I'm...hesitantly...looking at porting ximage, rview, and rholo (not necessarily in that order) to Mac OS X native Cocoa. Has anyone else looked at this? Is anyone else doing it as a project?
Randolph
Randolph Fritz wrote:
I'm...hesitantly...looking at porting ximage, rview, and rholo (not
necessarily in that order) to Mac OS X native Cocoa. Has anyone else
looked at this? Is anyone else doing it as a project?
Why go for yet another platform specific version? I really hate
to discourage your enthusiasm, but if we continue on this path,
we'll end up with a maintenance nightmare. If you want to do the
Radiance developers *and* users a favour, please consider using
some cross-platform GUI toolkit. My preferences are well known,
but really any cross-platform toolkit would be better than a
proprietary solution.
-schorsch
···
--
Georg Mischler -- simulations developer -- schorsch at schorsch com
+schorsch.com+ -- lighting design tools -- http://www.schorsch.com/
Greg wrote one almost exhaustive list of types of
people interested in Radiance. In that respect the
answer to the following question may help in
considerations such as yours: which category do you
belong to and who are the intended other users, if
any, of your platform-specific port?
On one hand you don't want to spend too much time on
supporting every platform-specific GUI gizmo. That is,
unless you do it for fun or exercise.
On the other hand, you don't want to be deprived of
the features that make 'typical' work with programs on
your platform more efficient and pleasant.
Then there are issues with continuing support.
That is, you either have:
A) Radiance -> direct platform-specific OS kernel and
GUI interface
or
B) Radiance -> platform-independent package ->
platform-specific stuff
In case A there is a danger that port author
eventually gets married, dies, graduates, etc. If the
port is moderately successfull and usable, then it
makes sense to try make it available and documented.
The way online storage and search is expanding, for
example, it may soon be possible to do that without
requiring or needing any sort of institutional
endorsement or support, without risking high network
usage charges or unknown people annoying you with
questions you don't feel like answering again after 10
years.
In case B, changes to platform-independent package
affect users on all platforms. Even if users are
software developers they may find the need to learn
and depend on one (or several) Radiance-unrelated
intermediate software packages a bit hard.
Less sophisticated users may a have hard time finding
and/or buying old version of AutoCAD on eBay. And they
may find using text editor to compose a scene even
harder.
If GUI look and feel and gadgets are the only issue, I
agree with what Georg wrote. Regarding performance I
wouldn't know, except for stating the obvious. Like,
you wouldn't want rview to be 50 times slower than it
could be just because bit blitting via some
intermediate package is so platform-independent that
it sucks on all platforms. Or, you may want to exploit
some concurrency, I/O, number crunching, etc. features
specific to your platform.
Tony
···
--- Randolph Fritz <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm...hesitantly...looking at porting ximage, rview,
and rholo (not necessarily in that order) to Mac OS
X native Cocoa.
...
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail