I decided to give this cross platform project a try but I’m going to go with a UI solution for it. I considered maintaining a separate UI for each platform to make each one as native as possible but from reading experiences online that will only lead to tears and maintenance nightmares. I want a unified codebase that only needs to be recompiled for each platform to work.
I’m going to start this project with QT (http://qt.nokia.com/). It seems to be the best choice at the moment from what I’ve seen.
The bigger issue I’m having is setting up this Mac so I can run Windows in a virtual machine to allow me to do development on both versions without leaving the warm comfort of OSX. I tried using Parallels but that’s not going well. I can’t get QT to work reliably when compiling from Windows while reading off the Mac hard drive, the path names for the shared folders are weirdly obfuscated, and there’s generally a lot of sadness.
I’m currently installing Windows into a trial copy of VMWare in hopes that it will be easier to work with. Here’s hoping!