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Re: Mac OS X presents an opportunity for Dylan



On 11/30/00 6:08 AM, the artist formerly known as Rob Myers,
(robm@onetel.net.uk), issued a press release stating:

> Work's been done looking into using GD with Project Builder, too.

Although free/open-source software projects don't always consider such
things as developer perception a top priority, I think you (the Gwydion
team) should give very serious consideration to making this your top
priority on MacOS X. Apple has made it clear that Project Builder is the way
to go in the future with MacOS X. They have put MPW in maintainence mode,
and CodeWarrior 6 *only* does Carbon and Classic, but not Cocoa/YB, and it's
not at all clear when or if CW will do Cocoa. Moreover, CW is a commercial
product, even with it's non-commercial license, which immediately shuts out
many less affluent, younger developers, who are precisely the sort who are
open minded and experimental enough to consider Dylan seriously - not that
us geezers wouldn't like Dylan too, but habits have a way of becoming set
with the passing of time...

Moreover, I've used the latest CW plugin under CW 6/MacOS X Public Beta, and
frankly, it's painful to use, at least in part because CW 6 itself is broken
under MacOS X (for example, double clicking a source file in the project
window does not open it in the IDE, even when file extensions are properly
set - of course this works with the identical carbon binary just fine under
MacOS 9.04). Getting even simple projects to compile cleanly is daunting to
say the least. Whatever the other faults of MacOS X Public Beta, the
functioning of Project Builder is *not* one of them - it is a pleasure to
use.

Apple have made Project Builder a free download. Making Gwydion Dylan run
under Project Builder would give Dylan immediate, widespread, free
availability to the very first round of developers creating Carbon and Cocoa
apps under and for MacOS X. Please focus your resources/time on making
Gwydion compile projects under Project Builder (including necessary
interfaces to Interface Builder for Cocoa projects if that can be done). If
Gwydion can seamlessly build Carbon *and* Cocoa apps under Project Builder,
I think Dylan can grab some *serious* mind share from C/C++ *and* Java on
MacOS X.

Thanks for listening.
-- 

Raffael Cavallaro, Ph.D.
raffael@mediaone.net



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