[chimera-dev] Aqua Chimera status

[Thomas Goddard]

  Here's a status report on the port of Chimera to the native Mac OS X
windowing system Aqua.  

  I have an Aqua Chimera built that can make it through some hand testing
showing molecules with different representations and surfaces and show
volume data and use some basic user interfaces like side view and model
panel and preferences.  It also passes all the tests in the Chimera test
suite.  More testing will be needed to see if everything is working.

  Showing side view and 1gcn and switching to sphere causes system
crash with Radeon 9000.  This makes the side view unusable with the
Radeon 9000.  This crash also occurs on the X windows Mac Chimera.
I've reported it to Apple.  It does not occur on Eric's GeForce2 MX.

  To get Tix working I commented out a number of X windows calls and
used the standard unix build.  Most of this code was #ifdef'ed out for
Windows so it should not effect Chimera operation.  The one case that
is likely to cause problems is an XSetClipRegion() call I commented
out.  That could cause drawing to run outside the intended bounds.
So the Tix port problem looks less severe than I reported before.

  There are a bunch of Aqua Tk problems.

	Mouse button 2 and button 3 are exchanged.  They are
	correct in X windows Mac Chimera.

	Benchmark dialog scrollbar mapped and unmapped
	continuously when dialog opened.  This can disable
	your whole Mac windowing environment.

	Sideview multi-tab window keeps OpenGL sideview display on top
	even when another tab is selected.  Mabye a Togl problem.

	Iconifying main window does not iconify other windows.

	Pop-up window showing function call arguments in Idle
	takes focus.  Also atom spec popups and toolbar
	buttons showing popups take focus so button clicks
	don't go to the desired place.  Usually 2 or 3 button
	clicks works around this.

	"Data" check button in volume dialog puts "Dat" and
	"a" on separate lines.  Side view "show low res"
	option menu shows "Fa..." and "T..." instead of False
	and True.  In both cases there is enough space so
	there is no need for the abbreviations.

	Clicking on the Idle window puts its menu at the top
	of the Mac screen.  To access the main Chimera menus,
	need to click on the main graphics window to get them
	at the top of the Mac screen.

	Splash screen does not update to show progress
	messages.  It just shows a blank white window until
	just before it disappears.

	Tear off menus are in upper left corner of screen
	under top of screen menu making it impossible to move
	them.

	Chimera icon is a separate window.

	tkwin.wait_visibility() is used by Chimera in splash
	screen and tkgui.py code and never returns.  I
	commented those out.

	Requesting multisampling pixel format for side view
	produces a pixel format but then fails to create
	graphics context with a bad pixel format error.  Need
	some special case Mac code to work around that bug.

  I'll try to package up an Aqua Chimera early next week for Eric and
Conrad to try on their machines.  (I'm working from home tomorrow).

  Tom