THE SITUATION

A year ago I was getting requests about the operation of the TWAINPlug under Mac OS X and REALbasic 4.x. For this, the plugin has to be Carbonized and of course tested with scanners that have TWAIN drivers. But, and it was a big but at that time, there were no scanners that shipped with TWAIN drivers for OS X, none from UMAX, nor from EPSON, not even from HP. The situation has changed with Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2), and now a TWAIN compatible data source comes with the OS. Still, scanner manufacturers usually make available drivers for scanners on OS X only for download.

..TWAINPlug will eventually be carbonized

Eventually I plan to Carbonize TWAINPlug. I think there should be no technical problems, although, as has been obvious with the majority of Apple's most devoted software "partners" (e.g. Adobe with Photoshop), it might take more time than I would like. Another big problem is that UMAX is not planning to support USB (Astra) scanners by porting VistaScan to Mac OS X (nor are many other scanner manufacturers planning to support their older models), and so I do not have access to my scanner for testing during development under Mac OS X.

I expect that April 2003 will be the earliest date for a carbonized TWAINPlug.

Until then, unfortunately, Classic is still the only option.