Subject: Re: Development of Abiword for MacOS X ?
From: Bryan Prusha (bryanp@wolfram.com)
Date: Mon Feb 07 2000 - 17:52:50 CST
At 16:07 -0600 2/7/00, Jeffrey J Barbose wrote:
>>
>> If we had an OpenStep version of AbiWord, we could recompile for
>>PPC, and it would Just Work. Unfortunately, there is not yet pre-X MacOS
>>support for OpenStep (and I don't know if there will be). Barring this,
>>given a MacOS Toolbox version (being constructed as we speak) it is a
>>relatively simple task to update it to the Carbon API, or "Carbonize" it.
>>There is already one Carbon SDK available from Apple, MacOS 9 ships with
>>CarbonLib 1.0, and soon the next version of CarbonLib, giving MacOS support
>>all the way back to MacOS 8.1, will be available. Personally, I think
>>getting the Mac version up at all will be our first task, but from there it
>>will be a relatively simple task to get it to run on Carbon for MacOS
>>support from 8.1 thru X. One of my main goals here is, particularly, to
>>Carbonize AbiWord. I hope this answers any questions.
>>
>>---------------------------------------------------
>> Bryan Prusha Wolfram Research, Inc.
>> Coding is life. The rest is just 1's and 0's.
>
>
>
>i might take this one step further and just make it Carbon-compliant
>from the start. As you said, Carbon IS the Mac APIs, minus some of
>the very low level stuff.
>
>and the new HLTB stuff would be a neat compromise between using an
>application framework and using procedural code.
>
>
>jeff
Yes, this is a good idea, but unfortunately, for the time beaing,
we can only run a Carbon app on MacOS 9. That kinda limits our development
environment, yes? Soon, Apple will release the next Carbon compatability
library for 8.1->9.0, with updated headers. Before then, the things we
need to do are update to the most recent headers (3.3.1 I think), reduce
the use of depricated functions and constants, and adopt the Appearance
Manager and Navigation Services. This will make the Carbonization process,
which could take a coupla months in an open source project, much easier. I
too am impressed by some of the new High Level Toolbox stuff, especially
the new Carbon Event model (it uses individual event handlers instead of an
event loop), but I haven't played with this yet. BTW, I forgot to mention
this in my last post, but it is possible to access the underlying BSD (and
I believe Quartz) calls from an otherwise Carbon application. Of course
that means the binary will only run on MacOS X and later unless the
libraries are weak linked and there is a runtime check for the OS version
before the calls are made.
---------------------------------------------------
Bryan Prusha Wolfram Research, Inc.
Coding is life. The rest is just 1's and 0's.
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