[Geobunny]

I used to love X-Snow for X windows, and Snow for Macintosh. In fact, I do still love both of those, but neither runs on OS X. The source code for the X11 distro is available from the following website, does anyone feel like trying to port it?

I'd give it a shot, but I've never ported anything in my life and never done any graphic work in C. I'd LOVE to see this program running on OS X. Download the Mac OS version (you'll have to boot into OS 7, 8 or 9) to see how good it is.

Download from http://www.euronet.nl/~rja/Xsnow/

Please help with this. I know there are other "snow" screen savers for OS X, but this one's class!

Thanks

[Geobunny]

Ok, my post's been read 33 times and no-one's answered yet. Does that mean that nobody knows how to do it, or simply that no-one's interested?

If it's the latter, can someone maybe point me in the right direction please and I'll try it myself? As I said, I've no idea how to do graphics in C, but also, how would such a program interact with the windows currently on screen? The best things about the program are that it takes up very little memory/CPU time and the snow collects on the bottom of the screen and on top of windows.

If you could help at all, I'd be really grateful. Another spanner in the works - I don't know Objective-C. I've done a lot of Java programming, but methinks OS X's JVM is too slow and probably doesn't have the hooks for interacting with other applications' windows!

Thanks

[Gul Banana]

[checking if what I posted is actually true]

[geran]

I mailded rick, the autor of snow and asked him if he was working on a port to macosx when the public beta came out, and he told me that he was planning on porting snow to os x. Have you talk to him more recently?

The main problem in creating a port is to find the positions of other apps windows . to create som falling snow is not to hard, take a look at "neko on desktop" for a exampel of moving objects on the desktop.

[00101001]

Sounds interesting – I'll certainly give it a shot, but I need at least till the end of the holidays to have something remotely close to the Linux version...

...If I can figure out how to do it

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by geran:
I mailded rick, the autor of snow and asked him if he was working on a port to macosx when the public beta came out, and he told me that he was planning on porting snow to os x. Have you talk to him more recently?

I emailed him about this time last year, and again this year, but didn't get a reply either time. Wee bit annoying.

If we can find out what calls QuartzDebug uses to find out window details, we're half way there. Two adjacent columns display Origin and Dimensions/size. Other columns even show visibility and level.

[00101001]

while you can't get as much detail as quartzDebug (i'd bed apple's using private API's to do that) – don't forget about the NSAccessibility API
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/...ssibility.html

I think it should give us all the window info we need...

[mahrz]

I remember a thread which covered this, I think FocusLayer was the result . But I can't find this thread anymore ....

[00101001]

hmmm, i can't find the thread either – strange...

but anyway, we came to the conclusion that Apple sucks because they didn't give us any useful hooks into the WindowServer...

NSAccessibility is the closest thing that we've got, which is somewhat pathetic

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by mahrz:
I remember a thread which covered this, I think FocusLayer was the result . But I can't find this thread anymore ....

http://forums.macnn.com/79/developer-center/120764/small-app-idea-aqua-focus-layer/

[IamBob]

Just thought some of you may be interested in what's going on in this thread.

[rickjansen]

Hi all,

Well, I *am* working on the Mac OS X version of Snow, am studying how Objective C works, and Cocoa and all, but I'm now running into the problem that the window list is not too accessible on OS X! NSWindowList does not do what I want, and the visRegion and clipRegion seem to have disappeared from Macintosh altogether, as Regions have too!

So, a bit of patience still please, I'll get you a Snow for Mac OS X :-)

Rick Jansen

[Geobunny]

Thanks for telling us Rick, I really appreciate it. Might this web site help? http://developer.apple.com/macosx/win32porting/

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by rickjansen:
Well, I *am* working on the Mac OS X version of Snow, am studying how Objective C works, and Cocoa and all, but I'm now running into the problem that the window list is not too accessible on OS X! NSWindowList does not do what I want, and the visRegion and clipRegion seem to have disappeared from Macintosh altogether, as Regions have too!

Didn't you get my e-mail with CGS.h?

[rickjansen]

There is a very preliminary version of Snow for Mac OS X on:
http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/rick/MacSnow/MacOSXSnow.dmg.gz
(Changed from gzipped tar to proper disk img)

The snow does not yet build up, I have no time to do that today, but
as it's Xmas today I did not want to keep this version from you.

There is no user interface either. There are two versions, a fast
and a slow one, one slowing down your machine more than the other.

Again, this is just a program being worked on, but hey, I'm new to
Objective C and Mac OS X development, so bear with me. I hope you'll
enjoy this version all the same.

Merry Xmas!

Rick Jansen

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by rickjansen:
There is a very preliminary version of Snow for Mac OS X on:
http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/rick/MacSnow/MacOSXSnow.tar.gz

There is no user interface either. There are two versions, a fast
and a slow one, one slowing down your machine more than the other.

The file I downloaded only has the (fast) version, but it doesn't load. It opens and closes again immediately. I then ran it from inside a terminal to see what errors came up and got this.

Code:
2002-12-25 13:46:34.817 Snow for Macintosh[1819] Unable to load nib file: MainMenu, exiting

[rickjansen]

Changed the file to a gzipped disk image:
http://dropmix.xs4all.nl/rick/MacSnow/MacOSXSnow.dmg.gz

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by rickjansen:
I checked, but the file should be okay!
The file MacOSXSnow.tar.gz should be 148 kb, did it download ok? No checksum errors?

Just sent you an email, I think it'll be easier that way rather than constantly reloading this page! Thanks for your work on this.