Cocotron helps port Mac OS X apps to Windows

Cocotron is an open source tool chain which promises to allow Mac OS X developers who work with Objective-C and Cocoa to compile their applications to run on Windows. The challenge with cross compilation tools is getting them to a point where a functioning application can be produced. The developers at Ecamm have described their experiences porting Ecamm's FileMagnet Uploader to Windows.

FileMagnet Uploader - before and after Cocotron

The Cocotron project was started in December 2006 to allow developers to avoid having to rewrite their code for Windows when they already had a working Mac OS X application. It installs into XCode, the Mac OS X development environment, and offers Windows as an alternate target platform for builds. Although it is still in active development, Ecamm got FileMagnet Uploader for Windows operating, and were impressed by the ability of Cocotron to do source level debugging of Windows applications running in a Windows virtual machine from XCode. The Ecamm developers are now releaseing FileMagnet Uploader for Windows and contributing their own Cocotron changes back to the main project. Cocotron is available under the MIT Licence.

(djwm)