Cross With the Platform

Tim Bray tweeted, No platform has hit the big time till it's been flamed by JWZ. He was referring to this rant in which Zawinski systematically dismantles any claim the iPhone has to cross-platform compatibility. "I finally got the iPhone/iPad port [of Dali Clock] working. It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the MacOS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right? Oh ho ho ho. I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS. ... they got some intern who was completely unfamiliar with the old library to just write a new one from scratch without looking at what already existed. It's 2010, and we're still innovating on how you pass color components around. Seriously?"

Want Real Cross-Platform? Try ZooLib!

[MichaelCrawford]

While the 68k Classic Mac binding hasn't been maintained for a while, it wouldn't be hard to get it working again. That would enable you to use the same client code all the way from the Mac Classic running System 7 to Mac OS X, Windows 7, Haiku, BeOS, Linux (mostly), BlackBerry and the iPhone.

All with one set of C++ client code, compiled to native executables for each platform.

If you want iPhone support, you'll need the Subversion source base; the code works, but we haven't rolled a release for a while.

• ZooLib C++ Cross-Platform Application Framework [zoolib.org]

Its Open Source under the MIT License, chosen specifically to be compatiable with both GNU GPL and proprietary development.

Re:UIKit != AppKit

[Linker3000]

Meh - the fix to get the Dali clock working is trivial - rename all pointers to smell like the colour yellow, and change all LONGINTs to SURREALs.

Re:Never underestimate...

[x2A]

Blame and credit alike... it does claim that if you read C code into memory, that it can then parse the read C, but I don't think it could parse the read C, which is why the java is being used for things it really doesn't want to be used for in Egypt to this day.

Re:Who is JWZ?

[elrous0]

Duh, he's the guy that created Babylon 5.

Re:Let's look at what JWZ said...

[larry bagina]

just think of how many more iphones they would have sold if it had a scroll ball/mouse instead of this touch shit. Users don't want to run a single application, they want to move windows around and navigate menus and right click on shit. lame.

Re:Who is JWZ?

[Sir_Lewk]

Oh damn, I never even thought of it like that but you're incredibly right. Next we're going to find out he carries a katana and delivers pizza for the mob in his free-time... :O