I have a new DMG for everyone to try.

One of the most important changes is a very new one. I added support for cameras for which you do not have a driver available on the local machine. There are several that we either cannot or do not know how to build on OS X (or Linux for that matter). There are also several that the Cloudmakers have built but we can't seem to get it right. So I rewrote some KStars code that will allow us to have the xml files present so that we can remotely connect to these sorts of devices even though we don't have the binary driver on the local machine. My code will basically prevent these drivers from appearing in Ekos in the profile editor in Local Mode, but in Remote mode, they will all show up but have a special icon.

**** Please note: This does mean that If you want to "locally" host a ZWO Camera, an SBIG camera, a DSI Camera, or several others on your Mac, you will probably want to use the Cloudmaker's Indiserver app to host them. In KStars/Ekos, you would connect to them as a "remote" connection even though they are on the local machine. If somebody wants to work on how we can get some of these cameras (which we know for a fact do actually compile on OS X) to compile using our build script, please feel free to try! Just to make it clear, my fix will make it possible to host these devices on something like a raspberry pi and connect to them if the driver is not available on your computer. It also makes it possible to connect to a Cloudmaker's Indiserver that is serving up the devices even though you might not have the driver in kstars.


Additions/Improvements in this version of the DMG
This version adds an astrometry options editor to make that easier to use.
The equatorial Grid Routines have been overhauled and are now much more accurate.
It adds pinch zooming capability to HFR Plots
It also adds range dragging to the Guide and HFR Plots
It adds the Dark Library viewer in Ekos options.
The default size button for fitsfiewer now has a more accurate algorithm.
Jasem's Polar Alignment Helper now works very well.
Also he did some great work with Live Video sub framing and DSLR options.

And much more!!

NEW KSTARS DMG 2017-02-15

Hi! Tested yesterday everything works as it should,well almost all. Some great features you added.
One thing I noticed there's only one Zwo driver (nice special icons too ), there where two before, so , working fine
Astrometry option dialog works great. Nice and helpfull. This time autofocus works (only in Low Memory Mode) but can't keep the iteration as reported on another thread. But again,not exclusive to MacOS.Dragging plots works too.

Getting this problem in craft, in both Jamie's script and also my own craft stuff:

paste.kde.org/pg8nbk00a

Any ideas?

We have another new DMG for everyone to test! We are thinking of doing an official OS X release possibly tomorrow because most of the bugs appear to be all worked out.

New KStars DMG

I did some major work with Astrometry Options this week, adding the ability to edit Astrometry.cfg in the program and a viewer that will let you see which index files are installed along with recommendations. Jasem also edited my options editor and made it easier to use.
I also did some minor bug fixing for OS X here and there.
Both Jasem and I also did some overhauling on the script to streamline it, make it not require completely reinstalling everything every time, and also fixing an error I had made in the path names in fix-libraries. We will post these changes to the gist within the next couple of days.

Plus many other little changes were made to the KStars code in the last week.

If anyone could do this, could you do a fresh install test? In order to do that, you need to either delete or rename the following files (renaming them would allow you to go back to your previous KStars data directory after you test this by just naming them back):
~/Library/Application Support/kstars
~/Library/Preferences/kstarsrc

Note: to test Astrometry.net you will need to be sure to turn of the "NoFits2Fits" option in the astrometry options because the version of astrometry is newer and doesn't use that option. The plan is to turn it off by default in the release.

Hi,
I just recompiled KStars on my Mac and encountered two issues:
First, Kstars does not find "baseclient.h" when compiling because when installing libindi, the file is not copied to the libindi include directory and has to be moved there by hand.
Second, the default directories for the external astrometry-net are changed to /usr/ rather than /usr/local/. This results in errors of KStars not finding the config file and the binaries. Afterwards, the astrometry options panel gets greyed out and hence the paths cannot be changed.

Hi Adam, were you building using Jamie's script or some other way? Jasem was just changing some things recently where he changed to libindi 1.4.0 and he was trying to change it so that the modifications we had to make to libindi to get it build before would then not be required. Right now we are working on making the build process simpler. I don't know about the baseclient.h problem, but we will look into it, it is probably related.

Did you try the DMG I posted? it should work pretty well.

Also, for the astrometry options. Jasem's change to the Alignment module does disable all the controls if you don't have valid paths to astrometry. But did you try the options button at the very bottom right of the align module? That button should still work and let you change your paths. Just like you, I had a problem with my paths at first and found myself locked out of the settings, until Jasem pointed out the other options button that is not disabled.

Hi Rob,
I didn't use Jamie's script, I just built indi and kstars from the git-sources (using the homebrew method). It worked fine except for that little issue
Concerning the astrometry options: For me, the whole alignment panel gets greyed out. I can click the options button you marked in your screenshot, but everything in the options panel is then greyed out too. I fixed it for myself by changing the default paths in kstars.kcfg for now.
I also want to add that the homebrew method is very convenient now, as the homebrew qt5 is now shipped as a binary with the dbus addon by default, so installing and updating qt5 takes minutes rather than hours now. Also, the 'download new data' stuff works perfectly now with the hombrew kf5 frameworks as it seems.

I actually wrote some code yesterday that was posted by Jasem this morning which might help with the defaults. We had a problem where you couldn't set the kstars,kcfg on different operating systems. So the defaults for the paths to the external programs were the linux defaults. So when I made the code work on OS X, I had to come up with a way to change the defaults for OS X when the user installs KStars, but not change it later when they set it to something they want. You would also want to keep your settings when installing an updated KStars from a dmg. Basically what I had done, since most people will probably be dragging and dropping from a dmg that we are about to post, is that I set those defaults when the user installs the data directory from inside the app. If you don't run that code or if you have nothing inside the app, then the problem was that the defaults for OS X never got set.

But yesterday, I came up with a way that we could programatically set the defaults to be correct on either OS X or Linux. So I coded the official mac defaults to be the typical external paths for the programs on os x. For example: /usr/local/bin/xplanet for the xplanet program and /usr/local/share/indi for the Indi drivers directory. So now, if you build KStars yourself, you would have to make sure you install these programs as well, but it will point to the right places.

For the people that use the dmg, or Jamie's script the defaults will still get set to the internal xplanet, indiserver, etc because then the code for setting the defaults when they copy the data directory would still be run.

So I think this solution should work for people who build KStars from source, for people who build from Jamie's script, or for people who drag and drop from the DMG we will be releasing shortly. In the first case, the defaults will be the OS X defaults, and in the other 2 the defaults will be the internal programs.

Your other problem is the disabled Astrometry options. When Jasem first made the change, I had a problem just like you where I couldn't get to the options but clicking on that button at the bottom worked for me. So I wonder if your problem isn't different than mine. Did you export all of the correct environment variables when building? Perhaps the compiler couldn't find some required programs.

You can see if the updates I made today help with the problem. Maybe it is just the paths.

But also I noticed today that when I changed the paths to try to replicate your problem today, it no longer seems to disable the align module when the paths are wrong. So maybe Jasem made another change to it. Can you check to see if this is still a problem?

As I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, Jasem and I made some massive revisions to Jamie's script, removing all of the required patching of emerge and craft, patching of libindi, and patching of 3rd party stuff. Jasem fixed the build so the patching is not necessary. I also went through this afternoon and made a bunch more simplifications. And I tested the build script thoroughly building kstars using craft, cmake, and Xcode. I tested it on both an older and a newer system. So it seems we didn't break anything. I was also able to figure out why my code for using otool on the plugins wasn't working, it was a capitalization error. So I was able to delete the extra script I had written and just use the original one that was supposed to work. It is much simpler now. The changes are now posted to the gist. github.com/jamiesmith/kstars-on-osx

So I just thought I would let you guys know just in case you didn't see it yet. Jasem released the dmg that I created the other day.

KStars is officially released for OS X!

knro.blogspot.com
edu.kde.org/kstars/

Nice work! My tiny contribution is a patch to homebrew-cask so you can easily install it with

Semi-related, I've also added the sbig drivers so you can install them with