In case anyone is trying to compile and run mdbtools on Mac OS X I've managed to do it.  I had to download and install the following:

pkgconfig-0.17.2
gettext-0.14.5
glib-2.6.0
gawk-3.0.2
mdbtools-0.5

I download each of the respective sources for each of these and followed the installation instructions.

So far I've tested mdb-ver, mdb-sql, and mdb-schema.

I was thinking about creating an Cocoa front end the GUI tools, but not quite sure where to start because I'm not a c/c++ programmer.  Is it just a matter of including the libmdb library in my project and making calls to the APIs?

Strange, does not work here ... how did you build the mentioned libs with ./configure make make install ?