Running SWT based, cross-platform jar properly on a Mac?

Yes, you will definitely need -XstartOnFirstThread to get this working on Mac OS X. Since it's a VM parameter, you can only specify it when launching your application, so detecting the OS from you code and setting it if it's Mac OS X is not possible. The solution on the Eclipse site creates a proper Mac OS X My Application.

App which is platform specific and, again, not feasible in your case.

SWT (like any other UI framework) has a "UI thread". That is usually the main thread (i.e. The one that executed main(String args).

All calls to UI methods must happen in this thread.

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