[GRASSLIST:2882] Re: Aqua GUI

[Glynn Clements]

Quim Soler i Subils wrote:

> I've read Kenne's message and I think that it would be a good idea to know
> the people who's working on the mac os side of GRASS too. I have no much
> experience on development/programming but I would like to join any team
> working on this question (I hope to learn quickly :-)  ).

Unfortunately, there aren't many developers working on MacOS X, and
those that exist don't seem to be particularly active. I don't know if
GRASS is being regularly tested on MacOSX; most users seem to be using
the pre-compiled 5.0pre2 binaries from OpenOSX.

> Some months ago I read some messages in the GRASS' developer's list
> about someone who was
> working on the development of a mac os x driver in order to display the
> maps on Quartz without Xfree. Anybody has more info or news on this
> project? It's still alive?

I'm not aware of anyone actually working on a native MacOSX monitor. 
It shouldn't be that much work; XDRIVER only consists of 36 functions
and 2000 lines of code. And much of that is due to supporting the 6
different classes of Visual; a monitor which only supported TrueColor
(separate R/G/B components would be even simpler).

> And another question. Should we port all the GUI to Quartz or only the
> display system of maps? I put 
> this question because some weeks ago I could "open" the tcltkgrass
> menu's with MacWish.app (the Apple's tcltk8.4 native for MacOS X) after
> a little debugging. However, I couldn't use it to work (you can not run
> any module) but the panels, the menubar and the help-system appear with
> fantastic mac-aqua-look. If we could use this mac tcltk version with a
> Quartz display driver for the maps maybe we musn't port the menu-windows
> and nviz. It's that right?

For use without XFree86, the most important thing is a native monitor.

Getting tcltkgrass to work might not be that much effort. If the UI
works but won't run commands, it might just be one or two functions
related to executing commands which need to be fixed (it may even just
be the absence of xterm).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn.clements at virgin.net>