create purple pen for mac
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AdminPeter Golde (Admin, Purple Pen) commented
A native Mac version of Purple Pen in the near future is highly unlikely. I have investigated this in detail and the technical work to get Purple Pen running on Mac OS X is very high. Compiling C# with Xamarin is easy in principle, but Purple Pen depends on many Windows APIs and libraries that are not available on Mac.
However, Purple Pen runs well under the Virtual Box virtualization software. I have written up a document that describes how to get this set up. See http://purple-pen.org/virtualbox.htm
You can also use Parallels, VMWare Fusion, or dual boot with Apple BootCamp.
Hopefully these solutions work OK for people. As Purple Pen evolves over the long term, I will keep cross platform considerations in mind, but this likely requires a significant re-writing of Purple Pen.
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Valdis Janovs commented
@ Peter - any feedback on this? Do you plan to try this? Should be easy, if relevant compiling solutions are used.
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Valdis Janovs commented
Hi all, any news on if this would be looked at as potential future dev?
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Anonymous commented
Mac version plz ;-)
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Anonymous commented
Mac version for this fantastic tool plz
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Matti Tahvonen commented
Has anybody tried with recent Mono or Wine? If the source code would be available, I'm quite sure there could be some small changes that might make it possible to start building reasonable mac versions as well.
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Anonymous commented
I need to create control descriptions in Danish. How to do that?
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Peter Mayer commented
When using Parallels I cannot print courses from Purple pen. I need to convert to pdf first and then print.
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Peter Mayer commented
I use mac desktop and iPad so cannot work with Purple pen files when travelling. I find Parallels a nuisance s PP is the only software I need it for.
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Matti Tahvonen commented
Tried with mono on mac, dialogs first work perfectly, but then it crashes when should open the map. Are the sources somewhere available? It would be much easier to try making this work on mono or wine with the sources.
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Jim Baker commented
With Xamarin, one can create Mac apps using. NET.
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Dominik Zalewski commented
I think it will be possible to do the port quickly soon, since Microsoft has announced that .NET is going to be open-sourced and ported to Linux and Mac. Until this is done, I don't think it makes sense to start porting.
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Pål B commented
I have tried to install PurplePen in Wine. It is possible to run the program, but the menues are missing and there are a lots of errors, I suppose it is some missing librarys of functions not implemented in Wine.
Start of Purplepen in Wine: http://stavanger.o-klubb.no/images/purplepen-wine/wine_start_PurplePen.png (When clicking the text no feedback is shown, but it works)
Program running looks like this: http://stavanger.o-klubb.no/images/purplepen-wine/purplepen-wine.jpg
And with error message: http://stavanger.o-klubb.no/images/purplepen-wine/wine-PurplePen-error.png
So maby it is possible to run the progrma this way?
Best would be if it was possible to compile the program in Mono on Mac and Linux.
Are running PurplePen in VirtualBox myself. -
New Mexico Orienteers commented
This is a followup to my previous comment here. I used Purple Pen to do everything for my meet. Once I had the print driver installed on the virtual Win XP, I printed to files (PostScript). Then, on the host Mac computer I used ps2pdf to convert the files to PDF. The PDFs were *much* smaller. I e-mailed the PDFs to my course setters and vetters, and printed the PDFs for the meet. Everyone was happy, and I got a lot of positive feedback about the beautiful maps, the pre-printed courses, and the convenience of having the control descriptions printed right on the map. (We don't have anyone competing with us who uses an arm holder for control descriptions.)
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Charlie Bleau commented
Works fine in VM-Ware Fusion as well.
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New Mexico Orienteers commented
A workaround for the Mac is to run VirtualBox or a similar emulator, then Win XP or other Microsoft OS inside the emulator. I do that now. Downside is you still need a license for the Microsoft OS; I recycled a license from a PC that is running Linux. Then you also need to know how to set up the Microsoft OS so that it can play nicely with the host system. OCAD Viewer works fine, once a printer driver is installed on the virtual computer as well as on the host computer. I am trying out Purple Pen now.