Cinder

Mac OS X Setup

Let's walk through the process of getting Cinder running on your Mac OS X machine. If you don't already have Xcode installed, you'll need to start with that. It should have come with your computer's install discs, but if you don't have those handy (or you have an Xcode older than verison 3.1), you can download the latest version from Apple right here. If you don't already have a free ADC account, you'll first need to create one with Apple, which you can do here.


If you are using one of our packaged releases, you already have everything you need. However if you are building from our Github repository skip down to the advanced section.


Let's try opening and building one of the samples. From the Finder, navigate to the cinder/samples/QuickTime folder and open xcode/quickTimeSample.xcodeproj by double-clicking it. From the Run menu select the Run item. Xcode will take a few seconds to build the sample and then it should launch. You'll be greeted by a standard Mac open dialog box. Navigate to a QuickTime movie on your hard drive and open it. You should see your movie begin playing back in the app's window. Hit the 'o' key to open a different movie file, or you can just drag & drop one from the Finder.

QuickTime Sample

TinderBox

TinderBox is our GUI tool for creating Cinder projects quickly and easily. For the time being it is Mac only, though a cross-platform version is very high on our to-do list. In the meantime however, the Mac version can generate both Xcode and Visual C++ projects, and it's pretty handy. It is located at cinder/tools/TinderBox.app in our packaged releases. The first time you launch it, TinderBox will ask you to point it at the location of Cinder on your hard drive.

TinderBox welcome

Navigate to the top level Cinder directory and hit Open. If you ever need to change this later, you can do so from the preferences menu.

TinderBox Cinder Location

Whenever you launch TinderBox, it will start by asking you where you would like to save your new project, and what you would like to call it.

TinderBox Save Dialog

There are a number of settings in TinderBox, but the defaults will suffice for most users. Simply hit the Create button, and you'll have a complete Cinder project ready for you to start coding in.

TinderBox Settings
TinderBox Results

Especially as we continue to develop the documentation, the samples are the best way to get started learning Cinder. Don't be afraid to modify them and experiment. And if you haven't read Robert Hodgin's Hello, Cinder tutorial, you should go do that first.

Advanced - Building Cinder

If you are building Cinder from the source, available on our Github repository, you have just a couple of additional steps remaining. As an aside, if you are brand new to Cinder, you maybe happier just using one of our packaged releases.


First, grab version 1.42 of Boost, which you can do here. After dearchiving it, you'll want to take the resulting directory and put it directly into your Cinder directory, and name it boost. It should look about like this:

Cinder in Finder

Now let's build Cinder itself. Open up the Xcode project in xcode/cinder.xcodeproj. To build Cinder, select the Build item from the Build menu.

Build | Build

Cinder has both a Debug and a Release version. To build the Release version, change the active build configuration, which you can do from the project's pop-up menu depicted below (note that your version of Xcode might look slightly different).

Release Build Config

Now build Cinder again, via the Build | Build menu item (or just hit Cmd-B) If all of that worked, in cinder/lib/ you should see libcinder.a and libcinder_d.a.