On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 12:13 +0800, Gordon Campbell wrote: > I doubt we'll ever see WorldWind on Mac since it makes very heavy use of > DirectX, which is Microsoft's way of providing better hardware access for > these sort of apps.
Yep. That makes a true native implementation unlikely. > We're never going to see DirectX for MacOS since it's a > totally Windows thing Now that, it's not safe to assume. I've played DirectX games under Linux ;-) . WINE has technology to support DirectX, and it's improving all the time. There's also a commercial wine fork called Cedaga with even better directX support. The implementation uses OpenGL to render the DirectX requests, and is likely to be ported to Mac OS X if the rest of WINE is. That doesn't mean you could run DirectX apps native, but it does mean that it may be possible to use the WINE layer to run DirectX windows apps. Developers may even be able to use WINElib to compile tweaked versions of their Windows DirectX apps into something that runs out of the box on Mac OS X. They're potentially much more likely to do this than port, since it'd be MASSIVELY less work. > so even after the move to Intel, we're no more likely > to get WorldWind or other apps. Getting WorldWind to work would involve > almost totally re-writing the app to use OpenGL or Core Image instead of > DirectX. Not necessarily, as above. > I think it's highly unlikely that the move to Intel, in and of itself, will > draw more developers etc. to the platform. I tend to agree there, though I expect the number of quick'n'dirty ports using things like WINELib may well increase. If Apple decides to release developer builds of Mac OS X for stock x86 hardware (or perhaps an emulator like VMWare with a bundled Mac OS X deal) that might help. I'm not holding my breath. -- Craig Ringer
