Need Windows Conversion

[Larryapple]

I am a longtime Mac developer and owner of a small company with a large
application called DVDAfterEdit. 15 months ago we began a complete rewrite
in Objective-C and Cocoa, adding support for the new HD DVD and Blu-ray
formats. We are finally nearing the 1.0 release of that product.

As part of this development we must support DLT (Digital Linear Tape) drives
which are used to submit DVD masters for replication (making thousands or
even millions of copies of a DVD). To avoid complications and possibly
delaying the primary product, we spun off a separate utility to copy DVD
masters to and from tape. These masters can be created and and converted by
both our existing and new applications, and also created by other authoring
tools.

Quite a few of our current and potential customers already have DLT drives
connected to their PC's, and use both PC's and Macintoshes in their
production. Making a Windows version of the tape utility could increase our
sales and visibility.

These drives are connected to SCSI PCI adapters. As one of our developers
said, "SCSI is so last millennium". But luckily we already have PC interface
code to the ASPI layer for those drives, and it works well in Visual Studio
C++, but with a very limited demo application.

However, our tape utility is quite ambitious and its capabilities would be
tedious at the least to recreate in Windows. It makes heavy use of threads,
bindings, and notifications, so that users can run multiple tasks in
overlap. It has about 30 classes, a few of them "borrowed" from the main
app. None of the window objects or drawing is particularly complicated.

It would seem that GNUSTEP could avoid a lot of rewriting for Windows. The
look and feel might be compromised somewhat compared to a native Windows
app, but the functionality is more important and must be maintained.

Our time is short, and the tape utility is a diversion from our other
objectives. We would greatly appreciate any advice, and are willing to pay
for help in implementing this project. The tape utility already includes a
tape emulator class which reads and writes the tape format to and from disk,
so actual SCSI hardware will not be needed for the development. Once it
works for the emulated tape drives, I can easily add the real hardware
support.

Regards,

Larry Applegate


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