Of course it
IS a helpful answer. It's an
option.
As I said, you don't like AIR? Don't use AIR. Use Java. Unless you're going to jump into a big, immersive 3D environment or operate elaborate animation, Java will do the job OK. I'll even grant that SUN is possibly less evil than Adobe is.
All I'm saying is, jumping in and coding Native isn't the only answer. It may be the only thing your client WANTS, or is COMPATIBLE WITH, but that's a different story.
If you can, develop platform-neutral, so that when (not IF) the question comes up, "Can this run under Windows?", the answer will be an unqualified, "Yes." If I target Windows and the question about MAC comes up, the answer is still an unqualified "Yes". Even if there are QA issues, you start the development cycle in ALPHA and work from there, instead of STARTING FROM SCRATCH.
If you have
F.U.D. about AIR, you should be pissing your pants if someone wants to use a cross-platform C/C++ library. Talk about instantaneous code rot! Especially if you have a 'team' to work with. Someone won't follow all the rules. Large enough team, MULTIPLE someones. The library changes, the compiler changes, the platform changes, your app probably stops working or stops building. Yay.
Any direction you take the development will have its own relative strengths and weaknesses.
If I were to *personally* target MAC right now, I'd just make a web app or use AIR. Yes, of course I'd TEST it on the Mac, but I wouldn't have to deliberately TARGET the Mac or (shudder) USE a Mac.
If you are already locked into some technology and don't have choices, then asking about 'development tools' is a silly question. You're kind of stuck with whatever they're using. But even then, there are development front-ends that can make life easier.
For an IDE, I like jEdit as an editor, and it will run on the Mac. So will Eclipse, which is a full-blown universal IDE with integrated debugging, a zillion plugins and enough bells and whistles to leave you permanently confused. I
personally like command line tools, even gdb. Eclipse is maybe a little off the deep end with GUI features for my taste. Either one will host/build Java applications very nicely. Either one will host/build C/C++ applications or Python applications, or all manner of web scripting languages as well.
Apple themselves recommend Eclipse. So does Adobe (Flex Builder).
http://developer.apple.com/tools/eclipse.html
Eclipse and jEdit are both excellent examples of Java based applications that are INSTALLED on your PC, but they'll run under Linux/Mac/Windows, and most of the less common operating systems without modification. The only difference in the downloads is the kind of installer. With either, you can sit down to any PC and have your development environment up and running, with the settings from whatever other PC you came from.
The days where it MATTERS what OS you are developing and running on are already behind us. Scripting languages are plenty good enough for almost anything. Very soon that 'almost' qualification will be gone.
There is no difference whatsoever to a user with a decent network connection between a well-written 'rich' web application that loads from the company network or internet in an interpreted environment and a native one that you install on every machine that connects to a network/internet server. Well, except that they don't have to install, configure or patch the one that's lives off the server. You update that, and everyone ends up using it. The latest stable version is always just there.
Oh and as far as Flash on Linux and Flash on an Intel Mac, they're essentially the same build. POSIX OS underneath. Minimal dinking to get along with the MAC GUI front-end instead of X/GNOME/KDE. Flash has its own rendering primitives. The core of it works identically, so I'd be supremely confident that something I developed exclusively under Linux would work on a Mac, and shocked if any issues came up.
