[Chimera-users] Which Mac daily build to use

[Thomas Goddard]

 > on another note: which of the daily builds should I be using? aqua,
 > aqua-intel, intel-cocoa, intel-cocoa-64.
 >
 > not sure on the + & -'s
 >
 > do not mind taking some crash risks to push sw dev objectives and 
reporting.
 >
 >
 > Matthew Dougherty
 > National Center for Macromolecular Imaging
 > Baylor College of Medicine/Houston Texas USA

Hi Matt,

   The Mac Chimera builds are far too numerous now.  I recommend the 
64-bit Cocoa build.  That is what I use.  It has one very serious issue 
right now that pressing Option-e or Option plus many other other 
characters will immediately crash Chimera.  It is a Tk Cocoa bug that I 
reported but I need to put a fix into Chimera while I wait for the Tk 
developers to fix it.  If that sounds too dangerous use the Chimera Aqua 
build (32-bit only). That uses the Mac Carbon API which is the older Mac 
API that Apple says they will not provide 64-bit support for.  So we 
will replace that with Cocoa in the Chimera 1.5 release in a few months. 
  My least favorite choice is Mac X11 which is not the native Mac 
windowing system and is the least well supported.  That Chimera version 
will also be eliminated in the future.  For the 32-bit versus 64-bit 
Chimera Cocoa you should use 64-bit if you have Mac OS 10.6 (Snow 
Leopard) or 32-bit for older Mac OS versions.  We don't offer 64-bit Mac 
Chimera on Mac OS 10.5 or older Mac OS versions.  Mac OS 10.6 is the 
first version of Mac OS that uses 64-bit by default.  I've measured 
performance of 64-bit Mac Cocoa Chimera and it is as good as 32-bit. 
For the Chimera 1.5 release we hope to only be offering two production 
Mac Chimera versions 32-bit and 64-bit Cocoa.  The X11 version will be 
in the unsupported category and the Aqua (= Carbon) will be gone.

	Tom