Building and Geomview under Mac OS X

10.7 Lion, 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.4 Tiger users: The latest SaVi release and development code (18 December 2007 and later) runs well under your operating systems, as shown in the screenshot below at end. The -redrawn-menus flag is not required.
10.5 Leopard users: The latest SaVi 1.4 release requires and automatically invokes the -redrawn-menus flag under 10.5 Leopard to avoid a Tk menu problem.

The following instructions tell you how to install SaVi.

1. Is the gcc C compiler installed? Run Terminal from your Applications/Utilities folder and type which gcc to find out.
2. If /usr/bin/gcc isn't returned, you will need to install Apple's developer tools to get the gcc compiler and Tcl/Tk. Either from a CD that came with your Mac (says this FAQ) or download the Xcode dmg from Apple Developer Connection, where you can also set up a free account. You'll need the right version of Xcode for your OS; for 10.4 it's Xcode 2.5. 10.5 uses 3.0, 10.6 uses 3.2, and 10.7 uses Xcode 4.
3. Once you have gcc, you should be able to download SaVi 1.4.5, unpack it with tar xvfz savi1.4.5-release.tar.gz (if Safari has uncompressed the file tar xvf suffices) and then:
   cd savi1.4.5
make ARCH=macosx

Known problems These Mac-specific problems are discussed in detail in the BUGS textfile.

• The Tk supplied with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard does not create SaVi's menus in the menubar. Tk's menu problems on Leopard are known. This is fixed in 10.6 Snow Leopard. As a workaround, the new savi -redrawn-menus flag will draw working menus in each window. This is set automatically when required for 10.5 Leopard in the savi wrapper script in SaVi 1.4.3 and later. ActiveTcl can be installed and compiled with to avoid the use of this flag and give full working Mac menus on 10.5 - see the hints in src/Makefile_defs_macosx.

With thanks to Ari Stern for his menubar work and problem investigations.