The return of Yellowbox?
I'm curious what everyone thinks about a return of the Yellowbox layer from the early Rhapsody days. From things I've read here and elsewhere, some concern exists over the ability to run a Windows compatibility layer on the new MacTels (i.e. VMWare or WINE). If they were to become very stable it may discourage native Cocoa development for new Mac apps, instead developers would just rely on VMWare or WINE making us use ugly Win32 apps.
Well, what about Apple reviving the Yellowbox layer that allows execution of what are now Cocoa applications from within Windows. Is this still possible? Would it provide incentive for developers to use Cocoa and develop for a much larger base of users (both Windows and OS X) rather than using Win32 APIs?
Well, what about Apple reviving the Yellowbox layer that allows execution of what are now Cocoa applications from within Windows. Is this still possible? Would it provide incentive for developers to use Cocoa and develop for a much larger base of users (both Windows and OS X) rather than using Win32 APIs?
Comments
Originally posted by bobbagum
There is a real danger of the universal binary suffering performance hits
Why?
The only downside will be larger application sizes and download time because of the need to include two compiled binaries inside every bundle.
Originally posted by longstride
Yea, I don't know why there would be a performance hit with Universal binaries. I would bet that the application bundles with have compiled code for each platform and just pick the right one according to processor.
The only downside will be larger application sizes and download time because of the need to include two compiled binaries inside every bundle.
That's exactly what UBs are and do. I'm curious as to why bobbagum thinks there will be a performance hit.
Given that I've seen a number of other people confuse Rosetta with Universal Binaries, I guess I have a suspicion, but I'd rather hear it from bobba.
Apart from the size issue, there shouldn't be any performance hits apart from taking up space, i forgot that it will actually be two separate binaries in the one packgage, I was imagining that the system have to load both binaries everytime, which weren't the case, my bad.
forget what i said before.
phew, the consumers stand no chance in trying not to be confused.
But if I buy my mac in 2007, I might be a bit pissed off that my apps developer had to spend time(and ultimately my money) supporting the PPC platform
Or I could be thankful that I still can get up to date software on my then ancient g4
Looking back at my beige g3, even though the platform is essentially the same as my G4 iMac I couldn't get new apps for os9, the last build of Mozilla for it is seriously outdated, i couldn't even use the web!(reasonably) apart from the old apps that I have on it, which works just fine, trying to keep up with osX would makes it crawl, it is, for all intent and purpose, obsolete. I see a growing market for linux on PPC.
Sorry, if I went off topic, please continue
I'm sure Apple would want to keep Mac Apps on their machines, so there's is no way they'd let Mac Apps runs on Windows.
Microsoft would sure like to have a VirtualMac for Windows PC though.
I'm having a case of OS/2 deja vu
What if there is a little checkbox in Xcode that says Windows, and it produces .exe binaries seamlessly.
Powermacs would flyoff the shelves to developers, even previously windows-centric one.
BTW, is it even technically feasible?
Originally posted by bobbagum
What about if the translation for Xcode apps to run on Windows is included in the binary and is portable, not requiring the users to install any thing on windows to run these mac.
What if there is a little checkbox in Xcode that says Windows, and it produces .exe binaries seamlessly.
Powermacs would flyoff the shelves to developers, even previously windows-centric one.
BTW, is it even technically feasible?
This is the whole point of the YellowBox. Apps run on Windows look like Windows apps. They are compiled to Intel code, albeit with calls to YellowBox libraries (which are also compiled to Intel-code). However, the development environment is so rich that application development is substantially faster than using standard Windows development tools. The upshot is that developers who develop YellowBox apps faster to market and at lower cost. This gives them a distinct advantage over developers who use standard Windows development tools. It also allows developers to deploy their apps to the Mac and Windows from a single code-base.
? BlueBox became Carbon and Classic emulator,
? RedBox -the Windows applications compatability layer- was finally removed.
-> Information on Rhapsody boxes
You could compile your code into a .app bundle released simultaneously for Mac OS X PPC, and Windows x86 with YellowBox.
I think now this would be even more feasible, with the exact same kind of processor between Mac and PC.