Hi all, I apologize if this posting is a bit long but I hope you'll bear with me.
I have a few questions and comments regarding scid on OS X. First a bit of background. I'm recently back to trying to use scid on OS X after a very long time away. I had tried it out back in mid 2002 when I first started using OS X and found it very nice and powerful despite the Tk interface. The fact that Tk is a bit quirky on OS X doesn't help. One problem was that scid uses menubuttons for top-level menus instead of using the more appropriate menu UI element. I had an email exchange with Shane at the time and submitted a patch in which I converted all the menubuttons for the main window to use menu elements instead. It was more to prove that this change improves things on OS X and doesn't negatively impact unix and windows users, so I didn't do this for all windows. Shane happily commited the patch in one of the betas for 3.3 and it's been in the tree since. Work and family took me away from dealing with scid at all and I just never did anything more about it. The net result of this is that the usability on OS X (when using Tcl/ Tk Aqua, which ships with OS X) was still a bit rough. Now all these years later when I started to research the state of chess software for the Mac I found a couple of things: 1.) scid is still the gold standard for freeware chess databases, and 2.) it's interface is still a bit rough on OS X. So, I've done some work to clean things up on OS X mostly for the purpose of making something that is more usable for me. There is still more to be done but I'd like to know if anyone is interested in getting these changes into the the tree? What I have now is a patch against the head of the trunk that changes all use of menubuttons as top-level window menus to use menu elements instead. The upshot of this is that users on windows and unix should see little to no change in appearance or behavior while OS X users should (when deployed correctly) have the window menus appear on the menu bar on top of the display as they expect. Now this will only work when built against the Tcl/Tk libraries shipped with OS X and when installed as an application bundle (e.g. double-clickable Scid.app). If users choose to build against an X11 version of Tk, it should behave as on unix so this should be fine for ports and fink. Work that needs to be done: 1.) Clean up the patch to catch and problems regressions on windows/ unix. I'm sure there are nits in there as I have not extensively tested it on OS X nor unix (I don't have a windows box on which to test). 2.) Fix up some code that specifies paths to various resources such as book and bases directories. These paths should be relative and determined at runtime for an application bundle because it should be standalone and installable anywhere. 3.) Fix up the makefile to produce a double-clickable application bundle for OS X. I'm sure there are other things but these are what jump to mind. I'm willing to put some more work into this but was wondering if there's any interest in this by the core developers. If not I may try to maintain a patch but I don't know how long that will last. Thanks for listening, Garth ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by the 2008 JavaOne(SM) Conference Don't miss this year's exciting event. There's still time to save $100. Use priority code J8TL2D2. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;198757673;13503038;p?http://java.sun.com/javaone _______________________________________________ Scid-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/scid-users
