I’m new to ImageMagick, and pretty inexperienced when it comes to building and compiling applications in the Terminal on a Mac. I have been spending a good portion of the last day or so trying to get what I want by trying various builds of ImageMagick, but with little success.
I’m using LiveCode to create a Mac program that processes images - blurs, some composites etc., and after finding that achieving that kind of effect with LiveCode was taking longer than the last Ice Age to blur a 380x380 pixel image (ok, overstatement there - but you could certainly make a cup of tea while you waited), I decide that you really won’t want to wait for it to chug through a 5mp image, which it may have to when the output button is clicked.
So I came across ImageMagic. It does what I want (and a whole load more than I could comfortably code in LC - which is great - it’s given me ideas), so I installed it on my Mac using MacPort as suggested.
However, I’ll eventually want to put my application into the wild, which is where it all starts to fall down. What I want is a completely self-contained build of ImageMagick in my application (LiveCode allows you to embed files & folders in the build - I have another smaller app that does just this with ExifTool very sucessfully)- one which will not throw a shoe the moment it’s put on a Mac that has never seen ImageMagick before, or even had XCode developer tools installed. What I don’t want is to include a whole subset of instructions for Mac users to crack open the Terminal and type weird stuff before they get going. I know IM is used in Photoshop plugins, and you don’t get instructions about the Terminal when installing using those.
So, what I’ve been trying to achieve is a build of ImageMagick that will support PNG and JPEG files, but does not rely on external libraries which may not exist on the host machine. One where I can put wherever I want on my HD, and it will work. One that I can put on my wife’s Mac (which is as vanilla as you can get when it comes to command line activities) and it will work. One I can put on the internet for anyone to use and it will work. And by “it will work” I mean “it will work when the user has dragged the app onto the HD and double clicks on it to start it”. Windows users have a .exe file they can use, downloadable from the ImageMagic site. It answers all my problems - it will do the job, it will handle PNG files, I can bury it in the LiveCode project and forget about it. However, it’s not Mac friendly. I wish there was a similar lump of code for us Mac folk to just download and use like that. It seems from various posts I’ve been reading on this forum that this isn’t likely to happen, which is a shame.
I’ve been digging around to try to find what I need. I thought I had something viable on Saturday, but it seems less viable than I thought today (sudden errors about missing delegates when I try on another Mac), so I have been trying again. I’ve been following the various examples on this page today:
viewtopic.php?t=13145 - I have lost count of the number of times I have build IM, and then discarded it because it doesn’t work.
I’ve tried pretty much all the examples on that page I’ve linked to - those form ImageMagick and those form others. I _think_ that the one posted by garside on that page has given me what I want, but I do know that if it use the command
Code: Select all
otool -L <path to convert>Is there a completely portable build of IM that can be downloaded? If not, are there any easy to follow definitive instructions that I can follow?
Thanks.