I've written an application in WinForms/.NET that I'd like to port to the Macintosh platform. I have never developed for the Mac but it seems as though AIR might be a good choice. I'm totally new to AIR. Some advice and info would be much appreciated!
Can an app be developed in AIR on a PC running Windows and then later be deployed transparently on a Macintosh? Or do I need to be developing on a Mac?
The app is a search interface for use against text-bases comprised of texts composed in ancient European languages. I pre-index the text-base and store it in SQLite as a fully-normalized (1NF) set of relations: TITLES, WORDS, WORDOCCURRENCES. So the app is really nothing more than a (query-only) database application with some specialized glyph-rendering requirements.
In the WinForms app, I used a custom third-party edit control with extensive support for the RTF specification, in combination with some third-party fonts that contain the necessary glyphs for rendering the Unicode characters corresponding to RUNES and to some abbreviations found in medieval manuscripts. BTW, these special non-ASCII characters are represented in the database not as unicode codepoints but as entities that can be represented in standard ASCII (e.g. "þ" ); when rendered to screen, the correct glyph has to be substituted when the Unicode codepoint for the entity supplied -- in this example the codepoint would be [U+00DE] and a thorn glyph (Þ) should be rendered.
Since it might not be possible to find a single omnibus Unicode font that contains a glyph for every codepoint I need to render (what are the most glyph-rich freeware Unicode fonts for Macintosh, btw?) the text widget must let the programmer "wrap" a Unicode character or series of Unicode characters in whatever font may be required at that point in the text. Is there a rich-text widget for AIR that can do this? A widget that can render HTML and supports CSS stylesheets would be ideal (inline-CSS-only would be OK too). If the widget had CSS stylesheet support, the string of Unicode codepoints could be wrapped with a <span class='rune'>.....</span> and the font-name for the .rune class could be specified in the CSS stylesheet.
Thanks very much if you've taken the time to read through this tedious stuff !