While the work here goes a long way towards explaining how to get RVIZ working on a Mac (especially in terms of getting macports sorted out to compile all the necessary dependencies into universal binaries), it relies on old Carbon support with wxWidgets-2.8 which is rapidly disappearing (e.g. when one moves to 10.6-Snow Leopard and then to 10.7-Lion). wxWidgets-2.9.2 has decent Cocoa support (here to stay on Mac platforms) so it seems that RViz on Mac with full Cocoa support is a worthy goal.

In essence, the deviations in this version of RViz from the one developed by Willow Garage are only to support wxWidgets-2.9 (which means using the version of propgrid that is now in the main wxWidgets code base).

For now, follow https://code.ros.org/svn/ros-pkg/stacks/visualization/trunk/rviz but drop the +carbon variants. Really, just make sure that you have universal (or i386) builds of everything. While I think a full 64-bit compile is doable down the road, there may still be troubles getting Ogre to work properly.

For Ogre, I just download and use the precompiled SDK from their website (currently using 1.7.3).

I skipped macports for this one and configured with $ ./configure --with-libjpeg --with-libtiff -with-libpng --with-zlip --with-opengl --with-cocoa --without-sdl --enable-unicode --enable-display --with-macosx-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk --with-macosx-version-min=10.6 --enable-debug --prefix=/opt/local --without-carbon --with-osx_cocoa --with-sdl $ make $ sudo make install

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why this works while the version with macports does not (even after altering the Portfile to use the same compiler version, architecture, optimization flags). For me, using the macports version of wxWidgets-2.9.2 leads to an error on wxGUIEventLoop::BeginModalSession () which occurs after the wxSafeYield() call in splash_screen.cpp... My plan for now is to do this source compile of wxWidgets and trick macports into thinking it's version is installed -- nice and hacky...

...

There are still some details of the new propgrid stuff that don't quite work right -- this causes the occasional crash. I'm hoping there are some other developers out there who can help find/debug/fix some of these errors (skipping the macports install of wxWidgets and building a version with debug flags enabled is invaluable for this).

Also, please use the github issues button to track problems/solutions.

I'm basing this code off of the newest version of rviz from trunk (i.e. Electric). If you are using Diamondback (like me), check out the 'diamondback' branch here where I've added the newest visualization_msgs and interactive_markers packages.