On Nov 13, 2007, at 4:43 PM, Pat Cho wrote:

> I am trying to get a rough idea of how much time it might take an
> experienced FutureBasic programmer to recompile an old Mac program and
> change the menus to make it OSX compatible.  I don't have enough
> experience with Mac programming or FB to know what are typical numbers
> for such a conversion.  The program was written in FBII on the Mac OS
> 7.0 operating system and there are about 14,000 lines of code.
>
> I realize the time depends a lot on how the original program was
> written, but I was hoping that some FB programmers on this list could
> give me some estimated ranges based on how long it took them to
> convert their old mac programs to run on OSX.  My email is
> cpu1122@... if you prefer to email me directly.  Thanks.
>
> Pat Cho

Did one of these conversions last year for a client. Had to upgrade  
LOTs of stuff. Besides the technical internals, these conversions  
typically require changes to fields on windows because they consume  
more real estate under  OS X than they do under OS 7/8/9. The client  
was willing to do all the re-alignment of window fields, so that  
reduced the time considerably (there were 30 or so windows). It was  
approximately 80 man-hours of work spread over 2 months. Again, my  
job was to do the minimum required to make it run in OS X. There was  
easily another 100 hours of work for the client just sorting out the  
window designs. As you mentioned, the amount of work depends a lot on  
the original condition of the program and how it was written.  
Applications with lots of globals (or mostly globals) tend to be  
fragile and less amenable to changes. This can dramatically increase  
the time to convert because a lot code will need to be rewritten.  
What I would recommend is allowing one of the programmers on this  
list to evaluate the source for you. This method will give you a much  
better idea of the time/cost.

Brian S.