Re: GNUstep <-> Cocoa compatibility

[Alex Perez]

Chris,
> > me neither. and i'm trying to avoid it as much as possible - that's 
> > why
> > i'm here :)
>
> This is unrealistic if you're actually going to be shipping Mac OS X 
> software.  You will *need* Macs for the development and testing of 
> this software.  Even if you can somehow manage to not have them, you 
> cannot develop good Mac software without using a Mac.
Yes, this is at least correct. You do need a Mac in some capacity, but 
you don't NEED a Mac. I've offered the use of my OS X box via VNC to 
Andy so he could port TalkSoup to OS X. He compiles at the command line 
using GNUstep-make and uses VNC for interface design and testing. He 
lives in the midwest, I live in California. Distance isn't really an 
issue.
> > > This depends on what you want to do. If you just take the GNUstep 
> > > code
> > > and suply a new NIB file for MacOSX not many problems should be
> > hmm, GUIs of applications i write are usually either simple enough to 
> > be coded
> > "manually" instead of being designed in an IB/GORM or aims to be 
> > dynamic
> > and complex enough to be generated on fly from underlying data model
> > instead of being designed ...
> This is almost never how it's done on Mac OS X with Cocoa.  Almost all 
> Cocoa interfaces are created using Interface Builder.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this model, and it increases 
portability significantly. Just because you happen to not like it 
doesn't mean it's wrong in any way. Personally, I use interface 
builder, but I don't see what's wrong with procedurally coding GUIs if 
that's your personal preference.
> > does this make job of porting my [hynothetical] GNUstep application to
> > cocoa easier?
> Potentially since there would be no interface resources to convert.  
> However, the interface metrics between GNUstep and Mac OS X are very 
> different, and the human interface guidelines are also very different. 
>  (E.g. where the buttons in an alert are placed and what they should 
> be called, and also whether an alert should be independent or attached 
> to a window as a sheet...)
GNUstep doesn't have sheets. I believe there are issues with Apple's 
gargantuan patent collection, but don't quote me on that...
> I can't recommend Renaissance strongly enough for this kind of 
> project, even if you're coding the human interface directly.  It has 
> layout managers, which can mitigate the differences between the 
> interface metrics on the two platforms.
Renaissance is not a panacea, however...
> > i rather want the following: develop an application in GNU environment
> > until i'm satisfied with it, checkout it from cvs onto MacOSX machine
> > and build it to run on MacOS.
> This is unrealistic.  It may be technically possible but it is not the 
> way to develop good software on either platform.
It might not be the best way to develop good software on OS X, but it's 
a perfectly fine model under GNUstep. Anyways, he'll figure all this 
out once he actually starts to port GNUstep code over to OS X, and 
he'll figure it out in a hurry.
--
Alex Perez
aperez@student.santarosa.edu
"Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat 
it."
--Thomas Jefferson