Side effects?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 31, 2013, at 16:53, Ian Wadham wrote:

> I did "sudo port install -k -s pallet"

Single-letter flags like -k and -s have no effect unless you put them immediately after the word "port".

sudo port -k -s install Pallet


> I am unfamiliar with both Objective C and the Macports structure … :-(
> 
> However, I am familiar with C++, Qt and Qt Designer (a forms designer
> and code generator for Qt-based GUIs).  Is there a forms designer for
> Mac, BTW?  Hand-coding of widgets can be laborious ...

Interface Builder. It's part of Xcode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder


> I could write something in C++ and Qt, but that might cause a chicken
> and egg problem down the line, i.e. to use the GUI you would first have
> to install qt4-mac.  Also it takes quite a while to install qt4-mac from the
> command line, even as a binary package, which might be a turnoff for
> beginning users.

Installing a binary should be mostly limited by the speed of your network connection, and the speed of your disk to unpack the compressed binary.


> Or maybe I could prototype in C++ and Qt while boning up on Xcode
> and Cocoa …  BTW I have OS X 10.7.5 Lion and Xcode 4.2.1.  Would
> those be OK as a platform, from Macports' point of view?

Yes, but please update to Xcode 4.6. It's a free update for Lion or Mountain Lion users on the Mac App Store or at Apple Developer Connection.

My opinion is that cross-platform frameworks like Qt or wxWidgets or Java result in programs that don't look at home on any platform, especially not OS X which has a very specific interface design aesthetic, and which are also far larger and slower than if they had been written to the target OS directly. If cross-platform compatibility is your primary interest and you cannot afford to create separate native interfaces for each of your target platforms then so be it. But for a MacPorts GUI, which need only run on OS X, I strongly suspect that the best user experience will result from writing in Objective-C with Cocoa.