Alternative Development Systems for the Mac

Carlos Camacho writes "Programmers new to the Mac platform, as well as newbie Mac coders often ask (or complain) about available development tools. Most often, Apple's Xcode is recommended since it is free, and a pretty slick package. For cross-platform work, Metrowerks CodeWarrior series has been with us since the early PowerPC days, and is very flexible in its support for multi-platforms. But with if you want to work in a language other than Objective-C,C, C++ or Java? Or learn an entirely new language? How does the Macintosh fare? iDevGames, a site devoted to Mac game developers, has put together a list of "alternative" development tools for Mac OS X. A good number of the tools listed are either free, or low-cost. So, if you're interested in playing around with Lua, Ruby, something similar to HyperCard, or one of the many BASICs, check out "Alternative Development Systems for the Mac.""

Comments

What about Mono?

[Kryptkrwlr_XTC]

Before you flame me as a troll, the Mono Project does have a Framework installer for OS X. so you can develop under Mono and have a app run on a Mac.

You missed eclipse !

[compactable]

Geez. The best IDE I've ever used, providing SWT libs for apple ... how is this not there?

A million different cheez-o basic versions listed, but they forgot eclipse ...

RealBasic

[Blakey Rat]

RealBasic, IMO, is the best cross-platform RAD tool in existence today. Not that there is a ton of competition...

It's a somewhat Java-like Basic syntax, completely object-oriented. It has the capability to use ODBC (on all platforms that support it), native widgets, many types of network sockets, etc. An install on every platform consists of copying a SINGLE file, one .exe file on Windows, one .app bundle on MacOS X... no DLLs whatsoever. That's a huge plus for me. A drawback is that it relies on Quicktime to present some media formats, such as PDF, and most Windows machines don't have Quicktime installed.

On, the other drawback. The developers and marketers of RealBasic have their head in the sand and have NO CLUE what they are working with. With about 1 minor revision and a decent-sized advertising campaign, these guys could conquer and destroy Microsoft VisualBasic. RealBasic does everything VisualBasic does but cross-platform and without reliance on numerous .dll files with version conflicts. Instead, they're advertising it as some stupid game development tool, wasting their time maintaining a "sprite surface" object and an entire 3D framework based on, get this, Quesa, which is in turn based on QD3D... two obsolete technologies layered atop each other. Let me save you some time: RealBasic SUCKS for game development. It has no native support for OpenGL or any decent sound libraries.

Since this is Slashdot, I'll also say that RealBasic includes very very skeletal Linux support, but I think Redhat only. I could be wrong, I don't use Linux.

Pretty much the only competition is Macromedia Director and Runtime Revolution... both of those produce alien-looking not-quite-native interfaces. (Although at least Director is good for game development.)

http://realbasichelp.com/ is the best forum on the web for RealBasic issues and questions.

Re:RealBasic

[Anonymous Coward]

REALbasic has excellent Linux support for Red Hat, SuSE and just about any other version of Linux provided that GTK 2.0 or later and a few other libraries are installed.

As for game support, I've seen several games written with REALbasic and they look pretty good. Why does REALbasic include game support? Probably because that's how a lot of people get into programming. They start by writing games. Quesa is a platform-independent 3D API. It uses OpenGL underneath on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It only uses QuickDraw3D on Classic Mac OS.

Regarding Visual Basic, one of the big problems for any company selling software into the Windows market is getting above the noise. It's a big market and that's attractive but that's also a negative. And throwing lots of money at a problem is not always be best solution.

Lisps for the Macintosh

[jaoswald]

There are a few Common Lisp implementations as well

Open Source:

Open MCL
SBCL

Commercial:

Macintosh Common Lisp
Allegro Common Lisp
Xanalys Lispworks

PyGame

[quamaretto]

I appreciate the mention of PyGame, as Python is presently my language of choice for fiddling around. I have recently started using Python and I really enjoy it, and it's odd to see Python based solutions left out of discussions where they are relevant.

It's almost like there are a large group of people who take offense at the mention of Python...

Squeak!

[Axello]

Squeak is the modern Smalltalk implementation. It supports opengl, quicktime, widgets, networking etc. It is cross platform and runs on Windoze, Linux, other unices, Mac OS X, PDAs etc. http://www.squeak.org/

Re:Feedback From Developers

[DLWormwood]

And then they stopped selling it less than a year after its original release IIRC. I don't think anybody but Ambrosia ever developed anything with it and they even pulled their game because it just didn't work right.

I just check Ambroisa's site and web boards, and they appear to still sell both the engine and the standalone campaign. They just don't appear on the "recent release" pages; you must explictly look for it on the Arcade and Utility pages.

That said, there are a few problems with Coldstone, however...

1. Beenox Studios has gone on to "bigger and better things" and are now mostly focused on doing ports of commercials games, leaving Andrew and company in the lurch. Ambrosia is said to be doing the update work themselves, if I'm understanding the discussion on the boards right.
2. The development IDE was written in REALbasic, IIRC. And to get stability for Panther and Tiger, they are going to have to rebuild it using a more modern release of it. This is going to lead to a new QA testing cycle, since RB is infamous for breaking things with each update.
3. Ambrosia has prioritized on getting a shareware version of WireTap out the door, making it a separate product from Snapz Pro. There's a "sticky" post in the Coldstone forum mentioning that the game tool has been "backburnered" as a result.

(1) no problem (2) why??

[javaxman]

But with if you want to work in a language other than Objective-C,C, C++ or Java?

(1) No problem.
XCode's build system is extremely flexible. You can have a custom script or binary run instead of the more standard targets. Just make a new project of "Empty Project" type, add a build target ( Project/New Target ) and pick either "external target" or "Shell Script Target" as appropriate. It'd be hard for it to be a lot easier without being language/tool specific, like the 'canned' target types ( of which there are already quite a few ).

(2)You want to use something that's not the most developer-friendly language ever created ( Objective-C ), the most commonly used language ever created ( C ), the most commonly used in commercial products OO language ( C++ ) nor the best mulitplatform language ever ( Java ) ?? What's your reasoning there?

I understand that there are reasons for using "none of the above" when writing code for OS X, like say, you have a big group of Fortran programs that you don't have time or need to rewrite, or you just rock at Python and don't have time to learn something else, or know you can do what you want in Pearl... but if you're developing a completely new codebase, with a full GUI-based app as your goal?
Learn Objective-C. Learn Cocoa. You'll be glad you did.

realbasic?

[hpavc]

Realbasic is pretty good, the windows+linux+mac+osx build is nice.