From: Sean Luke (seanl_at_cs.umd.edu)
Date: Sun Jun 24 2001 - 10:40:53 PDT
zbir wrote:
> Playing with Mac OS X on my iMac, and wondering how other Newt owners
> are acclimating to the new OS.
You'll be happy to know that the Waba for Newton VM was written *entirely*
on MacOS X. I started development back in November when I was using the
OS X Beta. I've had relatively few gotchas, but there are a few:
1. You can't drag a package to the NCU icon in the dock and have it
launch. Instead you have to run NCU, then drag icons into its window.
2. There is a serious conflict between the Newton Package format extension
(".pkg") and the same extension being used for NeXT Installer Packages,
now known as Apple Installer Packages. It doesn't matter if you change
the type/creator code with PackType (PackType will become your best friend
in OS X), the operating system still insists on recognizing the package
as an installer package. The icon is an installer icon, and
double-clicking it will launch the installer. You *do* need to change the
code, however, for NCU to accept it via the drag-and-drop trick.
3. For Newton developers, a warning, the MPW C++ compiler is not very
happy in OS X: deep underneath, OS X is BSD Unix. Which means that deep
underneath, OS X prefers that text files use linefeed as the end-of-line
character, while traditional MacOS stuff expects carriage-return to be the
end-of-line character. MPW doesn't handle this gracefully. It gives
bizarre warnings, insists that all errors in your code are on "line 1",
etc., because the concept of non-MacOS 9 text files are beyond the
capacity of its puny little brain. I had to create a little shell script
called ~/bin/to-mac:
#!/bin/sh
cat $1 | tr '\012' '\015' > /tmp/cm.temp
rm $1
mv /tmp/cm.temp $1
...which converts text files over to "Mac OS 9" format to make MPW happy.
4. Newton Press does not work under Classic. To use it, you have to
reboot into MacOS 9.
Sean
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