Preface

Mac OSX is currently a "contributed" build platform, and thus the build systems are more rough than for other systems. Some scripts are provided to smooth the process, however these may be out of date. The developers cannot continuously build this platform, as it is against the OSX licence to run OSX on virtual machines. Cross-compilation is not readily feasible either. If you can assist in building for this platform, please contact us.

Compiling

Dependencies

Mac OS does not have a proper package management system. You need XCode installed (here). For the latest version of OSX for some reason this is not quite free, and you now are required to use the app store or something to get this or build gcc yourself (somehow) it appears. So we can't easily automate this procedure for you. Considering GCC (the bit we need) is completely free (GPL), it is unclear what the deal is here. Note that at time of writing the wxWidgets version provided with XCode is several years out-of-date and won't work. Please don't try to use any of the built-in libraries provided with XCode - firstly, you cannot mix and match library linkage, it simply won't work (crashes) and secondly they are all very out of date. Use macports (which our scripts will try to do for you).
There is an automatic dependency grabbing script in the 3Depict source code under the "deps" folder. Run that (ensure you are connected to the Internet) to automatically download, build and install all the software dependencies. If it does not work, this is a bug, so let us know.

To run the script, simply open terminal.app, navigate to the "packaging/deps" folder containing "getDeps", then type:

$ ./getDeps

This will check your system for a compiler, and then will proceed to download and install the needed components in an automatic fashion. The compilation process can take several hours.

Building and Packaging

Due to some design decisions under OSX, programs cannot be directly run, but first must be packaged. Attempts to run programs without creating the ".app package" (actually a folder with metadata), will cause the program to function incorrectly (eg user input will be ignored). To aid compilation and packaging, use the "3package.sh" script in the "packaging/mac" folder. Execute this to build and package the program. In this way, a .app package should be built and ready for use.