Thursday, June 13, 2002

Retro Compuing Fun Currently, most of my day is spent in OpenStep 4.2 working on porting a Very Large Body of Code from NeXTSTEP 3.3 to OS X / Cocoa. My current task is converting the NIB files from NS to OS as OS X can open OpenStep NIBs, but not NeXTSTEP NIBs. To complicate matters, the apps to be ported made relatively heavy use of InterfaceBuilder Palettes that are not going to be ported (obsoleted by new API). So, the port from NS->OS of the NIBs is actually not just a straight conversion as I'm also converting objects on the fly from one object model to another. Very interesting stuff, really. As we no longer have any Intel hardware that can run OpenStep, I'm running OS 4.2 under VPC for windows. It is faster than the native OpenStep-on-Until box I used 5 years ago. By jumping to full screen mode, you can't even tell that Windows is the host OS! Furthermore, it is possible-- even easy-- to configure VPC to allow the OpenStep box to have its own separate IP address. Once done, configuring OpenStep is exactly the same process it has always been (i.e. easy). So, I'm no logged into an OS 4.2 box running under VPC that is mounting my home account, has all of the environment variables and defaults, etc. Works flawlessly. Quite the retro-computing experience! 3:42:57 PM