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Bookmark converter for Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, IE, Flock & more.

Version:  1.59

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Learn how to due crossplatform correctly

Feedback Type:  Commentary

Contributed by: bgrubb Thursday, July 02 2009 @ 09:59 AM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Have Not Tried

Recommend Product: NO

If you make people jump through hoops to get your program to run then you have FAILED a key part of crossplatform development: KISS. Though, in this case we have more a case of Keep It Simple, Stupid rather than Keep it Short and Simple.

If you are going to support Mac, Windows, and Linux why in the name of programming not go with a language that can run on all three--namely Java. Especially when you are simply converting bookmarks (as opposed to something like allbookmarks that effectively replaces the bookmarkers of your various browsers). Look at OpenOffice as an example of something that can at respectable speeds across all three platforms.

I tend to play with Darwine a lot and I have found anything with NET to be the biggest pain in the rear to run so why put it in something that is intended to be crossplatform in the first place?!?

Sure using Mono makes things a little easier but Mono is not the sharpest knife in the toolshead in terms of mac usage: the Mono homepage itself states to run a mono program you need to open the terminal and do mono myprogram.exe. Sigh, if we Mac users wanted to play with terminal commands for supposedly crossplatform programs we would dump the whole Finder interface and just run Darwin.

UltraKiss shows another alternative to this--simply have a little program for each of the platforms involved that does the needed handling for the OS involved to load the program. So you have a 120 kb (not that is NOT a typo--120 KILOBYTES) mac file, an equally small windows .exe file and .jar for everything else (UltraKiss is a java program after all).

But do see see of of these totally reasonable methods with this? No. Instead we see something on par with a Star Trek fanfic where Klingons celebrate their receiving a ship full of Tribbles as a peace offering.   

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