Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Merlin Ported to Intel in Four Days

Project Wizards is a company that makes project management software for Mac OS X. Apparently, they've been busy during Apple's World Wide Developers' Conference, because they have announced that their flagship Merlin product runs natively on Mac OS X for Intel. Hopefully there will be a number of other announcement like these to follow. If there are, it will encourage other developers to move their code to Universal Binaries and bode well for next year's transition.

I don't know how complicated Merlin is. But I do know how complicated Mathematica is, as I am familiar with it from my days at the University of Illinois' Calculus and Mathematica program. The fact that Theo Gray ported Mathematica in two hours is more than impressive. It is shocking. Hopefully Mathematica and Merlin are the first drips out of a gushing faucet.

Update: It looks like another developer has gotten their software to port over, too.

Update 2: Yet another port: Unreal Tournament 2004. And other games, as well.

Update 3: Here's a list of finished ports and commitments.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

what does it mean to "port" something?

i'm familiar with mathematica from my time at rose-hulman - it is indeed quite a monster.

Chintan K. Amin said...

"Porting" a piece of software means taking a program written for one operating system (or, in this case, an operating system version) and making it run on another OS or OS version. The process can be easy or arduous, depending on a lot of specifics related to each OS.