Windows Port

is there any reason why there isn’t a windows port yet? I’m sure this has been asked before and I’m sure you must have noticed people showing a keen interest towards it from the windows commnunity.

This is the only app I’d wish to try from a mac standpoint and having to buy a mac to try this…There is of course the other way around which is using a virtualbox but that isn’t exactly legal, worse let’s assume you do it and spend 300 buying this app, what if it all just doesn’t work out? So again, can we be able to see a windows port in the future if so how long?

Regards

I’m a designer - i’m not a software engineer. To code for windows I would need at least three of the latter, programming for the Mac is so much easier. Even Microsoft itself is faster making Office for iPad than for there own Surface platform.

You can try VirtualBox with the free test version from the website (and I recommend buying it from the website, too).

Georg Seifert
Hi,

Thanks for replying so soon. I’m a designer myself and don’t code. I could try the trial version but the thing is isn’t using macosx via a VM considered illegal according to EULA?(read it on stackoverflow somewhere). If it’s not then should I go with mavericks or snow leopard? Mavericks is free but I wouldn’t mind buying leopard if that’s where glyphsapp works best. Also how do you tell if it works well, are there any key things I should look for to check for breakage? If it passes, then I suppose we can safely assume it works for the pro version too?

Why would you want to use Snow Leopard? It’s the third version behind Mavericks. Mountain Lion (10.8) was the one prior to Mavericks and it works just fine.

George Thomas
Oh so you’ve tried it using vbox and it works just fine? I forgot about lion, I’m not exactly very familiar with the mac OS versions.

There are some problems with Snow Leopard. I strongly recommend 10.7 or later. Glyphs works great in Mavericks.

mekkablue
You mean glyphsapps running on mavericks inside vbox/vmware/ works well?

Apple allows Mac OSX in a virtual machine since 10.8 (if you own a Mac ;). This makes it very easy to run it in VMware fusion (on a Mac). It shouldn’t be too difficult to get it to work on a PC but I haven’t tried it for years. You could consider all this a trial period before you buy a Mac. The MacBook Airs became cheaper today.

Hi there,
I would love to see a windows version as well.
Did you consider using somthing like this?: http://cocotron.org/
I’m not a programmer as well, but there are such people out there I am very shure. :wink:
Why not try to find one?

It is a risky investment, and will most likely not pay off. Please read this: Why there is no Windows version of Glyphs | Glyphs

I understand!
Regarding the native Windows development: lets forget about it.
What about finding an “easier” way to port. Did you do research in that direction or is “it won’t be lucrative” the last thing you did about it?
Running it in a kind of virtual container… Or in that direction…

I do considering it. But it is very limited still. And a big hassle to setup and debug.

I"ve moved on and grabbed Fontlab V, pretty happy with it but eagerly waiting on fontlab VI for windows now as that’s what I’ve been eyeing for. It was due in July or sept or something but fingers crossed to have it up and running before the end of this year. Glyphs and robofont are nice but Fontlab VI is equally nice and just about everything I had hoped for is present in VI, even better that it comes for windows. So all in all no regrets investing in fontlab. Instead of relying on vmware and parallels and what not just to run one app, why bother? Grab the one that is built for your OS and for windows it’s fontlab VI for now. This argument about how the majority of them are on a mac is true, but inspite of that fontlab has decided to go ahead and make it available for windows users. I’d say that’s a better way to handle this as you’d be targeting a much wider audience.

It’s going to be a weird 2017 for all of us… Apple now seems to be alienating the creative users of their platform, who were once the centre of their universe… and Windows 10 is now attracting disgruntled creatives with their emphasis on touch displays, plus increasingly reliable Surface hardware, and a special Creators edition of their OS (never thought I’d see the day)…

Having read how dismal the Mac lineup is in 2017 (out of date Mac Pro / desktop Macs + underwhelming and overpriced laptops) it makes me wonder if we will see a wind down of mac usage in the creative world that will inevitably trickle down to the font design community.

It does suck a bit that Apple has turned their nose up at the people who have supported them for decades, back when they were a struggling company… they seem to be just chasing the dollar now and focusing on those little portable computers we all carry around in our pockets. It’s almost like the Mac platform exists just to run Xcode from (until you can code from an iPad of course and that’ll probably be the death knell for macOS.)

Having used Macs for over a decade myself, I’m now even tempted to switch back to PC / Windows 10 which I think has come a very long way. The only thing that stops me from doing that is Glyphs (which I mean in a nice way, since it’s software I can’t live without!) So I do dream of the day when a full fledged port of Glyphs for PC is made, if and when the economic factors are right for it.

But knowing that I can run OSX/macOS + Glyphs in a VM is really encouraging, and makes me think a switch to PC is not so difficult after all!

</rant>

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I never cared about the MacPro but the iMac 5K is still the nicest desktop I know of. And I really don’t understand the tech press. The give high marks for PC laptops with soldered in 8 GB of RAM and tell you that the 16 GB of the new MacBook Pros are simple not cutting it (the SSD is so much faster than anything I have seen before (duplicating a 1.2 GB file does not even show a progress bar) that a bit paging is not a problem at all).
And that Windows 10 is much better is because the fruits where hanging very low. I still wouldn’t like to to use it.

edit: I just run geekbench on my machine and it is not even 30% slower (single core, that is important in most cases other than video and 3D rendering). So I don’t really understand the underwhelming part :wink:

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This is off topic but the reason why I call it underwhelming is really due to the GPU video card, it bugs me to no end how incompatible the AMD cards are, with software like Adobe and Blender reluctant to support them properly… It would have been nice to have seen at least some OpenCL support bumped to 2.0. But they’re probably not too concerned about any of that given they’re pushing Metal as an alternative. That sort of stuff isn’t probably relevant for font editing but I suppose it’s hurting the creative industry.

SSD performance on the other hand is great, I use a Macbook Pro from 2015 and I have zero complaints about that :slight_smile:

And the SSD in the latest machines is much faster than your. I’m not so interested in the intensive graphic processing but that is good to know.