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Well, it can be easy if you use the right tools and frameworks right from the beginning. When you are only using Microsoft specific tools, of course it will tak

Well, it can be easy if you use the right tools and frameworks right from the beginning. When you are only using Microsoft specific tools, of course it will take a lot of work. Using Visual Source Safe? Using .Net? Using .Net forms? Using MSVC? (And even now when developing for MacOSX??)

tibbon 16y ago
Absolutely. This is something we didn't realize from the get-go. A Mac version wasn't in the initial plan until we realized (aka, I came onboard) that we needed one.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  And that's something that really bothers me. In the company I work for, there are web applications that are not even cross-browser. I have to boot into Windows every month or so to do some bureaucratic work on them.
hammerdr 16y ago
I think its a testament to their perseverance and skill that they were able to take such a legacy system and port it to the Mac. They used some pretty cool technologies (Mono, MonoObjC) along the way and solved the problem. This is a really good hack :) Good job to the imvox team! Edit: grammar.
- jmatt 16y ago
  Yeah congratulations to Mono and MonoObjC teams. This is great news for all those other business apps that are currently Windows / .NET only.
smackfu 16y ago
What is the right tool for cross platform work? Do any of the frameworks really generate a proper native-feeling OS X application? Or are they just "good enough"?
- albertzeyer 16y ago
  That highly depends on the target. In case of games, I rarely see them using the native widgets anyway. Otherwise it depends. Right of the box you will at least get "good enough" (with Qt for example). If you want to support OSX-only stuff, of course you need some tweaks and platform dependend code.
- angelbob 16y ago
  There aren't great cross-platform tools that provide good native-feeling results, mostly. There are a number of cross-platform toolkits. GTK+, Qt and wxWindows all come to mind as possibilities. But in general, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of the front end as native code if you want it to feel like native code. However, if you know you may be porting, you can separate a lot of the back end out of your UI code and make it a separate library in separate files. That makes it much, much easier to write several different front ends and still share most of your code.
- jmatt 16y ago
  python has done a great job at cross-platform development. If anything I'd say there is more work spent on "native-feel" in windows than mac. Since windows is the one that doesn't play well with others. I'd also recommend wxWidgets or QT using the related python (or ruby) bindings. I know exactly what you are saying about "good enough" apps. I can still remember some gtk+ apps for windows a few years ago... it was embarrassing. Given enough time the apps I've seen recently are native and no longer just "good enough".

tibbon 16y ago

Absolutely. This is something we didn't realize from the get-go. A Mac version wasn't in the initial plan until we realized (aka, I came onboard) that we needed one.

rbanffy 16y ago
And that's something that really bothers me. In the company I work for, there are web applications that are not even cross-browser. I have to boot into Windows every month or so to do some bureaucratic work on them.

hammerdr 16y ago

I think its a testament to their perseverance and skill that they were able to take such a legacy system and port it to the Mac. They used some pretty cool technologies (Mono, MonoObjC) along the way and solved the problem. This is a really good hack :) Good job to the imvox team! Edit: grammar.

jmatt 16y ago
Yeah congratulations to Mono and MonoObjC teams. This is great news for all those other business apps that are currently Windows / .NET only.

smackfu 16y ago

What is the right tool for cross platform work? Do any of the frameworks really generate a proper native-feeling OS X application? Or are they just "good enough"?

albertzeyer 16y ago
That highly depends on the target. In case of games, I rarely see them using the native widgets anyway. Otherwise it depends. Right of the box you will at least get "good enough" (with Qt for example). If you want to support OSX-only stuff, of course you need some tweaks and platform dependend code.
angelbob 16y ago
There aren't great cross-platform tools that provide good native-feeling results, mostly. There are a number of cross-platform toolkits. GTK+, Qt and wxWindows all come to mind as possibilities. But in general, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of the front end as native code if you want it to feel like native code. However, if you know you may be porting, you can separate a lot of the back end out of your UI code and make it a separate library in separate files. That makes it much, much easier to write several different front ends and still share most of your code.
jmatt 16y ago
python has done a great job at cross-platform development. If anything I'd say there is more work spent on "native-feel" in windows than mac. Since windows is the one that doesn't play well with others. I'd also recommend wxWidgets or QT using the related python (or ruby) bindings. I know exactly what you are saying about "good enough" apps. I can still remember some gtk+ apps for windows a few years ago... it was embarrassing. Given enough time the apps I've seen recently are native and no longer just "good enough".