[sharp-discuss] Question for Mac OsX experts

[Clemens Vonrhein]

Dear all,

I thought I asked the discussion list - maybe some Mac OsX expert out
there can explain me some of the weird behaviour I see on OsX (Tiger =
10.4.3).

As you know, SHARP/autoSHARP is designed so that a user can view maps,
models, plots and postscript files (self-rotation functions, Harker
sections etc) directly from the output logfiles - just clicking on a
link or on a button. These log-files are HTML - so are viewed through
a browser (like firefox or Safari on OsX). The 'normal' mechanism to
use with a browser/HTML system is to tell the browser the specific
mimetype of a file.

So we send files e.g. with a mime-type 'chemical/x-onew' and want to
tell the browser to open this tar file with a little script (that then
starts a terminal, unpacks the tar file and fires up O). This works
fine on all Linux distributions, SGI/IRIX, Alpha/HP/Tru64, IBM/AIX
etc. But it doesn't work on OsX - and this annoys me greatly!

The issue(s) seem to be:

  1. when the browser (Safari/Firefox) encounters an unknown mime-type
     for the first time it asks what to do with it. In Firefox you are
     then able to say 'Open with ...' and browse to
     $BDG_home/bin. However, I can't actually select the correct shell
     script (helpers.x-onew) since it is greyed out. OsX doesn't seem
     to recognise it as an application.

  2. So I change the name of the script from 'helpers.x-onew' to
     something with the ending .app (like helpers_x-onew.app). Now I
     can select this file in the 'Open with ...' browser. It also
     starts this script - but it thinks it is a 'Application
     (classic)', i.e. Os9! So it tries to open it in Os9 - not good
     for a simple shell script.

Questions:

 - how can I tell OsX that an application is a normal OsX application
   (and not Os9)?

 - is it worth my time trying to sort all this out - or is OsX going
   to refuse to behave like a normal UNIX system at all?

There are other issues (like opening a terminal requires a command
like /Applications/Terminal.app/MacOsX/Contents/Terminal or similar;
the mime-type in the HTML header seems to be ignored by Safari - the
Content-Disposition:filenam= needs to set a specific file extension)
that I can sort out (although I find them very annoying).

I'm just back from a workshop where all the tutorial machines where
iMACs (G5): we tutors had a lot of 'fun' getting things to work on
these machines (from data-processing software, phasing and MR right
down to refinement software). And it seems that each OsX version
changes things randomly relative to the previous version. OsX gives me
more headache regarding porting/support than anything else I've seen
so far.

Any hints, ideas, remarks would be welcome!


Cheers

Clemens

PS: I do like the graphics (card, monitor and quality of desktop) of
these machines though.


-- 

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* Clemens Vonrhein, Ph.D.     vonrhein AT GlobalPhasing DOT com
*
*  Global Phasing Ltd.
*  Sheraton House, Castle Park 
*  Cambridge CB3 0AX, UK
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* BUSTER Development Group      (http://www.globalphasing.com)
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