About Textures and OS X

Textures as-it-is works very well with OS X, in the Classic environment only. We know of only a handful of minor problems, discussed here, with solutions or workarounds for most of them.

We are working, almost exclusively, on the development of native Textures for OS X. We are neither willing nor able to predict or discuss the schedule for its availability, nor will we be responsive to queries about its feature set. (Suggestions are always welcome!)

If you are not sure that we have your email address, simply send email to osx@bluesky.com to ensure notices of Textures for OS X availability. Please include a relevant Subject header so that our spam filters will not discard your message. (You would not believe the number of spam and virus messages we receive daily.)

Apple and Intel: We are following with interest the news about the Macintosh moving to the Intel platform. We see no cause for concern specific to Textures, as our development uses the XCode tools, and we have already compiled a copy of our native Textures for Intel (although, alas, we are not yet able to test it!)

Bug report (Tiger): We have filed a bug report with Apple (Radar 4122846) describing a problem with OS X 10.4 (and update 10.4.1) where the Textures document icons disappear and are replaced with TextEdit icons (and double-clicking will open them as TextEdit documents). Also, if in an attempt to repair the icon linkage, a document is tagged to be opened with Textures (Finder/Get Info), then the document's icon is scrambled. (!) This is harmless (the documents are not changed in any way) but it is highly annoying; we are certain that the problem is not limited to Textures, as we see similar problems with other applications.

Although we expect this bug will be fixed by Apple soon, we have found a solution for Textures, available in the 2.1.9d5 development release.

Readers may not be aware that Apple permits the public to file bug reports; duplicate reports are said to be taken as one indication of a bug's significance.

(http://bugreport.apple.com, ADC membership required, no charge. ;)

Progress report (Tiger and fonts): Now that Tiger (OS X 10.4) is available, we can report some related news, both good and bad. The missing font encoding problem (see below) that has frustrated some of our efforts has alas not been fixed in Tiger. However, we have with considerable labor found ways to reliably reencode the fonts within Textures; in the long run no doubt this work will prove useful, although we wish it had not been necessary.

Progress report: one of the major elements of Textures is fonts, in all of their technical and artistic aspects. For quite some time now we have been pursuing a technical issue within OS X regarding the ability of the Core Graphic system to draw the standard Computer Modern PostScript fonts, as originally produced by us at Blue Sky Research and now in the public domain courtesy of the American Mathematical Society. The problem is simple: Core Graphics does not correctly encode the characters! For each font, some are "misplaced" in the character tables; this is a problem with OS X itself, and not something that we can correct within Textures.

Recently (in August) we identified specifically the root of this problem, and reported it to Apple; more recently (11 October) we received this response from a member of the Apple development team:

“I can tell you that the bug is currently still in Analyze, with a Tiger milestone. In other words, we're planning to look at it for Tiger, but no one has done so yet and so there can be no firm commitment that it will actually be fixed for Tiger.”

Although this is obviously non-committal, we take it as an encouraging sign.

If any of our readers would happen to have friends within Apple, and they would like to assist, perhaps you could gently direct their attention to Radar bug 3767399?