Oct 30

Mac Programs On Windows

Currently, Safari and QuickTime are the most notorious Mac programs on Windows, but there's a little twist here - we're not running exactly the Mac programs, we're running their Windows versions. What if people could easily run Mac programs on Windows, just as it happens with Windows programs on Mac for those using CrossOver? Obviously, that would really be a breakthrough, and it seems we're closer to that then most of you think...

Since Cocotron is the open-source project that's going to do exactly that, if everything works well. Most chances are to see Cocotron delivering what's currently just a promise, since this application is coming from Magnetism Studios,

a company with a good history behind, since they already managed to successfully port the Mac FileMagnet Uploader to Windows.

Currently, all we know is that Cocotron "aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.'s Cocoa documentation," so applications for Mac OS X written in Xcode should become easily to cross-compile for other operating systems, especially Windows.

From theory to practice there's a pretty long road, and until we get to see first Mac programs on Windows, without being completely rewritten for Microsoft's platform, we can have a few more trucks of beer(at least I can). Anyway, if you're a Mac OS X developer, it is my pleasure to inform you that Cocotron is available for free, being released under the MIT license, so go ahead, download it, and take your time to see how easy can be turning your Mac OS X code into Windows code. Just...don't forget to get back here and tell us more about your quest, all right?