ID:194424
 
You may have, once again, noticed a distinct lack of me 'round these parts. Rest assured I am trying valiantly to make myself do something in BYOND, but a rather large kink just got thrown in my plan once again.

Those who know me well know that I'm easily distracted by things. Shiny things. In this case, shiny, translucent things. For you see, I decided I wanted a laptop. And, since I have this "run-as-many-OSes-as-humanly-possible" fetish, I decided, "Hey, I might as well get a mac-based laptop. I've never had a mac before." So I went out and bought an iBook.

This has proved rather problematic for my BYOND experience, as there's no BYOND client/server/dreammaker for MacOS, and I _really_ like my shiny new toy. (I won't go into a zealotous rant; I'll save THAT for something REALLY worthy, like QNX =D) So, that's why I haven't been around GoBs and such, playing Lexiconomy or whatnot for a while. (I have, however, read through the entire BYOND book, and I really do want to start playing with it, I do!)
On 3/31/01 9:04 pm ApM wrote:
This has proved rather problematic for my BYOND experience, as there's no BYOND client/server/dreammaker for MacOS, and I _really_ like my shiny new toy. (I won't go into a zealotous rant; I'll save THAT for something REALLY worthy, like QNX =D) So, that's why I haven't been around GoBs and such, playing Lexiconomy or whatnot for a while. (I have, however, read through the entire BYOND book, and I really do want to start playing with it, I do!)

No problem -- get the very excellent program called Virtual PC and program away in BYOND.

I've done much BYOND programming using that.
On 3/31/01 9:04 pm ApM wrote:
So I went out and bought an iBook.

This has proved rather problematic for my BYOND experience, as there's no BYOND client/server/dreammaker for MacOS, and I _really_ like my shiny new toy. (I won't go into a zealotous rant; I'll save THAT for something REALLY worthy, like QNX =D) So, that's why I haven't been around GoBs and such, playing Lexiconomy or whatnot for a while. (I have, however, read through the entire BYOND book, and I really do want to start playing with it, I do!)

Sounds like it's time for a little history lesson!

Way back about 4 years ago when I first got my Mac, Tom bought a compiler for it with the intention of porting what was then "Dung" (and probably bearing little resemblance to BYOND today) to the Mac. If I recall correctly, Dung was developed primarily on SGI and Linux, complete with GUI clients, and Tom was just starting the transition to Windows (an unfortunate but necessary move, given the far larger potential audience).

Unfortunately I don't think Tom got much farther than a simple "hello world" program on the Mac. There was just too much to do and too little time, so the Mac port eventually took a permanent back seat to Windows. Over the years between then and now, the UNIX GUIs also took a back seat, leaving us with Windows as the only viable option for using BYOND. For 99.9% of the potential audience, this is neither a problem nor an issue at all. It's only frustrating to those few of us who do use other operating systems and avoid Windows except as a necessary evil to get the job done.

I've bugged Tom quite a bit over the years about maintaining cross-platform versions, but I understand his/Dantom's position. I'm sure it's on The List, but quite low priority at this point. Once everything gets big and they make their first few million, they can hire a few grunt programmers to do the ports in a week or so. Unfortunately I'll bet MacOS is at the bottom of the list since it would undoubtedly take the most effort. In fact, I'd say there's a much better chance of seeing an OS X client since it's UNIX based, and I wouldn't hold my breath on Classic MacOS.

Hey Tom - didn't you say you ported the GUI over to Qt on UNIX a while back? Too bad about their licensing, I'd love to do BYOND development on my main (FreeBSD) machine. It's a good thing I have a Windows laptop from work, or it's unlikely I would have been motivated enough to install it just to use BYOND! Oh well, I'm sure all of this will become a non-issue at some point when you get some time for a few ports.