Re: [VirtualGL-Users] TurboVNC viewer for Mac

[James W. <jam...@mo...>]

Hi,

On 16/05/2012, at 1:04 AM, DRC wrote:

> Since I'm an independent developer, plans usually follow money :)

I understand.  I wish I had money to offer. :-)

> Thus, what we're working on now is bringing in the next-gen Java TurboVNC viewer, adding TurboVNC-specific stuff to make it behave more like the TurboVNC Windows viewer, stabilizing it, and documenting it so that it achieves the same quality as our other viewers. Next, we will be experimenting with calling libjpeg-turbo through JNI to increase the performance to native levels.
> 
> The end game of this is an Android version of the viewer, but Java apps can quite seamlessly be put into app bundles on Mac as well, to the point that no one will know they're using a Java app. Many commercial Mac apps are really Java apps, in fact.

That sounds good.  I did like the idea of a non-java (e.g. FLTK) GUI, because since Mac OS X 10.7, Apple are no longer bundling a Java run-time environment in with their OS distribution - users have to install it themselves, as they do on other OS's.  I agree that Java applications can be bundled very nicely on Mac OS, and can be made to look almost native by using libraries such as Quaqua and MRJAdapter - I have done that myself in the past.

I will be very interested to hear about development progress of the TurboVNC Java Viewer, and about any major goals / milestones / timelines.

> The TigerVNC FLTK viewer would require too much work to "Turbo-ify", since it currently lacks some of the features we need. It would be hard to integrate it, since it relies so much on the TigerVNC/RealVNC infrastructure. Ideally, what I'd prefer is to write a native viewer that would replace all of our viewers, including the Windows one. FLTK could never replace our Windows GUI, so bringing in the TigerVNC code would give us three complex viewers to maintain instead of two complex viewers and one simple one. Thus, such a hypothetical next-gen TurboVNC viewer would probably need to be written using wxWidgets.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.  I really appreciate it.

> That is certainly something I'm keen on pursuing if financial sponsorship can be obtained for the effort.

Again, I wish I had money to offer. :-)

All the best,
James