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Porting X11 Apps to Mac OS X Aqua?

Posted by Cliff on from the will-this-be-a-difficult-process dept.

masonbrown writes "I'm fairly new to programming, and have spent most of my time with Linux, Solaris, and IRIX, with most of my learning done on open-source software. As a long time Mac user playing around with Mac OS X, I'm interested in the portability of X11 apps to the new Mac Aqua interface. Is there any straight forward way of doing this, or does the GUI for each program have to be completely rewritten for the new Mac OS?"

2 of 8 comments (clear)

  1. Well, that depends... by jfrisby · · Score: 4

    X apps are pretty diverse. If you want to port a low-level X app that uses something like Xt/Motif or otherwise talks pretty closely to the X server, you're probably hosed.

    On the other hand, if you are talking about porting a KDE app that uses the Qt/KDE APIs to the exclusion of lower-level junk, then it might be easier -- while there probably wont be a MacOS X version of Qt for a while, you'll be dealing with more abstract (semantically cleaner/simpler) APIs that map better to what's available on MacOS X.

    Remember that you'll probably want to produce an app that fits in nicely and feels like a native application -- that involves a lot of work no matter where you're coming from. Doing a straight port of low-level X stuff to MacOS X graphics primitives (*shudder*) would give you an app with a pretty horrendous user experience...

    -JF

    --
    MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
  2. GNUstep! by eMBee · · Score: 4
    most apps will pretty much have to be rewritten, unless you write them for GNUstep which is an implementation of the OpenStep specification, which itself is the base for Mac OS X.

    GNUstep aims to allow you to write apps so that you will pretty much just have to recompile them for either GNUstep, OPENSTEP or Mac OS X.

    greetings, eMBee.
    --

    --
    Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX