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Doug, ole bud, me thinks you are trying to opt out of this tricky task.
I know this is a joke, but if we did do a port it would require a more up-to-date Mac programmer then myself.
I think I may of come off as dismissive in my posts on this subject. I'm actually a strong advocate for porting to the Mac. I've gone over some ideas on a Mac port in the FAQ forum, but I can give you an updated summary here.
[include <disclaimer>; // This is my personal view as an employee of Conitec. Any resemblance between what I say and actual Conitec policy is purely coincidental.  ]
Personally I love the Mac. I like OpenGL too. Both have their pros and cons when compared against Wintel and DX. Ideally we would develop for both. The cold truth however, is that we are limited to the amount of time and money that we can spend on improving our product.
I *want* to pitch the idea of a Mac version of 3DGS, I think we could really own that market, but in order to make a good pitch to my bosses I'm going to need to be able to convince them that we can make money (or at least break even).
I see two ways that we can make this happen. The first is to find somebody to help fund the project. We've done this with other features in the past, normally the funder is somebody who has a big contract and needs a certain feature added to 3DGS. The advantage for Conitec is obvious (limited risk), but the funder also gets more control over how we implement the feature (in the Mac example, he could require that our software run on G3 iBooks). The price is negotiated up front depending on the difficulty of the task (don't quote me, but I think JCL estimated publicly that a Mac port would cost $50,000 but we would have to do some more research before we knew exactly how much). If the funder wanted the project for himself, he would pay all of it. If he wanted to share, we normally offer to pay some of that estimate ourselves (e.g. 50% of the cost).
The second solution is cheaper but much harder, you need to be able to convince Conitec that there is a market that would support the cost of developing and maintaining a Mac product. There have been some good arguments in this thread, but I would need some hard numbers to back this up. For example, if you could get the actually sales numbers of some of the companies that make game development tools for the Mac (these might be available for publicly traded companies).
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