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

Flash and Director

[xanderwilson]

I'm surprised Flash and Director didn't make the list. Some of those tools I've never heard of and I did a pretty long search for a crossplatform game development tool not too long ago, when I decided RealBASIC wasn't going to cut it for me.

Alex.

Re:What about Mono?

[OmniVector]

the performance isn't there. nor is the reason. why bother with C#/Cocoa# when you can use java/Cocoa and it's shipped with every mac already, and it has better performance (hotspot is way better than mono's vm right now). not to mention the dev tools for java in os x are about a million times better than anything for C#. (intellij, eclipse, xcode...)

SuperCard

[Swedentom]

I'd recommend SuperCard. When Apple abandoned HyperCard, they left a big void. SuperCard is OS X native and has excellent HC compatibility. Of course, it's far from a HC clone, as it it has all the things you'd expect from a development environment these days.

SC allows you to build standalone applications playing movies with QuickTime, displaying graphics with alpha channels, running shell commands and AppleScripts, etc...

I also personally use Runtime Revolution, and it's also good, and cross-platform. However, for Mac-only development, SuperCard definitely has my vote. It uses true Aqua GUI controls, and behaves like you expect Mac apps to do.

Here's a few Mac apps I develop with SuperCard: http://www.lightheadsw.com/

Re:(1) no problem (2) why??

[wirelessbuzzers]

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?

Objective-C is slow, it eats memory, and its syntax is very verbose. Most languages don't have 120-some character method names. And for all that, it's still unsafe, and has very little in the way of static type-checking, and no garbage collector (a refcounter where you have to twiddle references a lot doesn't count). I would not call it "the most developer-friendly language every created." I'd much rather code in Python or O'Caml.

C is not a good choice for anything but the core of most games, as it is too developer-unfriendly and lacks in features (like OO, anonymous functions, garbage collection...). While excellent for low-level code, it's not really in the running for high-level.

C++ is a good language for games, but many people would rather have something higher-level. It's unsafe, but many people will overlook.

Java is slow and verbose, and therefore painful for game development.

Maybe they want to code in Python?