In June, Apple announced the move to Intel processors with Steve Jobs saying on stage that the transition would be relatively easy for most developers. While this is true for simple applications and applications that have been cross platform for ages, it is not true for what I develop. I took a simple program, TimeRecord, and had it running natively on Intel in about 10 minutes. Not bad, but the application doesn’t have hooks into any other program, doesn’t connect to websites, doesn’t transfer data, nor take advantage of any cool features.
The main program I work on these days is Missing Sync for Palm OS and one of my tasks is to figure out how to move it to Intel. I came up with a brilliant (if I do say so myself) whitepaper on the transition. Implementing what I wrote, however, is going to be quite difficult as endian issues had never been taken into account and a requirement is that old, CFM conduits are supported. Apple’s current strategy doesn’t permit us to transition to an Intel native binary and support CFM conduits. So, we’re going to have to come up with some ingenious way to tackle this. One way, outlined in the way paper, may not work. So it could be back to the drawing board.
Missing Sync for Palm OS has upwards of 50 separate components that get compiled and will have to be tested on Intel. This will be no easy task. I’m always up for a challenge, but this one gives me a headache.