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Mac OS X Apps on Zaurus
An anonymous reader writes "Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller reports progress in the mySTEP project to run Mac OS X applications on the Sharp Zaurus. Though not yet ready for production, the newest release brings more maturity and features, and Dr. Schaller invites anyone interested in integrating mobile, low-cost, handheld computers with Mac OS X-based IT applications to contact the project. In particular, Dr. Schaller would like to locate someone interested in developing and contributing a new menu system (NSMenuView, NSMenuItemCell) to the project."
Well, Cocoa is really just a newer release of OpenStep, so the guts of it aren't anything altogether new or super secret. Actually it looks like the Zaurus thing is mostly a port of GNUstep, so it's not even entirely new stuff.
You can sort of do that already. Obviously, you would want to avoid Mac-specific things in your program, but there should still be plenty of common ground.
Well, Cocoa is really just a newer release of OpenStep, so the guts of it aren't anything altogether new or super secret. Actually it looks like the Zaurus thing is mostly a port of GNUstep, so it's not even entirely new stuff.
However, Cocoa is only one of the APIs running in MacOS X. Another quite important one is Carbon, very popular among commercial developers, as it is a path of least resistance leading from MacOS 9 to MacOS X (even if it's actually a nasty kludge, not a piece of art like Cocoa). So if you hope that GNUStep can somehow provide you native Linux ports of Microsoft Office, Photoshop or Warcraft III - it's not the way, as they are all Carbon.
It's more so the other way around that it's being done. It already is doable on the PC, and is being ported to the Zaurus. Not mentioned in this post, but it seems to be borrowing a lot from GNUstep, which has been very slowly working toward this goal for what seems like 10 years.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
NeXT & Sun created the OpenStep API from the API's of NEXTSTEP Mach (the ancestor of Mac OS X & Cocoa). There was OpenStep for Solaris, OpenStep for Windows and OPENSTEP Mach, the "reference" operating system for SPARC, HP PA-RISC, NeXT hardware (68K) and x86 (486+).
OpenStep Solaris was maintained by Sun. NeXT handled the other versions.
To clarify, mySTEP is a GnuSTEP-based implementation of OpenSTEP, an earlier version of what is now referred to as "Cocoa" (during the Rhapsody days, this was the "Yellow Box"), which is a very high-level API that has various language interfaces to objectiveC (Apple's preferred language; an object-oriented C dialect with Smalltalk-alike enhancements), Java, Ruby, Python, etc.
Cocoa applications are in most cases GUI apps as most of Cocoa's overhead is targeted for that direction. On Mac OS X, Cocoa interfaces with Quartz, the DisplayPDF-based, OpenGL-enhanced WindowServer that sits right under Aqua. With GnuSTEP, X11 is used. I don't know how it works with mySTEP.
But Quartz is not open source and there is no reason for that to change. Therefore, a lot of reverse engineering will probably be needed for cross-developing Aqua applications. I also fail to see the point: right now, Cocoa apps don't *really* work well under GnuSTEP; it still seems to have a long way to go. Even then, I don't think they have it implemented for Win32 yet.
As to binaries, I don't see at all how that would work.