MacOS X building instructions

[abligh]

Heya all,

I figured I'd keep this going with my experience, in case someone's listening.

I built Xara without any difficulties at all, first try, by following the XCode instructions on the site. Now, I'm running XCode 2.3 on a PowerBook G4 (1.25 gig of ram) with fink 0.80 and OSX 10.4.7. Because of Blender I also have my gcc set to v3.3; this might make a difference.

Great! It should compile with gcc 3.3 and gcc 4.x just fine.

Heya all,

First run was much as stated above -- I got windows, and the menus are built, but Xara->About did nothing and any attempt to use a tool caused a crash. On reload of the program I got the lock file message above. I tried deleting the .xara-xtreme folder and restarting, but that didn't seem to have any effect.

Don't worry about the lockfile message (that's probably rerunning the program). Ditto the ImageMagick message is harmless (except to the extent you want more import filters).

If it locks up when you use a tool, that's normally a symptom of not running from the package.

Heya all,

[Debug] 21:09:58: Launching: convert
[Debug] 21:09:58: wxMacExecute Bad bundle: convert

OK so that sounds like the source of the ImageMagick problem. I wonder why wxMacExecute needs convert to be a bundle.

Heya all,

Things about the build that I noticed right off the bat:
- Two windows -- wxWindows is attempting to set up an MDI interface which is basically not possible / not preferred on the Mac. Once it stops crashing and starts displaying icons that's the first thing that needs to be fixed.

It does whatever wxWidgets does with a wxMDIWindow on the Mac (at the moment). This isn't intended to be a permanent proposition...

Heya all,

- The icons -- is that part of the endian troubles that were mentioned? I thought I'd read that the icons are 32-bit .png files, in which case endian troubles don't make any sense. (I've compiled the same code using libpng on both PC and Mac and run across no problems.) Unless the icons are put into those .xar files? I haven't really given it more than a five-minute look.

Yes that's odd, especially as other people have got the icons working on the Mac.

What happens is a script called buildresources.pl is run which makes a zip file (called "resources.xrs") containing all the png files. This is then converted to an .h file (don't ask) with an array of all the bytes in the zip file and bound into the executable. wxWidgets contains a VFS like thing (wxFileSystem) which can be used to load files from it. Somewhere or other this process is failing. However, the resource file itself is clearly being build OK, because the xrc (XML) for the bar definitions is in there (also loaded through the wxFileSystem) as are the strings. Somewhere or other the bitmaps (only) are failing to load. The relevant file is wxOil/camresource.cpp if you want a poke around.

Heya all,

- The splash screen says Linux Edition. Mac version should say Mac Edition, in my opinion. (I won't go into how the color scheme makes me think of the good old CGA days, either. ^_^; )

Right now it says Linux Edition even if it's run on FreeBSD. That's just a matter of putting in a different bitmap.

Heya all,

Anyway, I'd like to play with it more. Where's a good place to start for Mac folks? Are there any code primers?

www.xaraxtreme.org and look at the "Developers" section. If you are debugging bitmap loading, look specifically at the section marked "Resource System". Also, the -dev mailing list is pretty friendly.

Alex