RE: Laptops -dedicated to music only?

["Jeff Larson" <jeff.larson@sailpoint.com>]

> Looks like the world needs a Mac version of Mobius. Has Jeff ever
> mentioned the possibility? I can't imagine it would be hard.
> Maybe he & I should talk

Thanks Os.  I've explored doing a Mac port, and it would be relatively
difficult for these reasons:

  - The UI is all based on WIN32 components, I would have to rewrite
    my UI toolkit on top of Carbon or Cocoa, or port it to something
    like wxWidgets.  My preference would be to go native with Carbon,
    wxWidget applications always look slightly wrong to me.

  - The audio interface is based on PortAudio, and the OSX support
    wasn't very good the last time I looked.  So I would either have
    to fix OSX PortAudio or write something from scratch using
    CoreAudio.

  - The MIDI interface uses my own library, I would have to port
    this to PortMIDI or rewrite it.

  - I use a few Windows features like threads, messages, 
    critical sections, and the registry.  These would have to be 
    ported to use pthreads and other Mac equivalents.

  - I allocate memory in the audio interrupt handler.  This is allowed
    in windows if you're careful, but my understanding is that this
causes
    an immediate crash on OSX.  I would have to rewrite some rather
    sensitive memory management code.

  - My build scripts would have to be ported from nmake to gmake and
    I would have to learn how to use Xcode.

  - Installation is completely different.

  - VST testing is a bloody nightmare on any platform.  Now I'd have
    another dozen hosts to test under.

I'd like to do all of this someday, but just don't have the time 
right now.  I don't really want to enter into a joint development
arrangement yet, but if you have any advice on these issues
I would be most grateful.  Feel free to contact me off list.

Thanks,
Jeff