Frame's future @ Mac/UNIX

[Paul Findon]

Steve Rickaby wrote:

> >"Although MacOS X has UNIX underpinnings, the difficult
> >stuff relating to user interfaces, font access, output,
> >etc. is all exclusive to MacOS X"
> >
> >In other words, the difficult stuff has all been dealt with for  
> GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. etc. So Adobe employs people  
> who know how to get a document to print on a Mac, even under the  
> formidably taxing OSX. It just chose not to put them to work on FM,  
> because there was little demand for its previous, non-OSX, new- 
> feature-thin FM upgrades. Terrific.
>
> There may be other factors at work here. To create universal  
> binaries that will work on OS X across MacIntel and PowerPC  
> platforms, Adobe has to migrate their code base to XCode, the Apple  
> development system. That process is, as I understand it, well under  
> way for the CS 2 applications.
>
> However, FrameMaker has a much older code base, so the effort to  
> migrate it to XCode would be proportionately greater. For all I  
> know, some parts of FrameMaker might be coded in Assembler for  
> speed. If this is the case, moving such code to a multi-platform  
> production base such as XCode would be all the more complex, and  
> might involve a major re-coding effort. All this ups cost and  
> reduces margins.

Who's side are you on, Steve ;-)

In the early '90s, I made many a manual with Adobe FrameMaker 3.0 for  
NeXTSTEP.

Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on BSD?

Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both built on the Mach kernel?

Hang on. Aren't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both object-orientated  
environments?

Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Objective-C?

Hang on. NeXTSTEP used Display PostScript, Mac OS X uses PDF. Isn't  
PDF based on PostScript?

Hang on. Don't NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X both support Type 1 fonts?

Hang on. Weren't NeXTSTEP app developers some of the first to port  
their apps to Mac OS X?

How difficult could it be?

Paul
<http://www.fm4osx.org/>