Will OS X version use native Font Selector & Color Picker?

[BPFowler]

Well, to me, the gist of your above message seems to be "the instructions from Xara won't work out of the box, so you need to fiddle", which is what I meant by "doesn't compile cleanly".

I am about to pick nits, and unlike the author of one the recent signature quotations, I am, as you will see, not all that good at it!

1. By following the instructions on the Mac OS build page, an experienced (or merely enthusiastic) dev can produce a working Mac Xara LX in about two half-days of work. I've mentioned the main bridges needing to be crossed in my previous post, and discussed some of them on the Dev list and elsewhere. I know that this is the case because I have done it, and I have watched Pekele do it. I repeat that anyone wanting to follow this trail is invited to a) submit bugs in Bugzilla, if bugs are found; b) start, or take part in, discussions on the Dev list; and c) bring up any other points here

2. I wouldn't say that one needed to "fiddle" with the code - fiddling, or tinkering, with something has negative connotations concerning your attitude towards it and your perception of its quality.

3. I would describe something as "not compiling cleanly" if I felt that the original author had not understood all the details of the code, concepts and methods he was working with. He may have ignored warnings that mattered, have used paths only found on his system, hardware features, special libraries or exploited outright bugs that other people could not be expected to have. Once code is being worked on by several devs on various platforms any such uncleanliness gets cleaned off pretty quickly and the code base matches specifications as found under the names of Kernighan and Ritchie or Stroustrup. Unclean code is usually only seen early in a project or in code that is not being worked on or possibly in very exceptional circumstances in sophisticated projects. Certainly some tweaking or polishing, particularly relating to third party libraries may be needed when moving to a new platform, but I wouldn't call this fiddling, especially as we are only making surface or inconsequential changes ('polishing').

I have the development tools installed, and am certainly interested in compiling an Xcode project (though only if it can co-exist with the 'official' project, which it should, though?).

The co-existence aspect is fine. I have several projects in my Xara LX directory, each of which is there to compile and debug the Xara LX code.

However, I am very against installing any "unix" libraries(?), like fink or darwinports, but if I understand things correctly, only the wxwidgets libraries are needed, so that is OK, I guess. (OS X is OS X, and should stay so, IMHO, I'm not interested in anything "unix"... yes, despite OS X being BSD at the core, but at least that isn't exposed to the user!)

Hmm. If you want to work on large or elaborate projects, particularly cross-platform projects such as Xara LX or Inkscape then you will almost certainly need the fink tools; installing libraries from fink or darwinports is simply a (convenient) alternative to compiling and installing them yourself. Possibly the Xara project will have to move away from fink as we are hearing that the fink libraries will not be Universal Binary, and that Xara LX needs Universal Binary libraries (I am not personally certain of the absolute truth of either of those statements, but that looks the way to bet). It may be that darwinports is a better way to go, but I have no evidence to support that. It is possible that we could ask the wxWidgets folk to publish libraries and headers corresponding to the required PNG, JPEG and XML calls - this makes a lot of sense, but I haven't looked into it. I may have mentioned that the MacOS coregraphics has the PNG and JPEG support that we need, but I can't seem to find the headers. It seems that Apple provides XML calls that are just a bit too old for us. A little bit of research into these questions could be of great help to all of us.

Guess I'm either your ideal tester, or the one you absolutely don't want, since I expect everything on OS X to "just work" and will report every little thing that doesn't.

(I have studied four years of computer science, btw, but only dealt with Visual Studio. I've only used OS X for about three months, but I have compiled universal binaries for some applications, but I am in no way really familiar with Xcode.)

Very much so. The more testy the tester the better the product! And my 'product' is a schema for people to get up speed compiling Xara LX.

When you say Visual Studio, do you mean (only) Visual Basic? Cocoa is rather different: See Alternatives to Hypercard, or any other good match for a Google search on Cocoa and Hypercard; whilst XCode and Cocoa are significantly - by a factor of several times - harder than Hypercard, the results are several orders of magnitude better and more appealing; and if you have the desire and the time to devote to it, take a look at the Cocoa Devwiki and see how you get on. See also the reasons why some people are choosing to use only apps that they have (or could have) compiled themselves.

[eobet]

By following the instructions on the Mac OS build page, an experienced (or merely enthusiastic) dev can produce a working Mac Xara LX in about two half-days of work.

Ah, forgive me, because I haven't coded in a long time, my terminology was a bit off. "Compiling" was a very bad choice of words. "Build", I think is more appropriate. If it takes a day to set up an environment for the Xcode project in order to make it build completely, that is bad news for me. The other OS X projects and sources I downloaded so far (just a few small apps) required only a different setting here and there in the project menu to turn them into Universal Binaries, and then a line or two to get rid of warnings. Admittedly, they were pure Cocoa or Carbon applications.

So, my original view of simply downloading an Xcode project and pressing build and voilà, has turned out to be very ignorant and very naive.

Though the Visual Studio application I have experience with was actually called Visual C++ back then, I still never had to dig around the command prompt (terminal) in order to build any of my projects or get them working (despite some of them actually being SDL or OpenGL projects).

So, I am sorry to say that at the moment, I do not have the time to do what getting Xara LX to build on my machine requires and as long as I need to install additional things into my system, without having proper uninstallation instructions (or information on where the files get placed and what they affect), I feel that I do not wish to go through with it either.

When LX can be contained inside an Xcode project without the need to download and install anything extra through the terminal (perhaps with the exception of SVN), I will be happy to become involved though! But perhaps that is still a naive goal which will never happen.

I am sorry for having wasted your time or getting your hopes up!

PS. At least I am glad that the result is a nice behaving application which installs by dragging it to the application folder (without the need for anything else) and uninstalls by dragging it to the trash (without the need for anything else), just the way it should be in OS X!

[BPFowler]

These are excellent points, but permit me to tie up a few loose ends

Ah, forgive me, because I haven't coded in a long time, my terminology was a bit off. "Compiling" was a very bad choice of words. "Build", I think is more appropriate. If it takes a day to set up an environment for the Xcode project in order to make it build completely, that is bad news for me.

It doesn't. The duration I gave was for a leisurely romp through the command line methods. I don't want to mislead people, so even if I state (correctly), that if you are much faster than I, or better prepared, you might do it one half-day, even if I add that most of the wall time would be spent waiting for hundreds of files to be compiled, I would be teasing if I suggested that an average dev could get this up and running in much less a day.

It is to be hoped that XCode project will be provided or will emerge that will build your own personal Xara LX in the time it takes the CPU to do the compilation + say 10 minutes 'make ready' of your time. That is about what it takes on Debian or on Gentoo.

So, my original view of simply downloading an Xcode project and pressing build and voilà, has turned out to be very ignorant and very naive.

For the avoidance of doubt, that is what we are working on. I have an XCode project which I could mail to you, and you can see for yourself how far from this goal we are. I don't doubt that we will achieve this, and what we are talking about is whether you want to be part of the Advance Guard. If not, I hope that you don't mind my trying to recruit a few foot soldiers by posting in your thread!

So, I am sorry to say that at the moment, I do not have the time to do what getting Xara LX to build on my machine requires and as long as I need to install additional things into my system, without having proper uninstallation instructions (or information on where the files get placed and what they affect), I feel that I do not wish to go through with it either.

That's right. This is mentioned on the instructions page. There are a handful of things needed, some of which will need to be installed, that might indeed affect other development work, but as you pointed out about BSD, all totally separate (or at worst hidden from) your everyday work.

Ben