[crossfire] Am interested in porting to Mac

[Amorya North]

On 11 Aug 2005, at 01:00, Alex Schultz wrote:

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      Another option is that someone could build the existing GTK client  
     
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      with gtk-cocoa (
      
      http://gtk-cocoa.sourceforge.net/
      
      ), which would  
     
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      allow it to run without the X server running and such.
     
     
It's worth looking into.

I don't know specifics about gtk-cocoa but most cross-platform widget  
converty things tend to give back a bizarre amalgamation of the  
original look-and-feel and the Mac one, which is often worse than  
either of the two extremes! The test image shows a fair few things  
which just look 'wrong' to a Mac user - even if many of them can't  
put their finger on why. (It's mainly things where the original app  
goes against Apple's interface guidelines - like having boxes within  
boxes, or centre aligned field labels, or a series of buttons within  
a scrollview. All fine (I guess!) for a GTK app, but makes the app  
feel out of place on a Mac.)

The advantage of such a port would be that it'd be quicker to make,  
and it'd make the finished product as simple as a drag-and-drop  
install for users. The latter is my main goal, so it's worth  
considering.

However, at the moment I'm thinking that if it's worth doing it's  
worth doing properly. This is partly because of this quote:

"At present, Gtk+-Cocoa is functional but incomplete. Because of the  
approach chosen for the port, each Gtk widget had to be mapped to   
the corresponding Cocoa  control. Given the number of Gtk widgets,  
many of them have not been mapped yet or only provide partial  
functionality."

Also, if I'm making an effort to bring Crossfire to Mac users, I may  
as well do so in a form that as many of them as possible will find  
easy to use and free from niggles.


>
     
      You may want to build it within the existing framework and link  
     
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      directly to the C code in the common directory, because that way  
     
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      this native MacOS client could eventually become an official part  
     
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      of the source tree, and one advantage of that is that many protocol  
     
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      changes would be handled from the code in the common directory  
     
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      which would then make handling such changes in the MacOS port very  
     
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      easy.
     
     
Yeah, that'd be good. I use an IDE instead of makefiles, so it  
wouldn't be tied into the build system (unless someone else helps me  
out there), but I could keep all my code in one folder (macos/ or  
something) and any Mac users who want to compile from source could  
open the project file from within there.



Thanks for your help!