Barcode Generator Application

For grins and giggles, I tried compiling an Xcode project I created back in 2002. Well, technically, it was a Project Builder project created in 2002 that was converted to an Xcode project a couple of years later, but the bulk of the code was written back in 2002. I wanted to see how much work would be involved in taking a project that was written when Puma was the current version of Mac OS and Macs were shipping with PowerPC processors and getting it to compile to work in 32/64 bit mode for Intel Macs.

Code changes required? Not a one.

There were a bunch of warnings that I would address if this were shipping software, since a couple of methods I used back then have been deprecated. None of them have yet been removed, so the application works (as far as I can tell) exactly as it did back in 2002. The project configuration was where almost all of the work was in updating, and there wasn't much of that, to be honest. Total time investment, about 20 minutes.

That's pretty damn amazing, different architectures, different register size, and a seven-year-old codebase written when I knew a heck of a lot less about Cocoa. Despite all the amazing changes to Snow Leopard, this old code still works flawlessly.

If you're interested in a free Barcode application, you can download the compiled application right here. If you have a version of the OCR-A font installed, it will attempt to use it (you can get a free one here), otherwise it will fall back on the system default monospace font.

I will push the project changes to Google Code when I have some free time.

Posted in: Cocoa