Can Anyone Help Me? Options

[By The Fireside]

Hi everyone,

I am new to this forum, so first off I'd like to say a BIG HELLO from me!

I have recently been learning about Java and would like to now start writing some applications that will help me to calculate overall measurements and sizes for fireplaces, so I can hopefully work much faster and also it will help my learning curves...

I have a slight problem, we use MACs in some parts of the workplace (for designing fireplaces) and I was wondering; if I wrote an application at home on the PC (and I have been told that you can run the app on a MAC) how easy is it to run the PC-built app on a MAC?

Are there any common problems that I might encounter? Do I need to write any special code?

Any help on this would be great!

Buck

[jochenWolters]

Hi, and welcome to the forum, Buck.

I have a slight problem, we use MACs in some parts of the workplace (for designing fireplaces) and I was wondering; if I wrote an application at home on the PC (and I have been told that you can run the app on a MAC) how easy is it to run the PC-built app on a MAC?

Generally speaking, Mac OS X has a built-in Java run-time, so you can execute Java applications on a Macintosh, regardless of which platform they were built on. As long as you use the standard class libraries provided with Java, it's highly likely that your application will run without any modifications or OS X-specific custom code.

The drawback with using Java is, though, that the resulting application may not feel like a real, native OS X application, and Mac users are rather picky in this regard. Therefore, I would suggest that, if your application is to be used in your office, you find a handful of colleagues that would also like to use the finished product, and involve them into your project right from the start by letting them play around with, and test, development versions of your application.

That way, you will learn about user interface issues as well as programming bugs early on in the development process, making it much easier to fix them than if you would complete the application and only then invite feedback.

Good luck with your project! And feel free to keep us posted on your progress.

Jochen.