The short screencast below shows Inkscape, a very cool drawing program with a GTK interface, running natively (i.e. without X11) on Mac OS X. There already are plenty of videos of The Gimp running natively on OS X. It is in the order of things that the port of GTK to OS X is first tested on The Gimp since GTK is the “Gimp ToolKit”. However it is nice to see other programs can use this port too, in particular such a complex application as Inkscape. In addition, Inskcape is written in C++ and uses GTKmm and Cairomm instead of directly GTK and Cairo so that’s one more layer to get working right.
Furthermore, the native application used in this screencast was compiled against MacPorts versions of the native GTK port. These are not the latest versions and things are probably better in the cutting edge releases (in particular I think the annoying screen flicker is fixed). But I tried this compilation precisely to show that the native port is becoming mainstream enough to work nearly out of the box, in existing software environments. You can find out the steps that were necessary to get Inkscape to use native GTK on Inkscape’s wiki.
And now the video:
And larger versions:
- Quicktime Movie with Flash video and MP3 sound [7.2MB]
- Quicktime Movie with H264 video and AAC sound [3.8MB]
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