A few weeks ago, some of us were discussing the problems of developing in Cocoa using the inaccessible Interface Builder, and someone suggested that we should try Renaissance. I have been working on it ever since, and can FINALLY report that it works and is wonderful!
I was, however, unable to find much information about how to use it on Mac, and encountered some major problems trying to figure it out. Thankfully, I had some great help from GNUstep's tech support.
Here is what I have figured out:
You can download Renaissance from the Renaissance Download page at http://gnustep.it/Renaissance/Download.html. There is a precompiled framework of Renaissance 0.8.0, which only works in the ppc architecture, or you can download the source code for Renaissance 0.9.0. There is also a link from there to a Documentation page that has links to the Renaissance manual and some good tutorials.
If you choose to compile Renaissance from source, or if you want to use make as the tutorials suggest, you will also need the package GNUstep Make. Go to the GNUstep download page at http://www.gnustep.org/resources/sources.html and follow the instructions under "List of Packages"; GNUstep Make is in the section headed "GNUstep Core".
For building from source, the Mac instructions on the Renaissance site are woefully inadequate. Here is the sequence of commands that finally worked for me: #GNUstep Make cd <PathToGnustepMakeSource> ./configure make sudo make install #Renaissance source /Library/GNUstep/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh 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
You generally build a Renaissance application the same way you would a standard Cocoa application, using .gsmarkup files in place of .nib files. Add the Renaissance Framework to your project, and turn off Zero Link. In order to get the Renaissance menus to work, I also had to replace all of the calls 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.
I hope others find this product to be as useful as I have found it.
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