Yesterday I wondered "What's the best way to build desktop software for a Mac?"  I got a lot of feedback - thanks - and the consensus was:  Use Apple's Xcode IDE, develop for the Cocoa environment (present-day version of NextStep), and program using the Objective-C language.  Apparently there is no direct equivalent to ActiveX but you can build Objective-C components which can be incorporated into multiple programs.  So be it.  Thanks especially to Mark Wrenn and Gary Lang.

Right now I have an "original lamp" iMac as my development machine, running OS 10.3 ("Panther"); upgrading to newer hardware might be a first step.  I'm not as worried about the machine's speed as I am about the 1024x768 screen resolution; I'm pretty spoiled by the 21" 1600x1200 monitor I use with my PC.  Is there any way to hook an external monitor to an iMac?  Or maybe I run an Xwindows server on my PC and connect to the Mac (I've heard good things about Exceed)?

I'll be traveling down this road - stay tuned for updates... 

[ Later: The 'net is awesome.  So I post this to my blog, check my referer log, and find this thread, which links to this helpful article about porting from Win32 to Mac OS X.  Excellent! ]