Subject: Re: Abiword gets "recognition" at MacHack
From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Mon Jun 25 2001 - 02:41:45 CDT
According to Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@lazerware.com>:
> At 1:41 PM +1000 6/23/01, Martin Sevior wrote:
> >Now if only some of those uber Mac hackers would help Hub out :-)
> >
> Something may happen...
>
> A number of prominent journalists and I were talking about
> the state of word processing on the Mac, especially in light of
> native tools for Mac OS X and we are thinking about having a
> "content" to write a WP for Mac OS X. If it happens, then I will
> certainly look at this as an opportunity to get folks working on
> AbiWord!
The state of Word Processing on MacOS X is that you only have AppleWorks 6
that is limited both in term of data exchange (they are still unable to
import/export RTF correctly, not speaking of Word) and that it has limited
features.
For MS-Word, people will not like as they'll have to *pay* to get a MacOS X
version of Word 2001 (version 9.0 for MacOS)...
That give us a free market segment :-) The only problem is to find
developpers... There are not that much developer willing to do Free Software
whose revenue is far from being guaranteed.
> Also, Dom and I have been discussing the possibilities of
> using the GTK/GNOME version of AbiWord under Mac OS X with XFree
> installed.
Here are my thought of the MacOS X port of AbiWord.
I think there are several path to go with this port.
1/ continue like I begun: target Carbon. This provide a code base that will
be usable for a MacOS 8.5 port. But this is probably not the best, but far
from being the worst.
2/ go like you suggested: compile AbiWord as a UNIX/GTK build and use it
with XFree. While this would be quick to do, this would not be the best.
Currently XFree is not installed by default. It is still experimental. On
also the integration with the existing environment won't be optimum. If
someone wants to try it, he is welcome. I currently have to reogranize my
disk space to be able to try it....
3/ use the MacOS 9 port of GTK a go as above. No need for XFree, less
optimum, more work as MacGTK is not really usable.
4/ Port GTK to MacOS X using CoreGraphics and go as in 2. Better than 3 as
it would be better in term of performance. Other than that it still has the
same drawbacks.
Solution 2, 3 and 4 would lead to a program that does not meet MacOS X GUI
standards like menu bar, etc.
5/ This is a variant of 1: use Cocoa instead of Carbon. That would speed up
the development time of AbiWord for MacOS X, but the code base would not be
compatible with MacOS 9. The biggest problem with this solution, that makes
me not choosing it is the fact that AbiWord is C++ and Cocoa requires
Objective-C or Java that are really hard to mix. I'm still hesitating to
make the move and port to Cocoa....
Keep in mind that Mac users have strong requirements against GUI and that
doing a quick and dirty port with a clumsy (ie not mac-like) GUI will only
leads to a failure. As a proof, I Star Office 4 that did exists on Mac. It
was a window displaying the whole Star Office desktop, and the menu bar on
top of the screen only has a File menu with Quit. They are not forgiving
about this (unless the software is stamped by Microsoft :-/ ).
Hub
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