Future-Proofed a Little Further
May. 14th, 2024 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerMoving to an “Apple Silicon”-powered computer, I made some small effort to look for updates to applications I use to bring them up to “running natively.” One image browser didn’t require that search, if because I’d compiled an update myself. That program, called Xee, had a few tricks to its interface and features that had suited my own case only to sort of spoil me for moving on to anything else when its “current” version stopped being updated. After a while I had managed to turn up code for a previous version with some updates applied, but there’d been no downloadable version available. However, despite knowing next to nothing about “Mac programming” myself beyond crossing my fingers and starting Xcode’s build progress, that had been enough to produce a working version again. Noticing a different “fork” of the code with different updates a while later, I had even managed to copy enough revisions out of the first repository to produce a version that now said it was “Universal.”
In these first months of image browsing, though, I found that version would crash trying to open certain animated GIF files. As some of Xee’s features can pause and step back and forth through those animations, this was a particular problem. Amid more searching and some still not satisfying experiments with other image browsers, I turned to a backup of my previous computer and retrieved my previous, merely “Intel” version of Xee. It would run on my new computer, and didn’t crash opening those certain files.
Trying to just poke at that version of the code until it promised to compile for Apple Silicon as well didn’t work. My thoughts then turned to comments about the image-displaying libraries having been updated in it. Trying to copy the changes in the source files (and the full files for the libraries) into the code for the “Universal” version didn’t work when I started with the PNG library, but when I just applied the GIF library changes the program did manage to compile. On testing it, it could display those certain files too.
The question, I suppose, is whether the ability to “run old Intel code via ‘Rosetta’” will be removed from macOS before the other old features Xee still depends on. I do find myself wondering if I’ll ever be able to teach myself enough of the modern Mac programming methods to create my own up-to-date image browser that works just the way I want it do. There’s also the fact that in my latest searches I turned up a few people asking for what might replace Xee for them. “If I can do this, anyone can” came to mind, but I didn’t have the accounts to add that comment to the now-antique discussions, and that’s certainly not the same as making a downloadable program available or even sorting out how to put code on repository sites myself.
In these first months of image browsing, though, I found that version would crash trying to open certain animated GIF files. As some of Xee’s features can pause and step back and forth through those animations, this was a particular problem. Amid more searching and some still not satisfying experiments with other image browsers, I turned to a backup of my previous computer and retrieved my previous, merely “Intel” version of Xee. It would run on my new computer, and didn’t crash opening those certain files.
Trying to just poke at that version of the code until it promised to compile for Apple Silicon as well didn’t work. My thoughts then turned to comments about the image-displaying libraries having been updated in it. Trying to copy the changes in the source files (and the full files for the libraries) into the code for the “Universal” version didn’t work when I started with the PNG library, but when I just applied the GIF library changes the program did manage to compile. On testing it, it could display those certain files too.
The question, I suppose, is whether the ability to “run old Intel code via ‘Rosetta’” will be removed from macOS before the other old features Xee still depends on. I do find myself wondering if I’ll ever be able to teach myself enough of the modern Mac programming methods to create my own up-to-date image browser that works just the way I want it do. There’s also the fact that in my latest searches I turned up a few people asking for what might replace Xee for them. “If I can do this, anyone can” came to mind, but I didn’t have the accounts to add that comment to the now-antique discussions, and that’s certainly not the same as making a downloadable program available or even sorting out how to put code on repository sites myself.