Hi sage-devel,
Thanks to some assistance from Dan and my chair/sysadmin, and a lot of
time trying to figure out vagaries of the not-for-the-faint-of-heart
documentation of Mac shell and Mac app property lists, I have the
following steps to make a Sage app clickable from anywhere which can
be easily changed to have it do the notebook instead.
I assume this can be turned into a .dmg (I don't know how to do that)
that could then be made available for download instead of the usual -
at least for major releases; the point is not to provide another
shortcut for the cognoscenti to make, but rather for easy instructions
for someone else (mabshoff? William?) to occasionally provide the app
for download when convenient for that person.
The point is that you should only have to do the following ONCE: after
that, all that has to happen is to plop a different Sage build where
it goes every time a new Sage build is made. At least, I sure hope
so!
1. Create a folder called Sage.
2. Make a subfolder called Contents.
3. Go in Contents folder and make a subfolder called MacOS.
4. Drop entire sage installation for appropriate architecture/OSX
version in the MacOS folder.
5. Make the following script, name it Sage.command, make it executable
(e.g. "chmod 755 Sage.command"), and also place it in the MacOS
folder. Note the grave accents (non-shifted tilde on most American
keyboards) in the second echo line. This script creates a temporary
script which starts Sage, and then runs the new script (which deletes
itself once you log out of Sage, a nice touch).
#!/usr/bin/env sh
cmd=/tmp/SageStart_$$
echo '#!/usr/bin/env sh' > $cmd
echo `dirname $0`/sage/sage >> $cmd
echo "rm -f $cmd" >> $cmd
chmod 755 $cmd
open -a /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app $cmd
6. Go back to the Contents folder and create the document Info.plist
below. The CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion may need to be different on
X.5 (I have X.4), and I made the last string 3.2.1 since that is the
Sage version I dropped in.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://
www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
<string>English</string>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>Sage.command</string>
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>com.sage.Sage</string>
<key>CFBundleInfoDictionaryVersion</key>
<string>6.0</string>
<key>CFBundleName</key>
<string>Sage</string>
<key>CFBundlePackageType</key>
<string>APPL</string>
<key>CFBundleSignature</key>
<string>????</string>
<key>CFBundleVersion</key>
<string>3.2.1</string>
</dict>
</plist>
7. Rename the Sage folder as Sage.app - you now have an application!
You may have to move Sage from whatever folder you started to
somewhere else, then back - this helps the Mac OS realize you have
made/changed the .plist file.
To make it a little nicer, add an icon:
A. Create a subfolder Resources in the Contents folder.
B. Add
<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>SageIcon.icns</string>
to the file Info.plist.
C. Assuming you have installed developer tools, open the program
/Developer/Applications/Utilities/Icon\ Composer.app/
and drag your favorite Sage icon into the boxes. Save this as
SageIcon.icns in the Resources folder.
(If one hasn't installed the tools, probably any image would work if
you reference it in the .plist file, but I'm not sure about how Mac
would do it, so it might not. Incidentally, I tried using the usual
Sage.png icosahedron for the .icns file, and found it is a little low
resolution; they like 128x128 pixels for the biggest, and Sage.png
seems to be 86x88. On the other hand, it's a little busy for the icon
at the smallest levels. Whatever.)
Incidental notes:
I. The user will still have to manually close the program and Terminal
window at the end of all this. Terminal is what really launches.
II. To have it do the notebook instead, change the line
echo `dirname $0`/sage/sage >> $cmd
to
echo `dirname $0`/sage/sage -notebook >> $cmd
Of course, to change the file, you will now have to Ctrl-click on the
application and choose "Show Package Contents" to get to it again, or
use the command line. Note that the user will have to Ctrl-C at the
end of this in the Terminal window - no way around that.
III. It would be great to actually have an interface etc - ideally,
one that just was an easy front end to Sage but also included the Help
menu, since one could just put the /doc folder in Resources and then
have it there, the canonical Mac way to do it. Well, that will have
to wait for the oft-mentioned OSX guru.
I hope this is helpful to at least one other person.
- kcrisman
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