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Mac OS X Apps on Zaurus

Posted by pudge on from the step-this-way dept.

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."

6 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. cocoa apps? by cheezus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wouldn't that require a reverse engineered implementation of apple's APIs? Or is this just talking about a portable framework so the same apps can run on both platforms?

    Personally, I'd be more intrested on being able to run OS X apps on desktop intel linux than a pda

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    1. Re:cocoa apps? by Dr+Reducto · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If you could get it to work on a PDA, how much harder could it be to get it to work on a PC?

    2. Re:cocoa apps? by Matthias+Wiesmann · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I could be wrong, but I think possibly the new Photoshop CS may be entirely Cocoa. It's the first PS that won't run under MacOS9.
      I highly doubt it. The fact that a program does not run under OS 9 simply indicates that it relies on some feature that is not present under OS 9. There are many APIs in OS X that are not present in OS 9 beside cocoa: BSD, Mach, Core Graphics, Core Audio, etc. It could also be simply compiled into a Mach-O binary, and not PEF. Finally, it could be that Adobe simply does not want to support two platforms, and simply prevented the App from starting on OS 9.

      Give the nature of the Photoshop, I would suspect it calls Core Graphics directly, maybe it uses the Mach API to handle memory paging (Photoshop traditionally did its own memory management). I highly doubt we will see a cocoa version of Photoshop before some time, as Photoshop build around the classic Mac OS toolbox since version 1.

    3. Re:cocoa apps? by Jayfar · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Further digging indicates you are probably right - no cocoa yet for PS.



      Still, and off on a tangent here, it looks like I'll need to keep my PS 7 handy after I upgrade, in order to use ColorSync settings in the print driver for my HP Photosmart printer. The latest HP drivers will, at long last marginally work under MacOS 10.2.8, but only HP's inferior Colorsmart option appears in the corresponding color popup menu in the driver, when running in other than OS 9 (I can choose either under OS 9).

  2. Re:If they can do this ... by Tar-Palantir · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Are you aware of the incredible amount of work that would take? Carbon is a *huge* system. Even if it wasn't Mac specific (which it is, and HFS specific, and big-endian specific...) it would take a good team a long, long time to get Carbon to work multiplatform. By comparison with Carbon, Cocoa is a very small (and well designed and documented) API.

    Besides which, Carbon's sort of in transition. Old APIs being phased out (thankfully!) and new ones like CoreFoundation being used in their place. CF, I believe, is partially open source.

    So, in summary, the answer to your question is "because it would be infinitely more trouble than it's worth."

  3. Re:If they can do this ... by lcracker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    CoreFoundation is portable code, that's not in QT, but is statically linked into iTunes/Windows. Most, but not all, of it is open source.

    I'm sure AppleSingle resources aren't a problem, whether or not they're in QT, given that we have some relatively short pure Python code that does them cross-platform, I'm sure Apple has some longer C code to do the same.