Developing for multiple desktop platforms

[Peter Haworth]

My usual development machine is a Mac but I've been using a WIndows 8 box
quite a bit recently.  I'm really glad I had the opportunity to do that for
a number of reasons.

First, it's made me a lot more aware of things I need to pay attention to
to make sure things look right on Windows.  I've come across numerous
instances where label fields display at the correct width to show all the
their contents on Mac but on WIndows, the text is slightly truncated.  Same
issue with other controls too although not as widespread.

And, I finally understand the purpose of the menuLines property for option
menus.  Doesn't seem to do anything on OSX but sure does on WIndows.  Plus
I'm now seeing other things in option menus I didn't realize, like you
can't disable menu items, and long subitem lists don't work very well, if
at all, on WIndows.

I'm also finding the IDE menu setup much more usable on WIndows than Mac.
 The way that the IDE's system menu keeps changing on OSX depending on
context has always been frustrating to me.  In WIndows, there's a menu in
the main IDE window that never changes and another one in the SCript Editor
window for actions specific to script editing, a much better scheme in my
opinion.

As a result of this experience, I'm wondering if anyone has ever prepared a
list of "gotchas" to watch out for when developing on one platform with the
intent of running on others - I'm talking desktop, not mobile. I'd be
willing to host such a list on my web site if anyone would like to
contribute their knowledge;  I'm sure there's more that I have mentioned in
this post.

Pete
lcSQL Software <http://www.lcsql.com>