I am a longtime Mac developer and owner of a small company with a large application called DVDAfterEdit. 15 months ago we began a complete rewrite in Objective-C and Cocoa, adding support for the new HD DVD and Blu-ray formats. We are finally nearing the 1.0 release of that product.
As part of this development we must support DLT (Digital Linear Tape) drives which are used to submit DVD masters for replication (making thousands or even millions of copies of a DVD). To avoid complications and possibly delaying the primary product, we spun off a separate utility to copy DVD masters to and from tape. These masters can be created and and converted by both our existing and new applications, and also created by other authoring tools. Quite a few of our current and potential customers already have DLT drives connected to their PC's, and use both PC's and Macintoshes in their production. Making a Windows version of the tape utility could increase our sales and visibility. These drives are connected to SCSI PCI adapters. As one of our developers said, "SCSI is so last millennium". But luckily we already have PC interface code to the ASPI layer for those drives, and it works well in Visual Studio C++, but with a very limited demo application. However, our tape utility is quite ambitious and its capabilities would be tedious at the least to recreate in Windows. It makes heavy use of threads, bindings, and notifications, so that users can run multiple tasks in overlap. It has about 30 classes, a few of them "borrowed" from the main app. None of the window objects or drawing is particularly complicated. It would seem that GNUSTEP could avoid a lot of rewriting for Windows. The look and feel might be compromised somewhat compared to a native Windows app, but the functionality is more important and must be maintained. Our time is short, and the tape utility is a diversion from our other objectives. We would greatly appreciate any advice, and are willing to pay for help in implementing this project. The tape utility already includes a tape emulator class which reads and writes the tape format to and from disk, so actual SCSI hardware will not be needed for the development. Once it works for the emulated tape drives, I can easily add the real hardware support. Regards, Larry Applegate -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Need-Windows-Conversion-tf4810749.html#a13764445 Sent from the GNUstep - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
