18 Nov 2000

Current status 18 Nov 2000: This week a lot of the tools were ported. The picture below show a build of a C application as viewed from the log. Currently Build, the dependencies database, MrC and its linker interfaces are working. Fantasm is being ported right now. Still pretty unstable though; although once Fantasm is running OK we hope to switch to the OS X version full time. There are some minor changes being made (like Build now knows what a 7400 is!) but nothing drastic at this stage.

Current status 8 Nov 2000: Phase 1 is complete! As you can see from the picture below, Anvil is now running on OS X. Currently quite a few graphical glitches but it seems solid enough. The next step is to bash it about a bit; make sure it isn't gonna crash then fix the drawing glitches - nearly all port/flushbuffer related I think. Finally get the tools and plugs loaded and running and that'll be the port complete. I expect this version will eventually go out as version 4 as it'll have some additional features on 3 as well as a few bug fixes. Three have been fixed already in this version - all crash bugs you probably would not have seen but Fluffy knew they were there :)

Current status 6 Nov 2000: About a week ago it finally booted! Stayed up for all of three seconds then died the old 'opaque access' death. Now whilst GDB is no Macsbug it's Ok when you get used to working with it.

Since then the editor has come up, Nav services, dialogs, project loader all working. Luckily I spent 3 months doing the appearance manager stuff for Anvil 3 (after which Apple promptly dropped the themes!) but it's paying off now.

Problems at the moment include: Many incorrectly drawn items (theme stuff); some dialogs are not displayed correctly (dunno); project window crashes (opaque access); no tool loader or access (deliberately turned off for a saner port).

Luckily nearly all tools are native and they all use Anvil as an OS so there should be no problems getting them 'up'; just some small ones to port from 68K (linkers mainly). Inital tests indicate it's just as speedy as ever (something I was worried about having played with another IDE on X) although there is some lag present in some places.

As you can see from this shot; I have the window background incorrect - many things have to change. The colour sets are OK as is the universal chroma coder but I have a huge list of things that won't work in the inital release. The idea is to get Anvil running in a protected environment as soon as possible so when some of your code (or my code :)) goes la la in a big way you don't have to reboot!

I'll try to keep this area updated on a regular basis; in the meantime if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us.