It's been a while since the 20130430 snapshot release and even more since my last post here, so here's an update on fre:ac development.

I have been working several weeks to try and make fre:ac run on OS X without an X server. The screenshot to the right shows fre:ac running on Snow Leopard without XQuartz.

Making this work meant implementing the smooth Class Library window and graphics backends on top of Cocoa. This was a lot more work than porting the original Win32 code to Xlib and Cairo back then. The Cocoa API is just so much different from any other user interface API I've come across before. Because of that it sometimes was difficult to map smooth calls to Cocoa and vice versa.

However, I'm making good progress on this now and think about 75% of the work is done at this point. It seems save to say that native Cocoa support will be available in the next fre:ac snapshot.