Windows to Mac

Date:    Thu, 21 Dec 1995 08:15:28 -0500
From:    "Glenn M. Picher" <gpicher@MAINE.COM>
Subject: Re: Cross Platform Compatibility

>We develop in Windows but want the end result to run on Mac.
...
>I must now choose the development tool for our current project.
>...with our last project, (developed in Icon Author) we ended up redeveloping
a lot of the code anyway for the Mac version.
>...can we simply develop in Windows using Director and recompile on
>the Mac and save duplicated effort.
Quite easily. The harder Director projects to port are from Mac to Windows. You won't need to worry about palette problems, will be able to use thousands and millions of colors, will be able to use simultaneous sounds and digital video without having to cross your fingers, won't have to wrestle much with configuration problems and odd hardware...

The major difference is in text operations (the Mac is substantially slower) and, compared to certain Windows graphics accelerator cards, maybe slower graphics performance. Just about everything else is easier to deal with.

If you can make it work well on Windows, it will probably be a breeze and look a lot better on a Mac. But don't spend too much time getting something to work right on Windows if it acts funny; test it on a Mac, and you may discover it's a phantom problem that only occurs on the PC. As always, TETOTOAYTM (test early, test often, test on all of your target machines).

Beware of two common traps:

    XObjects are platform-specific. They're implemented as .DLLs on WIndows and as CODE resources on the Mac. Some XObjects, such as FileIO, have identical Lingo implementations (well, almost) on both platforms. However, you don't always need XObjects anyway. The MediaBook CD from Gray Matter Design is a good source of crossplatform XObjects.

  1. Mac and Windows machines have different gamma characteristics. Artwork designed on one platform will look different on the other, because intermediate grey values are reproduced differently (even though black and white are the same).

This is true of any cross platform development tool, when porting in either direction.

The solution is to use 8-bit display modes, if possible, and use a corrective palette on the other platform (i.e., if you design on Windows, make a version of the same palette with darker intermediate grey values for use on the Mac). If you must use thousands or millions of colors (unlikely for you, since Director for Windows can't display such a stage yet), then you can process the image data itself, not just the palette entries, to correct for the target platform's gamma characteristics-- using a tool like Debabelizer on the Mac or Hijaak Pro on Windows.

Perhaps there are better Windows tools than Hijaak for this; I sure hope so, because Hijaak was the best there was a couple of years ago and it was a piece of crap compared to Debab.