To LUGNET HomepageTo LUGNET News HomepageTo LUGNET Guide Homepage
 Help on Searching
 
Post new message to lugnet.cadOpen lugnet.cad in your NNTP NewsreaderTo LUGNET News Traffic PageSign In (Members)
 CAD / 15113
15112  |  15114
Subject: 
Re: Which CAD program recommended for Mac??
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:22:04 GMT
Viewed: 
7539 times
  
In lugnet.cad, Kevin L. Clague wrote:
  Any Mac *and* Qt software development experts out there?


Well, I wouldn't really call myself a Mac expert OR a QT expert, but I'm at
least familiar with both.  I did the initial port of LDView to QT years ago, but
that's now maintained by Peter Bartfai.  However, I do get into the QT code
enough to have some familiarity (although it's QT 3.3, not QT 4.x).

Additionally, I've been working on a Cocoa native port of LDView off and on for
a year and a half or so now, so I'm familiar with Cocoa programming.  Of course,
that brings up the obvious question of why I would do a Cocoa port when there's
already a QT one.  The answer for that is mixed.  For one thing, I wanted to
familiarize myself with Cocoa.  I was an expert in OpenStep programming back
when there was still such a thing, and since Cocoa is the direct descendant of
OpenStep, that gave me a good grounding.  It's amazing what you can forget about
a programming environment after not using it for five years, though, so I'm
currently expert in neither OpenStep programming nor Cocoa programming.

Another reason for the Cocoa port is that QT 3.3 has some issues on the Mac.
These may or may not exist with QT 4, but they're definitely there with QT 3.3.
Also, the Universal LDView binary with a statically linked QT is really large
(15MB?), and I'm not real happy about that.  (Windows native binary and Linux QT
binary are both in the 1MB range, with the Linux binary using QT shared
libraries.)

It's also worth noting that the Mac QT version of LDView has some special code
to make it work as well as it does.  My help is in HTML form, so there's Mac
code to launch an HTML document in a web browser.  The Linux version uses QT's
HTML viewer, but in QT 3.3 at least, that's very basic.  Also, the only thing in
my Edit menu is Preferences (which is admittedly very strange).  The Mac QT
version is smart enough to move that to the app menu where it belongs, but isn't
smart enough to delete the edit menu, so I have to (carefully) do that by hand.
Macs expect recent files to be in a sub-menu of the file menu ("Open recent"),
so there's custom code for that.  Granted, LDView would work with none of these
changes, but it wouldn't be something I would really consider a "good" Mac app.

If you have any specific questions about my experiences, though, feel free to
drop me a line.

--Travis



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Which CAD program recommended for Mac??
 
(...) <snip> (...) Hi Travis, Very nice to hear about your experiences. I need many layers of Mac experience. The first and foremost (until I get myself a Mac and get ramped up in the development environment) is being able to build LPub for the Mac. (...) (16 years ago, 25-Feb-08, to lugnet.cad)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Which CAD program recommended for Mac??
 
(...) Sigh. My preference would be to have one problem on both environments. Unfortunatly MLCad will not be going open source. It almost happened. I asked Allan Smith about having bricksmith ported to the PC, but he's not even slightly interested. I (...) (16 years ago, 23-Feb-08, to lugnet.cad)

26 Messages in This Thread:










Entire Thread on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact

This Message and its Replies on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact
    

Custom Search

©2005 LUGNET. All rights reserved. - hosted by steinbruch.info GbR