Not really a programming related question but...
I'd like very much to experiment with WebGL on my spare time. My current 'spare time' machine is a MacBook running Mac OS X Tiger (10.4.xx) and I'm unable to find a new browser supporting this OS. Firefox dropped support, Chrome too, and Safari idem.
I read somewhere that this is due to a Quicktime bug that Apple won't fix.
Does anyone have more information on this issue ?
Does anyone have a clue or track to find a running implementation of WebGL on Mac OS X 10.4 ?
Cheers,
I know a fellow who is maintaining a Firefox 4 port to OS X 10.4.
Check out http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
Edit: Unfortunately I've just found out that this doesn't quite fulfil your main reason for wanting Firefox 4.
From the dev's site:
OpenGL support is presently disabled
in 10.4Fx. This is Apple's fault, as
Mozilla requires non-power-of-two
texture sizes, which require OpenGL 2.
Unfortunately, PPC Tiger does not
support OpenGL 2 at all, and only a
subset of cards support it in PPC
Leopard (the really irritating part is
that Intel Tiger does have OpenGL 2,
and OpenGL 2 came out in 2004!). It
may be enabled in the future for those
handful of configurations on Leopard,
but this won't benefit the majority of
users. Note that many graphics
features will work just fine; they
just won't be hardware-accelerated.
If you can get a build of Firefox which has WebGL to run, but don't have a GPU that supports OpenGL ES 2.0, you might want to try setting the "webgl.osmesalib" about:config option. Even simple programs will probably run at a flip-book frame rate however.
Related
I am using a CPTScatterPlot to plot some data in my Mac OS X app, and want to offer the ability to zoom in and out.
I can see that the iPhone version has the allowPinchScaling setting, but there doesn't seem to be a Mac equivalent. Before I manually implement anything, I thought I'd check to see if perhaps this was already supported out-of-the-box.
Any pointers or thoughts would be much appreciated.
Pinch and scroll gestures are also available on the Mac. I don't think this feature has been included in any release yet, so you'll need to get the latest source from GitHub.
I have a MacBook Pro with a GeForce 9400 graphics card. Wikipedia said this card supports OpenGL 3.
But the header and library shipped with OS X 10.6 seems to be OpenGL 2 only (I checked the files in /usr/X11/include/).
I need to do some OpenGL 3 programming. Can I do it with my current hardware and OS? What do I need to get and install?
Sadly, I don't think you can yet, as detailed here.
I believe Lion will upgrade OpenGL to 3.2 for OS X though (which is still short of the more useful 3.3 unfortunately).
NB: I do not own a Mac, this is purely from trying to learn modern OpenGL on the windows side and digging around to understand how portable it would be.
Edit: this thread on the official OpenGL forums has more detail. Although (see comments below this answer) it may not be completely clear why vendors cannot provide OpenGL 3+ compliant drivers, it seems pretty clear that there is no way to use fully OpenGL 3.3 compliant code and shaders in OS X. Some workarounds are provided in that thread however, as well as in my first link.
The best place to check OpenGL support on the various OSX and Mac combinations is:
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilities/
See the "Core" subpage for 10.7+
OpenGL 3.2 with GLSL 1.5 on 10.7.2 isn't too bad.
Your current hardware can support OpenGL 3, but not the OS. Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) should support OpenGL 3, which is a solution only if you can wait many months.
Your only option right now is to switch to a different OS such as Windows or Linux. You'll have to boot from this other operating system, because the virtual machine systems present a virtual video card to the guest operating systems, and none have OpenGL 3 compatible virtual video cards.
(Disclaimer: This information is based on taking Windows OpenGL and replacing wgl with glX. But I did verify that the corresponding extensions exist in GLX land)
You won't find OpenGL 3 support in any header files. Rather you need the GLX_ARB_create_context extension.
The other answers are probably correct about missing support in OSX, but even when support comes, you'll have to use glXGetProcAddress and load the extension. (Can't video card manufacturers add support for these extensions through their driver? Why does it require "OS support"?)
Windows OpenGL developer here. On Windows 7 only OpenGL 1.4 is officially supported, but everyone gets around this limitation by querying which functions are available at run-time.
On OSX I expect you can do the same thing. The easiest way to do this is with The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library: http://www.opengl.org/sdk/libs/GLEW/
We're building an application for OS X, and we can't rely on our users all having upgraded to Snow Leopard, or whatever the latest version is. We want to make sure that as many people as possible can use our app, but we also don't want to throw away some improvements that were made in OS X version if only 1% of users are stuck using earlier versions.
Is there anywhere I can find information on the proportions of people that are using each version of the OS? Or is there some "common wisdom" on the issue that real mac developers know?
We don't need any superfancy graphics or 3d animation stuff, just plain old windowing APIs - but we've already run into one problem where "NSStreamDelegate" isn't supported prior to snow leopard.
Thanks!
Web stats from Quantcast, late February 2010.
North American stats, but might serve as a guideline.
Version %
10.6 27.3
10.5 52.1
10.4 17.2
Other 3.4
Omnigroup also provide some useful insight into updates to their installed base. You can click through to see breakdowns by major and minor versions on their site. For July 2010 they have:
Version %
10.6 53.3
10.5 21.0
10.4 25.6
Other 0.1
I think I'm one of the last holdouts with a still-functioning Powerbook G4. Its upgrade path ends with Tiger. On behalf of all those who won't get rid of computers that still work fine (if a bit slow by modern standards), please target 10.4 !
Of course by objective standards, you probably want to target 10.5. It adds nice programmability improvements, and really, I don't know a single person still using 10.4 other than me.
As for NSStreamDelegate, it has been available as an informal protocol (i.e. a category of NSObject) since 10.3. It is just that Apple decided to make it into a formal protocol, since Objective-C 2 has an #optional methods.
So, it's not that you're using new functionality only available on 10.6.
I would love to begin developing applications for the MAC OS X, although I have to idea where to start.
Problem: I currently do not, and cannot afford a new MAC OS X-based computer.
Solution: A very good friend loves trying out things that I've made for Windows, and also owns a MAC OS X computer, and is willing to test these new creations.
Now I am faced with another problem. I don't know which language to use to develop these apps in. I am a .NET Developer and seeing as though I can only use a Windows based PC to develop MAC apps, where should I start?
I've heard of Mono, and have used it on Linux before, would Mono be an option for MAC development on a Windows based computer, too? Are there any other ways around this?
Any help is appreciated. :)
Thank you
jt
You could start with a cross platform language like Java, Python or Ruby. The applications you write this way either work immediately on OSX or need only little adjustments. I work with Java to develop for OSX, windows and linux. Java is not too different from C# and comes completely free. With some extra work Java applications can look like native OSX or windows or linux.
But this way you don't get any of the special features of OSX. For these you do need the OSX environment objective-c and cocoa.
If you don't want your applications to be total shite that makes me cry, then buy a Mac and start reading and learning about what makes a high quality Mac OS X application. The standards for quality are much higher on this side of the river, you'll soon see.
You need to have MacOS X and use Xcode with Objective C; this is the native environment, and you won't be able to appreciate MacOS X UX without using it. You may be able to install MacOS X on a PC, although this isn't approved or supported by Apple.
Just don't take half measures, it isn't worth it.
Sorry for this late answer, but I am having the same problem.
After looking around, I have seen people be able to install OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on their Windows 7 computers using a virtual machine. Maybe this website from lifehacker may help:
http://lifehacker.com/5583650/run-mac-os-x-in-virtualbox-on-windows
These people tell you how to install Snow Leopard. You may not install Xcode 4.33 on Snow Leopard, but it's worth a try. There also may be places where they show you how to install Lion itself onto their PC's, but Lifehacker has the most straightforward tutorials.
Hope this helps!
All the other answers are good. You need OS X and XCode. Since,at the moment you can't afford a Mac machine and seeing how the language of choice for both OS X and iOS is objective-c, you could start with learning C programming on windows. Objective-C is a superset of C. Knowing C Langauge will speed up your learning curve once you can afford to buy Mac. (or you might decide that C pointers are just too hard and save some money)
Also google how to create a hackintosh. I've seen couple articles on lifehacker on how to do it. It's not ideal but perhaps it would allow you to run XCode and create apps for iPhone or iPad.
I need to decide whether I should support Mac OS X 10.4 / Tiger, and the decision likely hinges on what percentage of mac users are still running Tiger. I didn't find anything too reliable on the interwebs nor on Apple's developer website. Let's ignore the impending Snow Leopard release and it's impact on Mac OS version usage distribution.
Does anyone know of a study that might provide insight? Any other suggestions on how to figure this out? If you quote any numbers/percentages please include a pointer to the source.
Take a look at the Sparkle+ stats, that the Adium project is collecting.
The stats are available here.
OmniGroup keeps track of the system configurations that use their software updater. The current split is roughly 60/40 in Leopard's favor.
Keep in mind that, judging from previous releases, Apple will likely drop official support of Tiger once Snow Leopard is released, which should be any day now.
It really depends on what user audience your software has (whether they're likely to upgrade or not). I don't have a study, but considering how each major update costs money, I'm sure there are many non-power users who are still on older editions.
You're better off targeting Leopard only, especially with Snow Leopard coming out at the end of the week with a lot of changes to key technologies. Apple moves pretty quickly and soon enough supporting Leopard will be your legacy support.
From the Adium Sparkle+ stats that weichsel linked to:
10.3 : 2170 ( 1.3%)
10.4 : 28645 (16.3%)
10.5 or above: 134269 (82.4%)