Further Tiny Compilation Achievements
Oct. 27th, 2022 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt seemed a tiny accomplishment to manage to compile some lightly updated source code for an old image browser program called Xee and once more get a personal copy of a program that can both step and jump through through a folder of saved pictures and step forward and back through the frames of an animated GIF as the mood strikes. The tininess came from the feeling I didn’t actually understand how the Objective-C source code I’d come across worked, and couldn’t adjust it so that Xee opens pictures at the same size Preview does, doubling pixels to deal with a “Retina Display.” Keeping Xee locked in “low resolution mode” got a bit more complicated after a system software upgrade and reminded me “all programs are ephemeral.”
In the midst of wondering if I could learn not just Apple’s Objective-C successor Swift but how to create a proper Macintosh application with it, I did get around to experimenting with Xcode a bit more. Along the way, I began to wonder about an item in an Xee submenu called “Remember Zoom Level.” I managed to compile a different set of updates to Xee’s source code, but wound up with a program that crashed every time it tried to open a picture. I resorted to poring over the revisions made to the code that had worked and commenting out some particular commands, and all of a sudden I did have another working program that could remember to scale everything up to two hundred percent. Trying to shuffle every revision from two sets together did wind up breaking the program again, though, even if I got to the point of compiling something that says it’s ready to run on “Apple Silicon,” which I don’t have access to.
In the midst of wondering if I could learn not just Apple’s Objective-C successor Swift but how to create a proper Macintosh application with it, I did get around to experimenting with Xcode a bit more. Along the way, I began to wonder about an item in an Xee submenu called “Remember Zoom Level.” I managed to compile a different set of updates to Xee’s source code, but wound up with a program that crashed every time it tried to open a picture. I resorted to poring over the revisions made to the code that had worked and commenting out some particular commands, and all of a sudden I did have another working program that could remember to scale everything up to two hundred percent. Trying to shuffle every revision from two sets together did wind up breaking the program again, though, even if I got to the point of compiling something that says it’s ready to run on “Apple Silicon,” which I don’t have access to.