Today I started work on porting my lib to OS X. It was going well using Project Builder, until I needed to build DevIL and had trouble with it. The Mac I have is an old iBook I bought from a work colleague, and it came with OS 10.2. I've updated it as far as it'll go using Software Update, but it's not enough to run Xcode. For that I need to buy an upgrade to 10.4. I was wondering, what tools do the Mac developers out there use? Project Builder, Xcode, plain makefiles, or anything else? Thanks for your help. Pete
*I*, though I'm not really a "Mac developper", used the shell and makefiles and such to build some libs (png, jpeg, ogg, SDL) and my game. Tried to build SDL with XCode, but it didn't work. Turned out to be much easier in the shell. That was under 10.3.
I use the shell, something equivalent to makefiles (custom Python scripts, actually), and a syntax-highlighting editor. That's all you need, really. BTW, I have OS X 10.3 and XCode does run on it. So you may be able to get a cheap 10.3 instead of 10.4 if all you need is to run XCode.
Thanks for your responses guys. I've another related question, if that's ok. Are you able to make proper .app bundles without using Xcode, or do you use another tool for that? Pete
Make sure you download the latest version of GCC and set it up to work with Project Builder. When I was using 10.2 a few months ago I had to do this manually. Doing this fixed the problems that I was having. I just compress my apps with stuffit. I didn't want to spend the time figuring how to make bundles. Actually I don't use mac enough to really know what a bundle is.
Check your hardware specs before getting 10.4, as I don't think 10.4 will run on the oldest ones. App bundles are just special folders. The OS will show you the contents of a bundle as a folder structure if you control-click it and select the menu option. You can even drag stuff in and out. That being said, here is one of several tools to build an app bundle. This one is free: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13927
The BundleMaker site has really good info about the contents of bundle folders, and so on. http://bundlemaker.forked.net/ Thanks for that. Probably what I'll do is use the command line to compile and use BundleMaker to make the final bundle. I believe my iBook can run 10.4, but I'm not 100% sure and I don't want to take the risk (spend the cash).
I use Xcode to make my app bundle, and to edit the source files, but I do the actual compilation using the command line and Makefiles. I found that Xcode ignored my command to optimize (-O3)... I could only force it by compiling by hand with g++/make!
If you do go the route of Python, you might want to look into a build tool called Scons. It's the makefile of the Python world.
xcode 1.5 will work with 10.3 (Panther); you can still get it from Apple, all you need is a free ADC membership, I just checked that you can still download it (600-some MB). This said, xcode is not much better than using gcc with your own scripts and a text editor. Best regards, Emmanuel