Cocotron: bringing Cocoa to Windows

I wonder if someone will take a spin on cocotron and try to use it to port cocoa touch from the iphone to android. Now that would be a killer...

Apple needs to push for projects like this, it's the best way to get people developing for the Mac OS platform.


http://gregstechblog.blogspot.com

UI-wise, Cocotron is very different from GNUStep. On Window, a Cocotron program uses native Windows Widgets while a GNUStep program will use GDI (non-accelerated drawing) to draw it's own NextStep-style widgets.

There are many ways to port an application and the Cocotron approach provides native Windows look and feel using Cocoa-compatible code.

Personally, I think that no matter what you do, you still have to learn the Windows and Cocoa APIs to get the best UI. Cocotron will save you time if you are writing an app that uses standard Cocoa widgets. Apps that use custom widgets (Delicious Library, Screenflow, etc.) will require knowing both APIs by heart.

BTW, iTune is "tour de force" because it does a lot of CoreAnimation/CoreImage stuff without Cocoa.

- Nick -

I like the principals of cross-platform applications but am very much opposed to them in practice. The problem always tends to be the "lowest common denominator" issue whereby you can't implement something that isn't available on all platforms. Mac-specific features/functions are what make Mac applications special. Apple has provided a rich and wonderful suite of services and frameworks that should be taken advantage of to make the applications that we love. Firefox is a wonderful example of this. It's a great application but it just doesn't support those things that we expect on a Mac, such as storing your passwords in Keychain. I don't mind, however, having a cross-platform core (e.g. Gecko used in Camino) as long as it is then wrapped in a true native application.

Or you could just use Qt, or WxWidgets, or even XUL.

So just like CrossOver Mac, we could run OS X apps on Windows... Or do we need to compile those apps in a special compiler..?

As developers become more reliant on Apple's Core services, I think this whole cross-platform developing dream is going to die out. It will just be too difficult to be worth it. In a few years, the browser will unify all the platforms anyway as it seems we're moving closer and closer to a sad web app future.

I'm really hoping in a twisted way that this will make for a much better Windows version of iTunes to replace the atrocity Win users have to deal with now.

Funny. We are currently successfully experimenting to bring our Windows based .NET client for our uploading service "Zeta Uploader" - http://www.zeta-uploader.com - to OS X with the help of the newly released Mono from Novell.

Still some minor glitches, but in principal it is working. Great stuff, too!

How is this any different or better than GNUstep, which has been around longer and is more cross-platform?

I like seeing Cocoatron supporting more of the Core* frameworks needed by modern Mac OS X applications, even if it only works on Windows.

Having open-source versions of these libraries would mean more commercial and open-source software for Linux. The Linux desktop crowd is heavily involved with Wine(lib) and Mono to bring Windows apps to Linux. Why no similar effort for Mac OS X apps?