As you heard, I have recently released MAL Client OS X 1.0.1 and even the final version just last month. I haven’t been doing much development on it since the whole program is rather functional and stable compared to iMAL, which makes MAL Client OS X a suitable replacement for iMAL, except the lack of Manga support and Scrobbling.

As I recalled on my blog, MAL Client OS X was written primarily in RealBasic. However, the project is becoming a bit more constrained and limitations arise. Sure, everything work and I tried my hardest to make it more Mac-like as I can, but in the end, a few things still aren’t what I wanted it to be. Another thing is that since MAL Client OS X is built from RealBasic, it is still using Carbon, which Apple is not seemingly want to support anymore. This is why I come to the decision that starting with 2.x, MAL Client OS X will be rewritten in Objective C and Cocoa.

Why would you do such a thing? Sure I have to learn the whole language (I have books on Objective C 2.0 and Cocoa), but in the long run, it will be worth it. With RealBasic, you are pretty much limited to what you are provided, but with Cocoa, you can call other frameworks to add functionality and MAL Client OS X can grow and become more like a Mac OS X application than it is currently. Also, Objective-C have Garbage Collection like RealBasic, so I don’t have to worry much about memory management, although this means that the 2.x branch will require Leopard and higher, although it will still support PowerPC Macs.

When you will expect 2.x preview builds to come out? After Spring Semester, but probably in June/July since I need to take some days to learn the Objective-C language and have some knowledge of it before diving in and start rewriting the whole program. In the mean time, if Manga support comes, it will be added to the 1.5 branch of MAL Client OS X. From this change, expect the interface to be the same, except that I may put the Search in a HUD panel than on the same window.