U++ forum: Welcome to the forum

Re: Porting (Mac OS X) and "reference application" idea [message #33140 is a reply to message #33086]

Mon, 11 July 2011 06:52

daveremba
Messages: 32
Registered: June 2011
Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA

Member

Hi, I'm new to UPP, so I'll pose some
basic questions for discussion below.

I have some time and knowledge of the MacOS,
C++, etc. and would consider helping with
a more complete port of UPP to Mac.
It would help to get some direction/discussion
from the UPP community.
Also, are there any other developers on
MacOSX who would work on this??

What is the interest level in a MacOS port
of UPP?

I got a port working of TheIDE on MacOSX,
and the example apps run, but under an X11
emulator, and do not have the Apple look and feel.
This of course is expected.

There is some remaining work to fix a couple of
problems with buttons and menus. But in any
case this is a quick and crude port, and its main
value is that TheIDE itself does run and could
be used as an alternative to Xcode.

Xcode is the Apple equivalent of MS Visual Studio,
or KDevelop, etc. It generates code for MacOS,
iPhone, and iPad. It has a simulator for
the mobile devices (like Android).
One works mainly in Objective-C.

Xcode generates a .nib file, similar to the UPP
.layfile, form another tool called "Interface
Builder".

Attached are snapshots of the "widgets" available
in Xcode IB for iPhone and MacOSX.

Some questions to consider:

What kind of port would be reasonable and useful
to the UPP community?
Probably reinventing
the entire Apple tool chain is not desirable.

is there a 1:1 correspondence of widgets to UPP?
(probably not)

The UPP community would want an app that runs
on Linux and Windows to look similar, but also
conform to Apple look and feel, right?
(without much or any re-coding effort, like
Qt etc, but a better result than Qt)

There are several technical paths to chose from;
and picking the best one depends on what
the community expects from a porting effort
of UPP to Mac.

So a useful first step, I would ask readers to please
look at the attached widgets, and provide some
comments as to which ought to be connected to UPP,
and which are "out of scope" (at least for a first
port). (widgets are in messages that follow)

There is at least a basic correspondence of
menus, buttons, tabs, etc. There are quite a
few button styles on MacOS however.
You can also
see some specialized containers that Apple provides
for OpenGL, Quicktime, PDF, and choosers for
time, date, options, etc. (particularly for
iPhone they look quite different from UPP).

I saw that another developer, Aris (fudadmin), did a port
of the vector and image drawing tools in UPP.
I downloaded that Xcode project also.

off-topic:
A universal mobile UI framework that claims 1 million
developers for mobile devices and that I'm working
with is Sencha, which runs in Javascript.

The libarary is called ExtJS. Here is the
link:
http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/

Sencha currently lacks a good data-object
connection to server (Direct-EXT is incomplete).
I recommend UPP developers take a look at it,
how might it relate to the Rainbow (or future UPP)
projects?

For another project, I am considering using UPP for the
server backend (since it is so fast compared to PHP, and
a much better language (C++ & good design)
compared to PHP). I'd need JSON/REST in UPP
to get my project working however.

Any comments on this would be appreciated
(maybe in another thread).

Thanks,

Dave

Xcode Interface builder widgets (Cocoa library)
are attached as 4 replies to this post.

[Updated on: Mon, 11 July 2011 07:37]

Report message to a moderator