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'''Warning:''' this page describes the GTK-OSX port of Gramps to Mac, which is still under test. This page too is stil still under construction. The program described may not work as expected. Or even work. Use it on precious data at your own risk!
The GTK-OSX port of Gramps for Mac is expected to supersede the Macports and Fink versions. It is closer to a native Mac application and should rely less on other programs, so should be easier to use and maintain.
At the moment (July 27 2009) Mac Gramps is only available built for Intel Macs. It should build happily on PPC Macs, but has not been tried. The distribution page carries both a binary application that should work as soon as it is downloaded, and also a build environment which should allow a Mac with the Apple Xcode tools to build the whole thing from scratch. The binary application was built for OS X 10.5.7 but should (in theory) work on OS X 10.4.
== How to Download and run the binary gramps application for Mac ==
To run the binary application, visit the [http://www.gramps-project.org/apple/ download page] and click on the latest download. The download name specifies the version of Gramps from which the build was made, and a final "macnn" version which changes whenever a minor bug fix is made to the Apple binary. The gramps-x.y.z-macnn-builder.zip files are the build environments to build each version from scratch, which can be ignored if only the binary application is needed. It's possible to download and run the binary application to a Mac without any Mac admin privileges, and with a Mac using only the programs supplied straight out of the box. Gramps doesn't use the X11 Mac package. It's useful to install [http://www.openoffice.org/ OpenOffice] and <that graph-drawing thing> to produce reports, but they are both straightforward.
which should create a directory, gramps_user_directory, showing the gramps database in Finder. (That's dot-gramps in that command!) Hitting Copy then Paste on this directory in finder will create an explicit backup, gramps_user_directory copy. [Does this actually work with a symbolic link? I'm not at a Mac to try it!] It is ''unfortunate'' that the current Macports gramps crashes if it is used to produce a backup archive.
The gramps application takes its working language from the System Preferences - International settings for the Desktop. If the list of desired languages there shows Esperanto - Russian - Dutch - English then Gramps should work in Esperanto. If that translation isn't available for a particular phrase, it should produce Russian. If that's not available for a particular phrase (in the place completion tool, for example) then Gramps should produce French, and then eventually English. As of July 2009, there is a bug if the Desktop is set to British English or any other subdialect. A safe workaround is to use System Preferences to list English as the preferred language straight after British (etc) English. As of July 2009, there is a bug in the Hebrew version. It crashes. All other existing versions seem to work.
Known bugs in the application (as of the mac13 version) include:
The plugins directory of the .gramps user directory should be visible in Finder using the gramps_user_directory described above for backup. Placing plugins in there should work for most existing plugins, and can be done with the Finder straight from a download.
Double clicking an image in the media reference editor should bring up Apple Preview, or a similar program, to view the image. Clicking the view button in an internet reference shold should bring up the URL in the default browser. Clicking the Google Maps button in the Places display should bring up the map in the browser.
The application called gramps on the desktop is actually a complete directory hierarchy called gramps.app stored in the directory ~/Desktop, where ~ is the home directory of the logged-in user. The contents of the application directory hierarchy can be seen in finder by selecting the application and choosing View Package Contents from the context (right-click) menu. Using cd and ls in a shell at a unix terminal, the "hidden" contents of the package are actually always visible and not hidden at all.
Gramps is a Python interpreted application and changing the program requires no build step. It's possible to change the downloaded binary application by choosing View Package COntents Contents in Finder, navigating to the gramps Python code in gramps.app/Contents/Reources/share/gramps in Finder, and choosing Open With... TextEdit for the .py file to change. (There seems to be a bug in the Mac implementation of the Python runtime editor "Idle". Opening the .py file with that doesn't work.) Editing the .py file and saving the new version will cause gramps to use it next time it is started. It won't change a gramps which is currently running. There are .pyc files also stored in the application, compiled Python byte-code, which can be ignored.
The binary gramps application contains not only the gramps Python sources and all their internationalised trasnlations, but also a complete Python 2.6.2 interpreter, and the Python code libraries distributed with that, and the compiled C libraries for graphics features like gtk, glade and pango. These are all fixed for a particular version of the distributed binary applciation. The only way to change them is to download a new distributed binary gramps application. This is intended to fix a major issue with earlier Gramps Mac implementation, where the program depended on so many different distributions that were always changing that determining what change introduced what bug was very hard.
A simpler way to see messages from gramps, should any appear, is to start it from a unix terminal. To do this, open a terminal with Finder-Utilities-Terminal, and type (for a gramps application on the Desktop)
cd / ; ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/MacOS/gramps
and that should run gramps and produce any messages with no delay. The file ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/MacOS/gramps is a shell script, as is ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/MacOS/gramps-bin which it calls. gramps-bin calls the Python 2.6.2 interpreter ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/MacOS/python to run the gramps code which is stored in ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/Resources/share/gramps. Local translations are stored in ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/Resources/share/locale. Standard python code is in ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/Resources/lib/python2.6, and the compiled C libraries are in ~/Desktop/gramps.app/Contents/Resources/lib/*.dylib. Only the gramps python source is shipped in the binary applciation. If other sources are needed, the gramps build environment must be used.
Should gramps produce a message indicating that it crashed because it could not find a particular library or source file, then do please post a message on the gramps users or developers mailing list, or post a bug. These tedious issues are usually easy to fix. Packaging gramps like this (as opposed to including everything and the kitchen sink) reduces the download size by more than a factor of three.
The binary application is built by downloading a Whole Pile of applications from various places on the web (about forty applications) and building each of them to produce a utility to help building, or a library, or something. Just one of these applications is the gramps code developed with such effort by the gramps developers, so it's clear just how much work has gone into the whole thing.
==Building Gramps from Scratch==
Building Gramps from scratch is useful to produce a version not currently available as a binary (for example, a PPC version) or to produce a complete environment for debugging and further development, inclduing debugging of all the C libraries Gramps uses, like gtk.
To build gramps from scratch, click on an entry from the [http://www.gramps-project.org/apple/ download page] like gramps-3.1.2-mac13-builder.zip. The builder files are build environments. The downloaded builder file when uncompressed will produce a directory called gramps_important_info. This is intended to be saved at ~/gramps_important_info, where ~ is the home directory of the logged-in user. It's possible to download the builder file wiht any browser and the to uncompress it and move it to ~ and then to execute ~/gramps_important_info/build_gramps (by double-clicking it) entirely from within Finder. build_gramps should dowload a bunch of stuff (It may hang up if any of the required webservers are down) and build it.