I wonder if there is any RAD tool for Mac OS X. Something like Delphi for Windows.
Lazarus is an IDE for Free Pascal that works on Mac OS X (among other platforms). Obligatory screenshot here.
Note: Lazarus supports two widget sets (Carbon and QT), with a third in Alpha (COCOA), most screenshots will be of the Carbon port nowadays.
Which languages are you interested in?
Certainly check out Cocoa, XCode and Interface Builder.
An actual Delphi for Windows that will allow you to cross compile your applications to Macintosh has been promised by Embarcadero (the current owners of Delphi).
The IDE will be a Windows product but the binaries it produces will run on a Mac.
It was due this year but wasn't ready for the September release of the latest Delphi. There are likely to be preview releases for existing Delphi customers in a few months from now but the actual product probably won't be released until around September 2011.
Here's an update.
With Delphi XE-2, you can now build and compile native 32-bit Mac OS X programs.
Delphi Prism XE is an add-on for Visual Studio that supports both .NET as Mono. This includes the MONO version used by the Mac. It's not the ideal solution and I haven't been able to check if it really works, since I don't have a Mac. But I have Prism and now my .NET environment allows me to write Delphi applications for the Mac. Again, too bad I don't have a Mac, else I would have been able to tell you how good that is!.
It appears as if the Delphi Prism IDE can also be installed as a stand-alone compiler with it's own IDE on a Mac. Again, I haven't tested this. I just know it has this option, since I saw it appear during installation.
As Frank Shearar already said, Lazarus is a Pascal IDE which would be a better solution for the Mac, right now.
Related
currently I have to port an existing mobile application which runs on Android and IOS to Windows 8. Unfortunately it is using a lot of C++11 Stuff, which is not supported by Windows Phone 8.0. The project itself was written with cocos2d-x 2.0. It contains a C# Part which loads a C++ library with the major part of the application. Also it includes modules from "Project Angle", which is a library to convert OpenGL calls into DirectX calls.
The first thing I tried was to upgrade the project to Windows Phone 8.1 using the 'reassign project' option from Visual Studio. I still had to remove a bit of C++11 Code, but now at least the project itself compiles. After compiling I got some linker errors for functions like 'getenv'. The angle libraries don't even compile and gives me errors like 'Cant find include file vccorlib.h' for every single source file.
Since I'm completely new to Windows development, I don't know if something went wrong on upgrading the projects, or if I have to fix something within the projects. But I tried to upgrade an other project, which was already ported to WP8, and got the same errors.
Now I have to deceide if I have to fix the Windows Phone 8.1 version or if it's easier to remove C++11 Code for 8.0 (which means a few days of work and let my heart bleed)
I also found a compiler update for Visual Studio 2012, which has extended support for C++11, but it seems it's not compatible for Windows Phone.
I hope someone of you could give me a hint, what I have missed for WP 8.1 or has another idea. Thanks for your help!
Cocos2d-x should work on Windows Phone, but you have to get the right version. You can't use pre-built binaries for other platforms (even desktop Windows) and you need to make sure you're building correctly. See the download page.
Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 is the latest stable release of VS that supports Windows Phone projects; you can see the level of C++11 support listed here along with support in the not-yet-finished Visual Studio 2015 compiler.
I currently have a VS2010 project that uses the Qt 4.8 framework. We needed to have some native libraries for video on windows and we will develop the same for the mac. We are now migrating the project over to the Mac Os so we can release on that OS also. I am brand new to Mac, last friday being the first time i have even fooled around with one, let alone xcode. Most of my dev experience has been in the Visual Studio world so i am not too familiar with "make" projects. We do have some pro files but they are more than a year out of date. What is the best way to migrate the projects between the platforms? Any tips or tricks? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
If you're going to the effort of migrating from Windows to Mac, I'd definitely recommend using CMake.
It has many advantages over using hard-coded project files/makefiles. This answer points to some CMake tutorials.
There are some conversion tools which are meant to be able to convert between other buildsystems and CMake, but I have no personal experience of these.
The CMake documentation sometimes leaves a little to be desired, but the mailing list is usually an excellent place to get help and advice.
I have an existing Delphi 2009 application. I saw with the new XE2 release that we can now build our Delphi application to Windows 32/64 and now Mac OS X! Thumbs up to 64 bits and for Mac OS X compilation...
How good is the Mac OS X compiler? What do we have to do to compile our applications to Mac OS X? Will it only work with the VCL components or it will convert third party components automatically? How do we handle OS API calls now?
The Mac OSX compiler is, at present, only 32 bit. A 64 bit version will be included in a future release.
As for the VCL, I'm afraid you are to be disappointed. The VCL is a Windows only framework and will remain so. The VCL is hugely reliant on the architecture of Windows. For cross-platform (Windows, OSX, iOS), the new framework being shipped with XE2 is called FireMonkey. Porting a large VCL app to FireMonkey is a significant task. There have been a lot of blog articles just recently discussing FireMonkey and a bit of websearch will lead you to them. I would warn you that FireMonkey is very different from the VCL.
This is brand new technology and so expect some teething troubles. It will take time for the framework to mature and for 3rd party vendors to get fully up-to-speed with it. At the moment, you should not be expecting to ship a GUI heavy app for Mac compiled with Delphi any time soon. What you should be doing is getting hold of XE2, learning about FireMonkey and planning a strategy for porting to FireMonkey.
I'm about to start a Qt project on the Mac and I'm not sure which IDE to choose between:
Qt Creator
Xcode
Which are the advantages/disadvantages of these two IDEs for Qt development on the Mac?
Personally I'm using QtCreator in order to have the same on all platforms. The main advantage I give to it is that it have been developed for Qt.
The main advantage I give to XCode is its integration to MacOSX.
Now for you it depends:
If you always use XCode, You should continue using it for Qt to keep your marks
If you always use QtCreator, you should continue using it
If you start developing on MacOSX (or you've never used XCode) you should use QtCreator
Then my advice is: use the IDE you prefer to use
Qt Creator has much better integration with Qt in code editing, UI designing, and debugging. And it's the same across platform.
My issue with Creator on the Mac is it's debugging facility is not on a par with other platform. The python script-able debugger is not as functioning as, say Windows version of Creator. This is not Qt/Nokia's fault since the gcc/gdb on Mac are versions behind. Apple switched its focus to LLVM and left gcc tool chain, eh, to its natural death on the platform.
I actually do much of my developing on a Windows VM. Only switch to Mac for building and debugging something that's only Mac-specific.
Both options have issues. Qt Creator has problems with projects that have complicated project hierarchies (complicated in terms of folder structure.)
With Xcode, there are issues if you want to have some objective-c source in your project and if you want to be able to step into Qt source while debugging.
Most of my development is done on the Mac using Xcode and BBEdit. I switch over to Developer Studio on Windows for testing or if I need to be able to step into Qt while debugging.
Given the amount of time we all spend working working in these environments, you should try both and use what suits you best.
You also need to consider eclipse. I have spent the last week using Qt Creator and being a long-time eclipse user (for both Java and C++) I find it inferior. Once (if) Xcode 4 support is added to Qt, this might change, but at the moment my vote goes with eclipse even without the 'Qt Integration' available (i.e. just using the 'C++ Makefile project with existing sources').
I wrote my programs in Visual Studio. now i have an mac and i want to program there like visual-studio. but there are differences between them. Is there any solution that i can write a code in Xcode that it is compatible in Visual Studio and works without any errors?
Is there any solution that i can write
a code in Xcode that it is compatible
in visual-Studio and works without any
errors?
Write standard portable source code. Xcode uses the GCC toolchain, VS uses MS's cl compiler. They are different. Xcode does have the notion of projects and solutions and allows configurations. However, they are a bit complicated (so beware). Also, the Xcode debugger is buggy and the editor is not as feature-rich as the VS2005/VS2008 IDE.
You can build Cocoa/Carbon based applications on Xcode but these won't compile/run on VS. Similarly, you can build Win32 applications on VS which won't run/compile on Xcode.
All in all, Xcode is your best shot at an IDE if you're not a vim/emacs fan.
You can easily write portable low level code in C/C++, but any GUI code or code which calls the OS will be non-portable.
Java would be also a good solution for platform independency. NetBeans would be my choice.
Would in theory be possible to have a vs template so you go project structure and intellisense then when you build have a build script export to the mac or source repository then build on mac
Either way Xcode needs to be run on a Mac.
You can use Mono and MonoDevelop, then the programs you create on Mac can run on Windows also. I use Visual Studio on my job, but my spare time I like to play around with mono on my mac. http://www.mono-project.com/