It's been fairly calm on the BitWise front lately, save the transition to the BitWise DocuWiki. January always seem to be a different kind of month, and I don't know why. Technically it's just like any other month, but for some reason, there's always something unusual going on in January. I'll have more to say about some of the "behind-the-scenes" things that went on during January in a few weeks, but for now, I'll just tell you that there will be a new nova in the galaxy in the near future. Drop me a line if you understand that hint. :)
Anyway, now that Intel-based Macs are starting to appear, we've renewed our efforts to provide a Universal binary for Mac OS X 10.4 that will run natively on both PowerPC Macs and Intel Macs. A recent burst of effort by some of the wxWidgets developers has allowed wxWidgets to be built as a universal library with a single configure flag. Unfortunately, there still seems to be a small thorn regarding endian-ness and byte swapping to prick out. After that, all that's left is gluing together all the 3rd party libraries. Once again, byte swapping is going to be a pain in the neck, and in some cases we're left to fend for ourselves. That, my friends, is why open source is not always a panacea. I'd pay to pick up the phone and get an answer, but there's not usually anyone to call...
The next version will be 1.7.1, a maintenance release rather than a feature release. We'll also be updating BitWise to use newer wxWidgets releases, which will be noticable mainly on the Mac with many bug fixes and other minor improvements. The Mac version is getting a surge of energy right now, and it's exciting to see it continuing to mature. We look forward to starting some new features soon. :)
So did you find someone with an Intel Mac that doesn't mind testing, or did you buy one for yourself?
Neither. The PowerPC macs can build Intel/PowerPC Universal software, it's just kind of hard to test the end result on Intel without an actual Intel box. :)