Just an FYI that a true Max OS-X client will be released in GGW version 3.2 with a standard (native) installer. A browser plug-in is included as well. This version is planned for public release on April 30th.

Any new info on a native OSX client for GoGlobal UNIX

No specific timeline information is available yet.

We are, however, considering an option to recreate our client using a cross-platform toolkit that could provide all features on all platforms (win32, UNIX, and Mac, potentially others moving forward).

I would be interested to know what the Mac commmunity would think of such an option? (For example, is there a cross-platform toolkit that Mac users would prefer?)

Troy

Troy,

Could you elaborate on the question?

Myself and an associate just started a new job at a company that uses GO Global, and we're both using OSX as our primary OS. We would like to use GO Global to get into the unix servers at our work without having to boot into Windows. I think whichever toolkit Mac users would prefer is the one that makes this happen the quickest..

-Jeremy

Jeremy,

I think the question I was asking was based on the following background. We could probably port our existing UNIX/x11 client to OSX fairly easily, however it would still require the use of an X server, which is not generally what people are expecting when the topic of a native OSX client comes up.

One alternative, which we are considering, is to rewrite the client using a cross-platform toolkit (for example, QT or wxWidgets) such that one codebase compiles and runs on Windows, UNIX/x11, and OSX. This has obvious benefits in that the feature set would be "normalized" for all clients, and specialization in terms of rendering could be provided for each platform.

My concern with such a client is that it would likely not use "native" widgets -- the cross-platform library would provide widgets that would, at some level, be different from the native ones. I realize that this can be overlooked to some degree, but the question I was trying to ask was do people that use OSX every day notice these types of things? And if so, is there a toolkit that they prefer?

Troy

Hi Troy,

So to reply to your first comment - you are correct, the majority of people using OS X wouldn't know what to do if they were required to use X11 to run your client. However, everyone I know (a bunch of engineers), would have no problem at all. So if you want to seed a version of that out to us, we'd be thrilled! (Remember that X11 comes with the OS)

On your next comment, despite your well-written explanation, the two of us who are reading this email still don't quite "get" the question. So, my response may not make sense, but I'll try. People who use OSX every day are used to things being the same from program to program (in terms of shortcut keystrokes, etc), so if you're saying that the look and feel would be slightly different than standard OSX, yes, this would be noticed. Would anyone care? Again, compared to not having the software, the answer is probably no. I doubt anyone could provide guidance on a toolkit that they prefer, since everyone is used to things looking and feeling the same and do not have awareness of widgets and toolkits. It's possible that the toolkits/widgets available are all refined to the point where there are no noticeable differences. Obviously, looking at something like Quicktime, it's developed by Apple so you know that would look right..

I hope that that helps, in SOME way.. :?