Hi guys,
It's been a bit since I wrote to the list (or contributed anything... been somewhat busy I guess with lab/school/life). Anyhow I just wanted to acknowledge the new WinHelp fixes (Kirill thanks in particular). Although there is still no Contents or Search, which would make the Vector NTI help more usable, the bug where it would complain about not being able to open help when it was requested even though help would open just fine has now been fixed. Thanks!
Also, I've been starting to play some with Wine on Mac and may in time end up contributing some patches for this goal, provided I will have to acquaint myself with some more Mac specific coding ideas first. Specifically though, I'd like to point out that I think the Mac is a hugely important platform for Wine I believe in terms of end-user adoption, and although I understand the rationale for not having binary packages available because Apple's X11 is buggy (which it clearly is), I think it would still be nice to have the Mac at least be an important focus.
And yes my thought initially was "well there's usually a Mac version of the Windows program." But alas unfortunately this seems to not quite be the case a lot of times. For example, even Vector NTI, which has both "mac and windows" versions, actually has a Mac version that does not work on MacOS 10.4 and higher (the company reports they are working on a code rewrite for Mac versions, but meanwhile there are tons of people out there on Google looking for ways around this/alternatives as Vector NTI is very common in molecular biology and Macs are traditionally the platform of choice in the field)... Wine would find a very nice niche here with a bunch of people that otherwise prob would not end up using it.
Another program we use a lot, Kodak Molecular Imaging, also actually has problems with MacOS 10.4+ on Intel (not PowerPC) Macs, although this has to do with the dongle drivers (USB dongle = Sentinel SuperPro), so likely Wine would need a little more improvement to be of use here.
Anyway, just wanted to point out my observations about the Mac and that although others might be thinking along the same lines I was... "well most programs available for Windows are available for Mac", in two examples I've discovered that upon careful examination this actually turns out to be quite opposite of the actual case.
Thanks for you time Misha
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Misha Koshelev