Plug Ins for Mac OSX

[kas_1611]

I've been using OpenCPN for sometime on an old Mac Notebook and never really wondered about the extra plugins as I really only used it for planning and noting new anchorages and other points of interest. After a brief dalliance with the Windows version I realised that there were several really useful plugins available, such as the logbook, magnetic deviation and others.

However none of these are currently available for those of us using Mac OSX. Is there anyone out there who could convert or recode the plugins (especially the LogBook) for Mac users? I know we are a rare minority but it would be really nice to have the opportunity to install some of the extras.

Cheers

Keiron
S/Y Black Gold
Croatia

[bcn]

Originally Posted by kas_1611

I know we are a rare minority but it would be really nice to have the opportunity to install some of the extras.

about 15 to 20% of users is not a rare minority - just needs somebody from the community to tackle it.
Not easy buy doable - my opinion....
And we have quite a lot of OS-X fans here.

[CarCode]

It's a kind of history. For a long time there was no Mac OS X version of OCPN available. OCPN is build with wxWidgets version 2.8 and thus allowed only a 32bit version for OS X. Actually Dave uses wxWidgets version 2.9 for the OS X version and so it is 64bit now. Latest wxWidgets version is 3.1.0.

Furthermore there are some differences between the OS X versions like Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks which affects the SDK used during compile time. So e.g. my own compiled OCPN version with many compiled plugins might not work with e.g. Leopard I guess. I can not test it because all my Macs do have Mavericks.

Gerhard

[bcn]

Gerhard,

question: what would you propose in order to progress? What is the best way from your point of view?

Hubert

[CarCode]

Hubert,

I am of very little help because I don't have older Macs on hand and there are quite a lot of older Macs out there, not speaking of the PPC Macs. PPC Mac software was once supported by Rosetta for Intel Macs, but Rosetta has gone also now.

If there is any experienced Mac user with an older Mac I will do my best to give my poor knowledge however.

Gerhard

[letsgetsailing3]

It's a great question, but I've also noticed manufacturers ceasing their support of older macs, unless you upgrade the operating system.

Last year I couldn't do my taxes on my imac without upgrading the operating system. My old vanilla leopard os is now too old, though it had worked for all the other years.

[CarCode]

Although the latest Mac OS X version Mavericks is for free it does work only with
- iMac, 5. generation, August 2007 (and newer)
- MacBook, 13" Unibody 2008, other 2009 (and newer)
- MacBookPro, 13" 7. generation, June 2009; 15" + 17" 3. generation, June 2007 (and newer)
- MacBookAir, end of 2008 (and newer)
- MacMini, 3. generation, March 2009 (and newer)
- MacPro, January 2008 (and newer)

Gerhard

[bcn]

PPC is <= 2006, so perhaps we should not worry about it.

As said, machines from OS-X 10.6.8 (2007) on might upgrade to Mavericks (10.9). HW requirements Gerhard has posted above.

And as I understand Xcode5 would allow to built for 10.7 if necessary and for 10.9 and 10.8 out of the box.
What version is Dave building on/for? In order to have the plug-ins compatible..

Hubert

[nohal]

Well...
the wx version bundled in the Mac package has had been a bit of a moving target, but should settle down for the 3.4 release. I really doubt wx3.1 will be out by then, so it will most likely be 3.0.x
It's not a very good idea to base the official release on the WX SVN master or 3.1 branch at any given point in time without a really good reason as the ABI is likely to change and it would be hard to build the future plugin releases compatible with the officially released OpenCPN. It's nice to use it for local builds, but simply not feasible for the masses.

There are two sources of OSX statistics I'm aware of:
Omni Software Update Statistics
https://www.adium.im/sparkle/#osVersion
I personally read them as "Sorry for the people using anything older than Snow Leopard and forget about PPC completely"
And yes, 3rd party plugins will be taken care of at the time of 3.4 release. The same way as for other platforms.

Pavel

[CarCode]

Any wx version has some bad and some good things. The latest bad thing I discovered with OS X Mavericks that there are performance issues because wx uses family names for fonts while Mavericks prefere Postscript names.

See: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fro...rs/XrW3kLsbS3Y

So using the latest wx build prevent much extra work.

Gerhard

[CarCode]

Another example why to use always the latest build of wxWidgets:

There was a memory leak in the Mac OS X version which was fixed yesterday:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fro...rs/0zE5VZK-PSw

Gerhard

[bcn]

Gerhard,

obviously severe errors have to been patched.

Having a look to the wxWidgets roadmap
Roadmap

there is the following statement:

First of all, it is useful to know that wxWidgets has stable release branch and a development branch. The stable branch preserves both API and ABI (binary) compatibility between all releases in the same series while the development branches may (and, while, rarely, sometimes do) break API and don't attempt to preserve the ABI at all.

and

3.0.0 was released on November 11th, 2013. Next release in this series will be 3.0.1 and will probably be done relatively soon thereafter, i.e. in the beginning of 2014, to fix any relatively small bugs found in 3.0.0. We plan to make at least a couple of other bug fix releases in 3.0.x series.

So it does not seem to wise to rely on on moving target for production releases for various platforms when the developers of WxWidgets are advising for a different direction. At least I would not feel comfortable.

And obviously it is a good thing that you keep an eye on the ongoing development, testing it in parallel.

Hubert

[CarCode]

Hubert,

there are two different things to keep in mind:

wxWidgets for Linux and Windows is well developed but not for Mac OS X.
The Mac OS X version is relativ new and has several anomalies like e.g. wxRegion not to speak about the different SDKs of OS X.

So what you have read above about roadmap is OK for Linux and Windows but not for OS X and I am speaking here for OS X only.

So when you have a compiled OpenCPN version for Linux or Windows the compiled OpenCPN version for OS X has a completely other behavior.

Gerhard

[kas_1611]

If it helps I am running OSX 10.9 (Mavericks) on a MacBook Pro after upgrading from an older MacBook Pro from about 5 years ago that was running 10.6 (Snow Leopard). As much as we'd all like to have the plug ins run on older versions of OSX I think we'd all agree that a start has to be made somewhere so maybe it should be with the current version of OSX and if time and manpower allows try to make them work on slightly older versions, although given how old OSX 10.6 is now I would be the first to admit it's probably not worth it.

OpenCPN itself works perfectly on 10.9. I use a Bluetooth Mouse for ease of navigation along with a Bluetooth GPS (which is 1000x easier to set up in OSX than Windows8 ;-) ).

Keiron

[CarCode]

As I already have said there are nearly every day some bug fixes for the Mac OS X version of wxWidgets. The 2 latetest fixes from yesterday are:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Fix improper NSGraphicsContext handling in wxOSXCreateBitmapContextFromNSImage.
Authored by Václav Slavík on 25.01.2014 at 17:38.
Don't leave currentContext set to the temporary context indefinitely,
but restore the previous one when done. It's apparent from the code that
this is how it was meant to be done.
Not doing this can result in strange, insanely hard to debug errors in
completely unrelated places, because OS X (at least < 10.9) reuses a
pool of contexts. For example, this change fixes Quicklook crashes in
file open panel on 10.8.
Affects src/osx/carbon/utilscocoa.mm
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't leave dandling pointers in wxDataViewCtrl in wxOSX.
Authored by Vadim Zeitlin on 25.01.2014 at 17:39.
The previous m_ModelNotifier became invalid but wasn't always replaced with a
valid one, resulting in a crash due to the use of an invalid pointer.
Affects src/osx/dataview_osx.cpp
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

kas_1611,
if you want you may try a Mac OS X version including several plugins. This is my private version and therefore only in german language.
It does use a separate folder for ALL configuration files and so does not bother any other OCPN version you are running which save these files in different folders. My config folder is: ~/Library/Preferences/opencpn/
This dmg has still several bugs but should run. It installs via an installer.
http://topperdiek.de/dl/OpenCPN.dmg

Gerhard