I need to develop a GUI based application for Mac OS 10.4 and newer (including PowerPC) and I am having a hard time decides on what language/framework to go with.
If I decide to go with straight Cocoa, I will have to run an older version of Xcode to compile for 10.4 ppc. Then run the newer version of Xcode on a different machine for the newer SDKs. Does anyone have any experience with this that could offer some insight?
I have a decent amount of experience with python and was thinking about doing it in PyQt4, but I’m not sure about what problems I am going to run into with packaging the application and getting it to work in the newer versions of MacOS.
Finally, I’ve been thinking about learning Java and developing the application using the Swing libraries, but I’ve never done and I’m not sure if learning this is worth it in the long run, nor do I know about the possible problems I would run into during deployment. Is it as cross-platform as they say it is? Am I going to have a lot of problems getting it to run in specific versions of MacOS?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am willing to learn an new language/framework if you have any ideas.
There are plenty of applications that run on 10.4 through 10.7. One way is to build using the 10.4u SDK and with the deployment target set for 10.4; that means using Xcode 3 or earlier and it will likely be easier if you have an older system, 10.5 or 10.4, to build on. In general, you can stick to a lowest-common-denominator of APIs that are available on the ranges of OS X releases. If you don’t need to support all machines that ran those older versions of OS X (for example, 10.4 was the last release to support booting on ppc g3, 10.5 for booting on ppc g4), you can use a newer SDK and use the Availability.h macros that allow you to check for compile- and run-time version dependencies within. See the discussion here. If you want to use Python, check out the python.org 32-bit-only installers for OS X which run on 10.3+, although be aware that without Xcode 3 it will not be straightforward to build C extension modules for Python on 10.7: built on earlier systems, they should work OK on 10.7 as well.