[Ham-Mac] Cross-platform development of amateur radio applications: Mac OS X vs. Mac OS 9

[Dick Rucker]

on 5/20/03 8:09, Chuck Counselman at ccc@space.mit.edu wrote:

> I'm not complaining; I think it's great that you ported EchoMac to
> the Mac OS; but the reason I don't use it is that I can't, because
> all of my Macs run OS 9.x (not OS X).  Even the Mac that I bought new
> this year and that came with OS X installed, uses OS 9 -- because I
> have many Macs and, for simplicity/reliability/redundancy, I like to
> keep the same system and same applications on all of them.

I understand a few of the problems of moving from OS 9 to OS 10 as I have
done it myself, but the move has proven well worth it.  OS X is now just so
easy to use and so dependable that it is my operating environment of choice.

>From what I hear from newcomers to the Mac platform, they, too, find the
Aqua interface intuitive and relatively easy to learn. There's no need to
dig down into the command-line interface unless one chooses to do so.

On the issue of reliability, there's no contest, IMHO.

On the issue of redundancy, you're probably referring to your collection of
old Macs.  One laptop and one desktop are all I want.  I do have a second
laptop, a Dell, for running Digipan and a few other ham-radio related
programs that only exist for the PC, but there are better uses for the desk
space it takes up. Sadly, the paucity of good ham software for the Mac keeps
it around.

I keep a bootable version of OS 9.1 around for those few occasions when I
need to run one old application that fails to run properly within Classic
and for which I haven't yet found a good substitute.  To avoid the risk of
damage to any OS X volumes due to OS 9's ignorance of Unix file structures,
I dismount those volumes while using OS 9.1.

When it comes to software for amateur radio operators, there is a
potentially great future for the OS X platform, but none at all for OS 9,
IMO.  The reasons include:

 - the powerful software development frameworks provided by Cocoa,

 - the variety of the programming environments supported by OS X,

 - the reliability and extensibility of the Unix operating system.

I find it encouraging that some *nix developers are moving in the Mac's
direction.  For example, consider this excerpt from the Readme file for
version 1.0.3 of AbiWord:

"AbiWord has been developed principally on Linux and Windows, is known to
work on a variety of UNIX platforms, and preview builds exist for QNX and
BEOS. A Cocoa port of AbiWord for MacOS X is in active development.

"AbiWord Version 1.0 is available for MacOS X only as a UNIX build.
Unfortunately, this means you don't get an Aqua interface. You need to have
XDarwin running. Printing can be a hassle. Fortunately, there is a lot of
developer interest in finishing the Cocoa port for Version 2.0!"

I am one of those patiently waiting for AbiWord with an Aqua interface.

Dick Rucker, KM4ML