| Version: 3.3.1

wxWidgets for macOS installation

wxWidgets can be compiled using Apple's Cocoa toolkit.

Most OS X developers should start by downloading and installing Xcode from the App Store. It is a free IDE from Apple that provides all the tools you need for working with wxWidgets.

After Xcode is installed, download `wxWidgets-{version}.tar.bz2` and then double-click on it to unpack it to create a wxWidgets directory.

Next, use Terminal (under Applications, Utilities, Terminal) to access a command prompt. Use `cd` to change directories to your wxWidgets directory and execute the following sets of commands from the wxWidgets directory.

    mkdir build-cocoa-debug
    cd build-cocoa-debug
    ../configure --enable-debug
    make

It is recommended to use the `-jN` option with the last command, where `N` is a number of the processors in your system (which can be checked using `sysctl -n hw.ncpu` command if you are not sure), as this will dramatically speed up the build on modern systems. So in practice you should use a command like this:

    make -j8

(but don't use it unless you actually have 8 CPUs and enough memory for that many parallel compiler invocations).

You may also prefer to add the `-s` option to avoid normal output from make and/or redirect it you to a log file for further inspection.

You should build at least the smallest possible wxWidgets sample to verify that everything is working as intended, by doing

    cd samples/minimal
    make

and then running `minimal.app` from this directory from Finder.

If you'd like to, you can also build all the other samples and demos

    cd samples; make;cd ..
    cd demos;   make;cd ..

If you use CMake, please see CMake Overview for building wxWidgets using it.

# Advanced topics

## Building library for distribution

When building the library for the distribution with your application, you shouldn't use the `--enable-debug` option above. You may, however, want to use the `--disable-sys-libs` option to ensure that it has no dependencies on your build system's other libraries that may not be present on all systems where the application is used.

It is also often desirable to build the final version of the application as a "universal binary" (i.e., a combination of binaries for several different architectures). In this case, you should build wxWidgets as a universal binary too, using the `--enable-universal_binary` option. By default, this option enables building for the usually wanted set of architectures (currently ARM and Intel), but you may override this by listing the architectures you want to use explicitly, separating them with commas.

## Creating an application icon (icns)

Assuming that your application icon is a PNG file named "app-logo.png" that has a 1024x1024 resolution, run the following from Terminal:

    mkdir app-logo.iconset
    sips -z 16 16     app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_16x16.png
    sips -z 32 32     app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_16x16@2x.png
    sips -z 32 32     app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_32x32.png
    sips -z 64 64     app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_32x32@2x.png
    sips -z 128 128   app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_128x128.png
    sips -z 256 256   app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_128x128@2x.png
    sips -z 256 256   app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_256x256.png
    sips -z 512 512   app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_256x256@2x.png
    sips -z 512 512   app-logo.png --out app-logo.iconset/icon_512x512.png
    cp app-logo.png app-logo.iconset/icon_512x512@2x.png
    iconutil -c icns app-logo.iconset
    rm -R app-logo.iconset

This will produce a file named "app-logo.icns" that can be included in your Info.plist file to be used as the application icon.

## Installing library

It is rarely desirable to install non-Apple software into system directories, so the recommended way of using wxWidgets under macOS is to skip the `make install` step and simply use the full path to `wx-config` under the build directory when building an application using the library.

If you want to install the library into the system directories, you'll need to do this as root. The accepted way of running commands as root is to use the built-in `sudo` mechanism. First of all, you must be using an account marked as a "Computer Administrator". Then

    sudo make install
    type \<YOUR OWN PASSWORD\>

## Distributing applications using wxWidgets

If you build wxWidgets as static libraries (i.e., pass `--disable-shared` option to configure), you don't need to do anything special to distribute them, as all the required code is linked into your application itself. When using shared libraries (which is the default), you need to copy the libraries into your application bundle and change their paths using `install_name_tool` so that they are loaded from their new locations.

## Apple Developer Tools: Xcode

You can use the project in build/osx/wxcocoa.xcodeproj to build the Cocoa version of wxWidgets (wxOSX/Cocoa). There are also sample projects supplied with the minimal sample.

Notice that the command lines above build not just the library itself but also the wxrc tool which doesn't have its own Xcode project. If you need this tool, the simplest possibility is to build it from the command line after installing the libraries using commands like this:

    $ cd utils/wxrc
    $ g++ -o wxrc wxrc.cpp `wx-config --cxxflags --libs base,xml`