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FYI, I've put up a torrent for iTunes6 here

I agree there's nothing special here. KDE running under X11 has worked on OSX for the past two revisions at least. I've been using it under DarwinPorts (I use Kopete, KMail, and Konquerer from my work machine via X11 Forwarding over SSH back to my powerbook to avoid any personal info being kept on my work machine or in the work proxy/filter logs).

What would be cool is not KDE under X11, but KDE as a native OSX application running under Cocoa. Konquerer itself is well worth using in place of the Finder. While Apple's Finder is decent, Konquerer is much more feature-rich. Same for Windows, a native KDE port would be nice, mostly so I could use Konquerer in place of Windows Explorer.

There are alpha builds of KDE for Aqua and for W32, if anyone is interested:

Info on getting KDE for Cocoa built: http://wiki.befunk.com/tiki-index.php

Info on getting QT3/Win and compiling KDE for native Win32: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt3-win32/

Now these projects, when they progress a little further, warrant a slashdot posting about KDE running natively.

http://wiki.befunk.com/tiki-index.php

They say it's pre-alpha level code, but I did try it (ages ago). I know a friend who switched from Linux to a Mac, but still starts up X + KDE just to use KMail to check his mail. It would be nice to see more KDE apps running natively.

Ahem, yes, I thought you were being sarcastic.

Excuse...

AFAIC the racoon is the only one trying to get KDE running natively on OS X and he's also a KDE on Fink contributor. Seems the best guy to approach for bug reporting and such. Be nice, I have the impression he works really hard on all this.

Cheers

At the X11 layer, Apple should provide good window management,

clipboard integration

keycode management

printing

and a small extension that would let X11 apps access Apple-native features through the X11 protocol.

One already can hook an X11 app into Carbon and Cocoa pretty much the same way any other app does it: including the headers and calling the functions. Virtually nobody does, because most developers place a high value on either consistency with the platform (i.e., not X11) or consistency across platforms (i.e., not Carbon and Cocoa).

Getting back to the original point, though, few modern mainstream applications use X11 per se. They use cross-platform, high-level toolkits: GTK, Qt, Swing, wxWidgets, XUL, VCL, etc. It's a lot smarter to integrate platform-specific code once at the toolkit level (again: like so) than to force hundreds or thousands of application developers to duplicate that work (even ignoring the cost to Apple).

The rest (menu bars, etc.) the Gnome and KDE developers would do if Apple's legal department only would let them.

See, that's one of the problems with Apple's X11 server: it is so big, heavy, and inefficient.

http://ranger.befunk.com/gallery/licenseplate/aab

the mac version has been gpled on the os X platform I think in 2003. Go and see some cool project http://ranger.befunk.com/blog where they try to port KDE to OS X natively.

I do not agree!

Qt apps can look quite nice on MacOSX, okay it OpenWriter will not look as native as Apple's own 'Pages'.

Pages:
http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/word.html

Native Mac apps often have different GUI layouting. An as you say...

> Mac people like polished apps ... Mac users like that.

OSX apps do not just use Aqua for the Widgets, they have a completely diferent approach to GUI design!

I think the Qt NWF http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/ooo-nwf.html
will be a good basis for a version of OOo that blends in with MasOSX, since:
- Qt uses more native Aqua routines in every new release
- if there is a MacOSX version of OOo using Qt-lib then it will be much easier to just ajust the GUI of OOo that it matches the OSX feel (i.e. get some nice big icon in that toolbar)

Conclusion:
Yes, I do have confidence in the Qt road to a MasOSX port of OOo, because it is a much better startingpoint than the current OOo version running on OSX:

http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/swrit er_osx.png

Which is plain ugly (as you can see) and needs X11 AFAIK.

Just see how KOffice (using Qt) is doing in comparison:
http://ranger.befunk.com/screenshots/qt-mac-kword- 20040101.png
And this is only a proof-of-concept kind of quick-port. No addional GUI refactoring has been done! Since that is what every GUI apps that is ported to OSX needs!

Last screenshot to prove my last statements:
http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/images/compa re_ms_osx.png
This is the current difference between OOoWriter-for-OSX an OSX' most used wordprocessor: MS Word. This prove 2 things IMHO:
- OSX users do massively use badly intergrated apps (i.e. MS Word)
- OOo cant get much worse...

_cies.

Check out this page for progress.

http://ranger.befunk.com/pics/latest/Coast%20with% 20Mom-Pages/Image172.html

The site's slashdotted now, so I can't see how good of a job they did, but the one I did from the stencil is reading... a-duh-email.

It seems to be a bit stale (updated Jan '04) but we've got better luck wishing for this.

Nothin' perfect, yet. NeoOffice and NeoOffice/J are two projects trying to Mac OS X-ize OpenOffice. NeoOffice/J is largely usable, but also very large (~500MB, memory usage typically runs above 100MB) and slow. It's also ugly as sin.
I haven't been following it much, but someone is also in the processing of using Qt's cross-compatibility to port KOffice to OS X.

The native KDE stuff is still a beta thing but if you don't mind to leave some of its functions like import filters you might want to give it a try. Works fine for me. Have a look at its Wiki over at KDE on Darwin.
Also available are binaries.

Though RangerRick has done a lion share of the work (vastly more than probably the rest of us combined) there are a lot of other people involved in the project as well who have contributed a lot of time (Martin, IceFox,,ChArles etc..) albeit with less to show for it (with the exception of IceFox) I personally blame X11's virtual keyboard.....*damn you X11 virtual keyboard implementation*

But yes, things are coming along quite nicely in the KDE-Darwin land =)

Drop by and say hi! irc.kde.org channel=#kde-darwin or visit at KDE on Darwin HomePage

We are always looking for help!

He and his companios really deserve the G5 and iPods and whatever else is to win :-)

Let's not forget the OS X Native Port is coming along nicely

Apple is rumoured to pick up support as well!

Let's not forget the OS X Native Port is coming along nicely

Apple is rumoured to pick up support as well!

Let's not forget the OS X Native Port is coming along nicely

Apple is rumoured to pick up support as well!

And, don't forget that Ranger Rick is still working on porting KOffice to OS X. There are now binaries available and if you're going to download all the KDE-on-OSX packages, you may as well use the all-packages torrent.

Also, yes, I know it's a bit ugly, KDE styles are a bit messed up. When you run anything it always complains "KThemeStyle cache seems corrupt!"

Sure they do

Well then check out the screenshots. ;)

Take a look at this...

There are a few more screenshots, just go to the parent directory.. I hope it doesn't kill his server. :)

voila: http://ranger.befunk.com/blog/archives/000072.html

You mean this circular dependency? It's been fixed. Also note that they don't recommend doing selfupdate-cvs anymore. Instead, do selfupdate-rsync once to set the mode to rsync and then just do "fink selfupdate" from then on.

Depends on what you mean by "native". KDE is already working with X11 on OSX.

We're still working on making it build with Qt/Mac.

You'll need Qt/X, the KDE libraries and an X server for that.

You are misinformed. This makes it quite clear, I think, that X11 is not needed for running KDE applications - notably Konqueror. Yes, it's quite OK to make "ooooh" noises at the eye candy.

iqu

But it fits into my code bounty. :)

I'm really hoping Advanced Tracker takes off, he's got a great design but nothing much yet, code-wise.

I've also been working off and on on getting CheeseTracker going on MacOSX, but it's got a lot of weird GTK issues. Reduz is working on porting it to Qt right now, though, so maybe it'll be a possibility in the future.

All I know is, there's crap for trackers on OSX (and Linux for that matter) now. Here's to finding something that works, dammit! :)

I load up the article, and what do I see?

Screenshot ...

Yeah, it's not 100% but we've got things mostly working. I've got screenshots (including KDE in rootless mode, very nice =) up at my web page.