Thursday, February 26, 2009

Matrex on MacOSX

Matrex uses the SWT library for its GUI. SWT uses the native GUI of the platform. The current version of Matrex, 1.3, uses SWT 3.4.
On MacOSX SWT 3.4 is based on Carbon, which is only 32 bits.
So Matrex 1.3 on MacOSX does not work using Java 1.6 (Java 6), which is only 64 bits and therefore not compatible with Carbon.
If you want to use Matrex 1.3 in MacOSX please either:

  • run it with Java 1.5 (Java 5) instead of Java 1.6
  • try the beta version of SWT 3.5 for Cocoa 64 bits. Download the zip file and unzip it in the /swt directory, where is the directory where you installed Matrex.

The following is the description of the SWT 3.4 problem written by the SWT developers:

SWT cannot be used with OS X JRE version 1.6 (Mac OSX only)

OS X JRE version 1.6 assumes that pointers have a size of 64 bits, but SWT's Carbon port only uses 32-bit pointers, so SWT and Eclipse cannot be used with OS X JRE version 1.6. The workaround is to use an earlier supported version of the OS X JRE.

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