Stanza Desktop support for Leopard

Thu, 02/19/2009 - 21:31 — wyuenho

I happen to think Stanza on the iPhone is one of the few killer apps for the iPhone and I love the UI. However, it really frustrates me that Stanza's support on the Mac is just so terrible. I mean, I am kinda hoping you can get technical here with me because I just don't understand it.

I did a search on the forum and the last thread started on this topic dates back to early 2008 and it offers no insight into what the problem is and why it is so difficult.

In order to develop an iPhone app, you've got to have an Intel Mac, and it's pretty damn hard to get an Intel Mac with one of those single core Intel Core machines these days. But the fact that Stanza Desktop Mac doesn't even run on 64-bit Mac OS can mean only a couple things.

1. You have some really screwed up code/optimizations that somehow magically breaks automatic word padding on 32-bit instructions.

2. You are so tight on funding that you can't even afford to update your few Mac developers with a 64-bit Mactels running on Leopard so they can target their code for both the 10.5 and 10.4 SDKs.

3. Some other equally screwed up problems that prevent you from delivering a non-embarrassing Mac version of Stanza because I just can't think of anything else.

Either way doesn't give Lexcycle a very good image. Have you guys thought about open sourcing the app? If there's some licensing problems with the DRM modules so on and so forth, why can't you just open source the part that you can open source so people can figure out what's screwing up 64-bit support for the Mac. If your app is reasonably modular, use a decent version control system, you should be able to do that easily. If it's one of those badly developed, vendor supplied DRM modules that's causing the problem, why can't you just drop the support for that on the Mac version? I mean, if you have read the statistics, there are really very very few Mac users out there still using 32-bit Macs. I hope you guys can solve this problem soon. It will be a shame to see such a potentially killer app get bogged down by such silly silly problem.

Fri, 02/20/2009 - 19:33 — wyuenho

That's hardly the reason...

First of all, the latest beta just pops up a dialog, tells me 64-bit mac isn't supported and then hangs immediately. I have to force quit the app manually afterwards. Second of all, the fact Eclipse SWT doesn't have a 64-bit Mac version doesn't prevent you from writing an app that runs on a 64-bit Mac for the least bit. Azureus(now Vuze), and Eclipse have been running fine on the 64-bit Macs since day one. All SWT does is to translate Java code's data to something native and then calls the Carbon API with those data via a JNI library. It's just a bridge, how on earth can it break word padding? Are you using a self-compiled SWT from source? If so I suggest you check your compilation flags or just use the pre-compiled binary from swt.eclipse.org. SWT's cocoa port is not coming until late June, seriously, this just sound like a really really silly problem that can be fixed in a few days max. If you really can't figure that out, maybe it's time to think about open sourcing this app and let the community help you. You are not making money off the users buying the app anyway, you are making money from Google Ads and the publishers. It's really not that hard to set up a publicly accessible repository.

Thu, 02/19/2009 - 23:12 — marc

The problem is simply that an

The problem is simply that an underlying toolkit that Stanza uses (Eclipse SWT) doesn't yet support 64-bit Macintosh. They expect to have support for it soon. Once they do, Stanza will be supported on 64-bit Mac.

It should be mentioned that we do indeed have 64-bit Mac users who are reporting that they are successfully using Stanza Desktop. It just simply isn't yet supported. I encourage you to give it a try if you haven't already done so.

Note that even if you aren't able to run Stanza Desktop on your local computer, there are a variety of other methods for converting your books and getting them on your iPhone. Please don't hesitate to let us know if the FAQs and forum postings don't provide enough information to get you started.