This is a very valid point, but since when has that really mattered to people writing open source software? Windows certainly doesn't seem to have more support from the open source community than anything else.
http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=418
As a counter-point, deploying software on Mac OS X is cheap and fast. You save god knows how much time and money in development and testing (especially testing), so you have much higher profit margins.
It doesn't matter how cheap and fast it is for 5% of the market.
If you look at open source graphical toolkits that support at least
two platforms, you won't find any that started on the Mac. These
are the ones I know of that can be used from Python and where they started.
- QT (Unix) - GTK (Unix) - wxWidgets (Windows) - Tk (Unix) - Fltk (Unix) - Fox (Unix)
Consequently the Mac versions of these (if supported at all) is often not as good as the original platform. That results in a bit of a chicken and egg problem. There is no/little Mac support by other developers because the toolkits are poor, and the toolkits don't improve because noone uses them.
Fortunately it just takes some sustained efforts, even just bug reporting and things get better. wxWidgets has gotten a lot better although there are still holes.
For the OP, one choice is to try and help improve a toolkit at the same time as doing their own project. It will end up improving things for many more developers and users.
Virtualization software is useful (and I'd love it to death if it was around), but I've found it to be rarely necessary for Mac OS X development.
It solves many configuration management and testing issues. It also lets the developer use the machine. For example I can't use the Apple Addressbook or Calendar programs for my real data. I fill them with all sorts of test data. (Fast user switching sort of helps but brings other issues). And you really need virtualisation when you have to deal with versioning issues of core system components or the OS itself. For BitPim we have to do seperate 10.2 and 10.3 builds, and there are now all sorts of 10.2 issues that aren't addressed. When Tiger comes out things will get even worse as developers will have to decide which version to make their primary supported OS version.
QEMU has some support for emulating a PPC system. Maybe that will work
in the future.
Roger _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
