> I'm not a programmer by any means and hope my entry into this newsgroup
> will provide some insight on how easy or difficult such a task may be.
> Is it hard to port other non-Mac software over to the Mac platform or
> has Apple made it pretty easy to generate a "Universal Binary" from
> non-Mac software?

Some software is easy to port. Software written in Java, like ImageJ or
IDEA, is pretty easy to get running on the platform. You need only take
note of the areas in which the Mac model and the Java platform differ.
(Whether the menu bar is in the window or at the top of the screen is a
biggie.) A reason for that, of course, is that those writing in a cross
platform language are more likely to have thought about other platforms
while they designed it. They thus may have made it easy to port from
the first.

Other software is very difficult to port. I have clients who have
amazing amounts of code in VBA, hooked up to Access databases and excel
files. This code barely runs on new releases of Access, let alone on a
Mac. When you hard code platform assumptions deep in your code, it is a
real pain to port to another platform.

If you are after a graphics viewing program, you would do better to
check out Lemke Software's Graphic Converter, as well as the free
Preview program bundled with your Mac. Similarly, The Gimp will do many
of the things photoshop would do, so that might be an option.

There are lots of image viewers on VersionTracker - try some.

Programming graphics is non trivial on any platform, especially if you
want to _do_ something to the file you have opened. Thus, graphics
programs not designed for porting in the first place are likely to be a
painful move. On the plus side, the Cocoa toolkit is very keen and
offers great productivity, thus you may get a new program written faster
than you might expect. Similarly, I hear good things about RealBasic.

Scott

--
Scott Ellsworth
scott RemoveThis @alodar.nospam.com
Java and database consulting for the life sciences