Wednesday, April 14, 2010

GNUmed on Mac - maybe ; on the IPAD - never

Hi all,

What is the situation on the Mac ?
There is no reason why GNUmed would not run. We have not tested it for some time. I guess MacOSX is very much like Windows with regards to software management. Apple seems to care liitle if you have trouble managing software. So the best approach would be to go for frozen binaries just as we do on Windows and throw it all in a big fat dmg. For the server I guess macports can be used and gm-boostrap_server should work as well.

People seem to go crazy over the iPad despite its obvious limitations. Everyone is telling this fairy tale story that Apple is after the healthcare industry. The Oscar folks have been dreaming about it for some time.

So is GNUmed ever going to appear on the iPad ? I guess not anytime soon (TM). Apple has decided that python is not a first class citizen on their devices. The upcoming version 4 of their OS simply forbids anything but Objective-C, C and Javascript.

Primarly designed to keep out Adobe Flash it hits FOSS hard. Guess he will still manage to sell a good number of device. People simply love looking at it :-)

Unless proven to be vaporware the Wepad could turn out to be the alternative. Hardware specs are better (it is not as shiny and heavier) and runs a full fledged Linux. Ok, they managed to screw up by producing a Windows error during the press conference showing that it was a video in an endless loop :-)

If anyone wants to have a go at producing binaries for the Mac with e.g. pyinstaller let me no so I can can give you the pyinstaller setup script I use on MS Windows.

BTW I was looking for the prices of a used Mac but let me tell you unless they change their insane price/hardware ratio I am not going to get one myself anytome soon.

Sebastian

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