porting iPhone openGLES app to OSX?

Question

Developing for the iPhone has been my first experience with objective-c and first in-depth experience with xcode. How difficult would it be to port an openGLES iPhone app to the OSX desktop using openGL? I am not asking about user interface - obviously there is no equivalent to cocoa touch UI on the desktop. I am asking specifically about the app delegate and openGLES layers. Are there any major hurdles? Is it as straight forward as simply creating a new app delegate in a project of type cocoa?

Answer 1

I've started looking into just the same thing, and it appears that OpenGL-heavy applications would be among the easiest to backport to the Mac. Pretty much everything in OpenGL ES is present in OpenGL on the desktop (with the exception of some of the fixed-point stuff), so that code can stay the same.

The way that OpenGL is handled on the iPhone is via a Core Animation layer (CAEAGLLayer), rather than a specific view. Therefore, you should be able to transfer that across to a Leopard-based desktop application, although you'll need to convert all references to EAGL classes to their OpenGL equivalent (EAGLContext to NSOpenGLContext, for example). You could render into a CAOpenGLLayer that's displayed by itself, or use that layer to back a custom NSView.

The fundamental structure of a desktop Cocoa application will be different than a Cocoa Touch one, but you should be able to start from one of the Xcode templates and add back in your components from the Cocoa Touch application.

Again, I haven't yet done this for my application, but it looks reasonably straightforward.