I am sorry to say I have decided to cease MacTADS development.

MacTADS was planned to be a full rewrite (and renaming) of the old TADS developer suite of applications for Macintosh. (For an introduction to TADS, see http://tads.org.)

TADS Developer Suite

The TADS developer suite supported TADS 2 only, not TADS 3. It included a separate compiler, debugger, and limited text-only run-time a.k.a. interpreter that predated the much more powerful MaxTADS interpreter. It was Classic-only and had a System 7-era interface. See the IF Archive for the version of the suite that predated my involvement, or see the explanatory old downloads section below for an old beta update that I wrote of the suite.

MacTADS Toolkit

Once I had gotten more familiar with the TADS developer suite, I decided the best step would be to rewrite it from the ground up. That was the start of MacTADS.

The centerpiece of MacTADS was going to be MacTADS Toolkit, which would be the Macintosh equivalent to TADS Workbench for Windows. It would support real project files for TADS 2 and TADS 3 games, similar to true IDEs such as Metrowerks CodeWarrior and unlike the limited UI of the TADS developer suite. Also unlike the TADS developer suite, its UI would be rich enough to encompass all the possible compilation and debugging options for a TADS game, without resorting to command-line options.

In addition to compiling TADS 2 and 3 games, it would allow you to debug them by communicating with an external TADS interpreter such as HyperTADS.

Plus, because MacTADS Toolkit would be based a on C++ framework written to compile on both the old Mac OS Toolbox and Mac OS X's Carbon APIs, it would be backward-compatible from System 7 to Mac OS X.

MacTADS Toolkit got the "toolkit" portion of its name from an old Classic-only TADS 3 compiler that Iain Merrick put together, but ceased development of on my assurances that MacTADS would be done "real soon" with TADS 3 support.

Ceasing Development

If all the above features sound too good to be true, it's for a very good reason.

I basically got caught up in the minutiae of the backward-compatibility framework, called Isthmus, and wound up working mostly on that for far longer than I'd like to admit. The users for whom I'd been planning such compatibility all moved on to OS X or lost contact. With OS 9 long ago declared dead, and an OS X-native alternative, TADS Workbench for Macintosh, already available, I officially gave up.

Future Plans

As I was looking to give up my MacTADS development, the author of the alternative TADS Workbench for Macintosh was also looking to cease development, and offered me outright ownership of the Workbench for Macintosh project.

I flirted with the idea of working on that as my new project in late 2004 and early 2005, but I'm afraid I have also decided not to work on TADS Workbench for the time being, and my current plans are up in the air.

Old Downloads

None of these downloads are under active development, though I will be happy to answer questions about their use.

MacTADS Toolkit 1.0d2 (TADS 2.5.7) pre-release
MacTADS_Toolkit_1.0d2.sit.hqx, February 2, 2004
This version of MacTADS Toolkit included completely new TADS 2 project UI. It was still Classic-only, System 7-era UI-only, and no support for debugging or TADS 3.

Macintosh TADS 2.5.4 beta 1.0 pre-release
MacintoshTADS_254_beta1.sit.hqx, August 13, 2000
This is a version of the TADS developer suite which is slightly updated from the version available at the IF Archive.