Hi Jack,

Same old tune here... we have a customer who is interested in replacing his aging pc's with mac's.

He wants to to know if it would be feasible to "pay you" to write a copy that would work on the MAC.

I know from other threads some of you have had good luck running ATE on parallels and other vmware. Without a mac or the ability to place my hands on one i don't really want to get involved in this COW...

If there are some BBS apple junkies that may want to sell some consulting time on this, also feel free to post, and we can see if there is something we can do to make some connections.

Thanks!

I'm not much of an Apple junkie either, so I'm not really the one to help you with Parallels or another virtual Windows, but from what I understand, that's fairly straightforward.

A second route (possibly even cleaner, depending on the environment) would be to use the Mac version of RDP (connecting to a Windows "server" from which you launch ATE to the Linux server). Again, I'm not sure about the availability of an RDP client for the Mac, but am pretty sure there must be one. And if not (or possibly even better in any case), Jorge was showing a remote client tool at the last Conference which I believe worked on many platforms and he felt performed better than RDP. But I don't remember the name of it. (Perhaps he'll come out of hiding and tell us.)

But if your customer really wants to pay to have us develop a native Mac version of ATE, I'm certainly interested, as we have been talking about the possibility of creating a more portable implementation (potentially suitable for pad devices, Linux clients, etc.) It's a huge undertaking though, with lots of trade-offs to consider. (XTREE is a particularly huge obstacle, since most likely we'd have to switch to some other widget, which would make it very difficult to perfectly emulate all of its characteristics.)

Most likely such a new implementation would be, at best, only "mostly compatible" with the existing ATE, thus requiring some application rework. (On the other hand, if you want to run your application on a handheld pad device, you're probably going to need to rethink the interface a bit anyway.)

Hi guys, I'm happy to have a chance to feel useful with a quick tip, considering that it has been absolutely impossible for me to participate in all the interesting debates here; hopefully, in 2 weeks, after definitely move to my new office, my life return to some normality.
The product that Jack is talking about is Go-Global ; I have it running in Windows Server and Client but, they have it for several other platforms and it also runs on the browser, which turns it into a solution, almost, universal.
Hope it helps.

As an aside, I also have customers running A-Shell on Mac's using the RDP-Mac version (by Microsoft) over a Windows Server; and it works perfectly, I had to design a keyboard layout to install on the server, but it's perfect.

Thanks Jack, and Jorge.

You know, im not really inclined to make application changes to handle apple "widgets" as you say, and your right, the complexity of you maintaining this and windows versions of ATE would be monumental.

Let me ask a naive question... the RDP-Mac program, does it require a windows server to sit between the Mac and the Linux box?

Thanks again!

Yes, some kind of RDP server is needed. (So admittedly this scheme is most practical when you are running your app directly on Windows, in which case the app server and RDP server can be the same.)

Gotcha thanks.

There sure seems to be a lot of history on this topic. One of our customers was bought and the new owner has a mac book pro. Version 10.15.7. The company is running on a windows server with the PCs using ATE to telnet in. They are running GUI programs but the flag to run in text mode probably still works. I know zilch about Macs. i will ask the same old question. Is there an existing way to telnet in that is reasonable?

My only thought that springs to mind is TinyTerm for MAC if you think the text based am62/wyse60 would work still. We have a customer running this on Android when they replaced their Windows CE handhelds running Pocket ZTerm. ( they say it works but we left them to it and never got involved)

Another option, particularly if there is a Windows Server to connect to, is to use the Mac RDP client.

I am surprised but pleased. Thanks again. We will try it. All we need is a mac, learn how to use it, make the software run it, etc.

You could also use Parallels or VMware Workstation to create Windows VM on the Mac, and install ATE there. There's a Unity mode that allows apps installed in the VM to be displayed like they running the normal Mac OS environmet.

Or, just convert the Mac in a Windows machine via bootcamp