Subject: Re: Development of Abiword for MacOS X ?
From: Julian Morrison (julian.morrison@virgin.net)
Date: Mon Feb 07 2000 - 13:00:57 CST
sterwill@abisource.com wrote:
> Well, the kernel of MacOS X is based on the BSD kernel, but the graphics
> and other operating system libraries are new and proprietary, and as such
> present the same hurdle to porting as does MacOS 9 or below. There would
> be no easy recompile, as there is for BSD-based systems using the X
> Window System. As far as I know, no one has taken up a MacOS X port of
> AbiWord.
They are neither particularly new nor closed-spec. Basically, they are the
old NeXT OpenStep interfaces, warmed over and shifted from display
Postscript to Quartz (display PDF). Unless you plan to do really flashy
things with direct graphical drawing etc, all the old OpenStep drawing APIs
should work fine.
However, the text-editor component built into OsX already has 99% of a word
processor's features right out of the box, so porting Abi Word is probably
pointless; a kid could assemble nearly equivalent functionality with a
couple hours and a copy of the interface-builder app.
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