Re: porting from Cocoa help

[Sheldon Gill]

Anurodh Pokharel wrote:
> Well, it's been exactly since i last posted about porting a cocoa app. I
> tried again today an was actually able to compile everything in
> ProjectCenter with a few changes. The main change on my end was that apple got
> rid of the dock in mail.app so i got rid of it too. That made porting a
> lot easier. 

Good idea.

>  The app i am porting is OSXnews  ( http://osxnews.sf.net )

Great. Have you put your current porting efforts into a branch?

> I have a few questions. 
> 1. does  NSAlert exist in gnustep? I had to comment out every instance
> to get it to compile2.

Yes it does. You need "#import <NSAlert.h>" to make it happen.
Note also that the behaviour is somewhat different from Cocoa. You need to 
change
        [myAlert runModal]
to
        NSRunCriticalAlertPanel()

> I know that @try{} catch does not work in the version of gcc that
> ships with non Darwin systems. How do you guys get around it? I commented
> every instance, but that will limit the stability of the application

NS_DURING
  {
    // try_block
  }
NS_HANDLER
  {
    // catch_block
  }
NS_ENDHANDLER

> 3. How do you give the application an icon? does it take icns files?

No, it doesn't. icns files derive from resources and are a mac-only format.
Convert the icns images to TIFF images for use in GNUstep.

> 4.  NStoolbar uses @selector to specify the action, i had to comment out
> all of that too. How is this done in gnustep. 

  [myToolbarItem setAction: @selector(doAction)];

> 5. i have the old style (non XML ) nib files. What should i use to
> convert them to gorm?

nib2gmodel on MacOS-X to convert to gmodel

Gorm to convert gmodel to gorm (GNUstep equivalent of nib)

You can find more info here:
<http://mediawiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Writing_portable_code>


> 6. Webkit, where can i get a copy of the gnustep version. The app uses
> webkit to display newsgroup postings in a nice formatted way. I can live
> without it, but it would be nice to have simply to keep the source in
> the OSX and GS versions similar. 

To the best of my knowledge there isn't a current webkit port.

> beyond that, the application now compiles (without the nib files, yay!
> late binding!)  on linux with gnustep and hopefully, we will have GSNews,
> a small fast NNTP newsreader for gnustep 
> ====
> Oh yeah, for anyone who might see this in the future via google gorups,
> to get round the missing  coca.h thing, make a folder called Cocoa in
> the project directory and create a file there called Cocoa.h with the
> following contents:
>
> #import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
> #import <AppKit/AppKit.h>
>
> typedef BOOL bool;
>
> #define  true YES;
> #define false NO; 
>
>
>
> this  makes Cocoa apps a lot easier to port to GNUStep since it requires
> no changes to the headers included and fixes the bool issue. 

GNUstep has had <Cocoa/Cocoa.h> for a while now which contains the bool, true, 
false definitions.

Which version of the libraries are you using?


Regards,
Sheldon