Universal Mac App: My first shot at Universal compiles

Originally published on Monday, August 14, 2006

With a good deal of trepidation, I grudgingly converted one of my apps to Universal format for Mac. That is, it runs on native PPC or Intel code. Although there has been a great deal of comment out there that building Universal apps is easier than it sounds, I felt my app was one of those which would be a difficult battle. The app itself uses GUI, open source, a custom framework, and byte order specific code. Worse still, my code style isn’t what I’d call “good”. Uhg!

For the most part, it was actually very painless. Fortunately, the open source code handled byte order issues internally, so that turned out a little easier than expected. In the areas in which I specificially swapped bytes, well, I mostly had that code right anyway, so with a little work, it’s just fine too.

Of course, I haven’t fully tested the result. As far as I can tell, it works almost exactly as bad on a intel mac as it does on a PPC mac. When I say bad, I mean that it’s not well or fully implemented. It’s just a GUI app I’ve been working on for years that I never bothered to polish (I plan on making a polished version, but will I???).

So, rating my first experience for 1-10, I’d say 8.5 (1 point off for having to do it in the first place).