Renaissance on Mac

[Carol Clark]

I am a disabled Mac developer who has just become an enthusiastic advocate of Renaissance as a means of creating user interfaces for Xcode applications without having to use Interface Builder.

The process of getting to this point, however, was such a huge problem that I suspect many others have simply given up in frustration. Without a lot of great help from Adam Fedor at tech support, I'm quite sure that I could not have done it at all.

The biggest problem is that the installation instructions are woefully inadequate. Here is the sequence of commands that finally worked for me:

cd <PathToGnustepMakeSource>

./configure

make

sudo make install

source /Library/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh #start here if gnustep-make is already installed

cd <PathToRenaissanceSource>

export ADDITIONAL_FLAGS="-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4"

export ADDITIONAL_LDFLAGS="-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4"

sudo make clean #if Renaissance was previously installed

sudo make install

Also regarding installation, the instruction to "Get gnustep-make" is a bit of a problem; I did not even find a link back to the GNUstep site from the Renaissance site, and googling "gnustep-make"  turns up mostly release notes and references.

I agree that using Renaissance directly from Xcode (the term Project Builder has been out of date for years, and by now I suspect there are developers who do not even recognize it) is easy and comfortable. However, there are a couple of things that it took me a while to figure out that could easily have been addressed on your website.

The biggest issue here is that, in order to get the Renaissance menus  to work from Xcode,  I had to replace the call to NSApplicationMain with

[NSApplication sharedApplication];

[NSApp run];. 

NSApplicationMain, which is used  in all of GNUstep's tutorials and examples, also attempts to load the nib, and either fails because the nib is not present or overrides the Renaissance menus if it is. The replacement code also works fine when I build the project with make. I suspect that, when built from Xcode, NSApplicationMain uses Cocoa's version, while make uses a GNUstep version.

The information that one must turn off Zero Link in order to build with Renaissance, and that Renaissance 0.8.0 only works with the ppc architecture would also be helpful.

And why is there not a precompiled version of the Renaissance 0.9.0 Framework posted?

Thank you for great product. I hope that these suggestions can be used to make it more feasible for Mac developers to use it.

Carol Clark

carolclark@cox.net