I've given up trying on trying to set up my development environment under Mac OS X. There are three components that I need to have working: the Java Runtime Environment, CVS, and an IDE. I did finally figure out how to add a CLASSPATH setting correctly and run the OTM, both in the Terminal and with MrJAppBuilder. The OTM starts but only one of three panels show up in the interface, the simulator has no UI show up, and I didn't try the ITS because you need a database for that.

So obviously it doesn't quite work with JDK 1.2, perhaps the support classes are too old or we're using deprecated JDK methods (though in that case it should still work). In either case it's beyond my time to try to track down what's wrong. CVS is a similar picture. I have no idea how to configure it to use a remote server. The man documents, though great listing the commands and listing the files, don't tell you how to configure CVS. So once again, after a week of on and off banging my head on the wall I don't want to deal with it anymore. And if CVS doesn't work then there's little point in trying to use Project Builder.

That unfortunately leaves using legacy applications. So I started the Classic environment, then copied my Java archives to the Mac OS 9.1 MrJ folder and fired up the OTM. Wonder of wonders, it works. Start up the simulator and that works too. Start up MacCVS Pro and that looks fine, though I'll have to wait until I get to work to test it fully. CodeWarrior also started out fine and I recompiled the program ok. So it looks good and at least I don't have to reboot into Mac OS 9 to do work. I'll have to wait for a better CVS client to come out for Mac OS X.

Our first application of today is ManOpen, which is just a GUI man viewer. All ManOpen does is do man (with the -a option) and apropos. Probably not all that useful for people comfortable with Terminal, but I thought it was nice. A second man viewer, with nicer output, is Xmanview which is currently at version 0.3 (preview). It formats the output (which looks somewhat like nroff) and adds hyperlinks to other man pages. It doesn't have apropos and it's a bit slower than ManOpen since the page rendering takes a few seconds.

While ManOpen is free and XManView is a preview (so it may be shareware in the future), GMan is a beta program (that expires at the end of May) that will be shareware when finally released. It has a simple interface -- instead of typing in your query term it tries to list all the man entries (though cvs wasn't in the list). When you click on an entry you see a little description, then you can click on the "show" button to see the entry. In a nonresizable (and small) window you get a very vt-terminal-looking output. No formatting, no links, nothing. This is the worst of the three man viewers and it's amazing that they're considering charging for it.

Our game for today is Goban, a GUI front end to GNU Go. Go is one of those games that I've never bothered to learn (the other one is Chinese Chess or whatever it's called). It's actually pretty simple. You and the other player alternate putting stones down on a board. If you ever sorround another group of pieces (such that your opponent can't grow the group), then that group is captured and removed from the board. I think the object is to control as much of the board as possible. With Goban you can vary the board size, handicap one side, set the computer level (at least I suppose that's what Komi means), and set up two-player mode. It's a nice looking application, but being a no- randomness-strategy game, it means I really suck at it.