----->>> On 30-Mar-2001, Ulrik Sproge-Jakobsen wrote: > Thus, for those of us in the flow business using Mac > computers, we cetainly have to hope that the software > developers in BD and Treestar release MacOS X-compatible or > at least carbonized versions of their flow software within > the foreseeable future (i.e. months - 1 year). -------------- Tidbits has an article describing who should switch to OS X: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-573.html#lnk3 My take on the whole thing is that a summer release of X.1 is where we'll see the marketing push, with native (carbonized) applications available. I had planned to release at least a preliminary version of FlowJo for Mac OS X on the same date that the operating system shipped, but wasn't able to pull it off. I'm currently in a holding pattern waiting for Apple to provide tech support on a couple of questions, and for the makers of the tools I use to build FlowJo to release OS X compatible versions of their tools. I just received a beta version of the code used to support USB dongles, and that is expected to be finalized in about a month, but there are a few other pieces of other peoples code that I need before I can release a fully functional version for you all. For the time being, I still have to develop programs on OS 9, and then test them on OS X, getting very little information about why the code doesn't work. As Ulrik explained, any Mac application that runs under OS 9.1 will run under OS X. I know of people who have been using FlowJo with the beta versions of OS X for months, so there is no problem there. But there are limitations in performance and all of the FlowJo windows are contained in one "classic" window, which is cumbersome. So I've been anxious to put out a "carbonized" version, which will work on OS8, 9 and 10. But the operating system has been changing so much in the past six months that I have been waiting for the changes to settle. Apple sent me a version called "Release Candidate" about two weeks before the March 24 release date, so I decided it was time to install it and start working on what they call a "carbonized" version of FlowJo. The changes in my code only took about a week, and runs fine under OS9, but dies right away under OSX. (Apple has a smug new dialog box, that says the application has died, but it has not affected other applications or the operating system). Unfortunately, when I went to install the development tools so that I could debug these problems, I found that my tools don't run under OS X. The installer program wouldn't read the CD that works fine on my older machine, so I had to run it across the network. That appeared to work, but somehow left it in a state that kills the Finder when it tries to launch the tools. So my experience has been that its not ready for prime time. I'd recommend that those who try it out do so on an extra computer, not only because its still unproven, but you also have to erase the entire hard disk in the installation process. Apple's big developers' conference is in late May which is presumably where they'll teach us programmers how to make it work, and fire us up with rabid evangelism and Jolt cola. The big products like Filemaker and Microsoft Office are claiming to release carbonized versions in summer/fall. That's when Apple will start shipping OS X preinstalled on the hardware. So I wouldn't recommend rushing into this now, unless you like to be on the bleeding edge, but figure that by July new computers will come with it installed, so thats a good time to move other machines as well. All that said, it does look like OS X going to be quite nice. It handles multiple programs very smoothly, is going to scale up nicely as they start adding more processors to the boxes, and stabilizes the memory management that has been what makes it so hard to write reliable Mac software. There are some nice improvements to the Finder (look for FlowJo to bring the NeXT multi-column file browser to look at cell populations) and I'm excited about having real Unix, OpenGL and Java environments to leverage off of. So I'll commit to saying that FlowJo will run native on OS X sometime soon, and those who want to test out the early versions should contact me. But I wouldn't recommend converting earlier than this summer, other than as a learning experience. Adam ------------------------------------------------------------ Adam Treister Tree Star, Inc. ph: 1-800-366-6045 fax: 1-650-508-9186 adam@treestar.com <http://www.treestar.com> ------------------------------------------------------------
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