[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Freeciv on MacOSX

[Mike Kaufman <kaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 01:53:56PM -0800, Loren Wright wrote:
> 
> I haven't been able to play it very much, and so far I haven't played 
> online.  I'm using version 1.13.0 of the game with XDarwin and 
> OroborOSX under OS X 10.2.4.  In general I'm very impressed with the 
> result of the team's effort, though as a Mac person, I'm not too 
> thrilled by the X-Windows UI.  But I'm starting to get used to it
 
excellent, we were just discussing the need to get good interest on
Macs. the first thing to do is of course get rid of 1.13.0 (which is buggy
as hell). upgrade immediately to 1.14.0 and if that works, use CVS. 

> First, in the dialog where you confirm (or change) the name of a new 
> city, the Enter key generates a little square on the screen, which I 
> imagine corresponds to a misunderstood control character.  So far this 
> is the only place I've encountered where Enter isn't accepted as the 
> default button for a dialog.  If you then hit Return, it is treated by 
> the program as if you hit the Cancel button.  You have to first delete 
> the little square generated by the Enter key.  (I haven't looked at the 
> source code, which I DLed, but I suppose this could be some kind of 
> built-in X-Windows thing!)

I take it that you're using the XAW client. I don't know about you, but
I've found the OSX Xwindows quite flaky.  Install the GTK 1.2 and 2.0
libraries and try out the GTK clients. The UI should be a lot more
impressive. We also have an SDL client coming along (but not quite ready
for prime time). Testers for Macs would certainly be welcome here too.

> I'm currently an "under-employed" Mac programmer, so if you think there 
> are some places that I could make contributions to the coding effort 
> without having a thorough knowledge of the rest of the source, I'd be 
> willing to give it a try!  I'll also go to the website and see what the 
> official path is for contributing to the programming effort.  Thanks 
> for your attention!

someone else could confirm this, but I recall a Cocoa project for Freeciv.
Maybe I'm hallucinating. Ah, here it is: http://bolson.org/freeciv/,
It seems he's stopped work. Maintaining a binary distribution of Freeciv 
for OSX (a .dmg) be quite nice (though it looks like Matt Stephenson
<cattrapATusersDOTsourceforgeDOTnet> is doing this) (It also looks like 
our download page needs to be updated. Testing these distributions to make
sure installation is easy as pie would be quite nice (writing up a quick
guide for any install quirks would be extra special).

-mike