Vector NTI on Mac, WinHelp improvements

[Misha Koshelev]

Hi guys,

It's been a bit since I wrote to the list (or contributed anything...
been somewhat busy I guess with lab/school/life). Anyhow I just wanted
to acknowledge the new WinHelp fixes (Kirill thanks in particular).
Although there is still no Contents or Search, which would make the
Vector NTI help more usable, the bug where it would complain about not
being able to open help when it was requested even though help would
open just fine has now been fixed. Thanks!

Also, I've been starting to play some with Wine on Mac and may in time
end up contributing some patches for this goal, provided I will have to
acquaint myself with some more Mac specific coding ideas first.
Specifically though, I'd like to point out that I think the Mac is a
hugely important platform for Wine I believe in terms of end-user
adoption, and although I understand the rationale for not having binary
packages available because Apple's X11 is buggy (which it clearly is), I
think it would still be nice to have the Mac at least be an important
focus.

And yes my thought initially was "well there's usually a Mac version of
the Windows program." But alas unfortunately this seems to not quite be
the case a lot of times. For example, even Vector NTI, which has both
"mac and windows" versions, actually has a Mac version that does not
work on MacOS 10.4 and higher (the company reports they are working on a
code rewrite for Mac versions, but meanwhile there are tons of people
out there on Google looking for ways around this/alternatives as Vector
NTI is very common in molecular biology and Macs are traditionally the
platform of choice in the field)... Wine would find a very nice niche
here with a bunch of people that otherwise prob would not end up using
it.

Another program we use a lot, Kodak Molecular Imaging, also actually has
problems with MacOS 10.4+ on Intel (not PowerPC) Macs, although this has
to do with the dongle drivers (USB dongle = Sentinel SuperPro), so
likely Wine would need a little more improvement to be of use here.

Anyway, just wanted to point out my observations about the Mac and that
although others might be thinking along the same lines I was... "well
most programs available for Windows are available for Mac", in two
examples I've discovered that upon careful examination this actually
turns out to be quite opposite of the actual case.

Thanks for you time
Misha