XO Wavers,

I got an e-mail from someone who really wanted to try XO Wave, but was
stuck with OS X 10.3, because of some older hardware he had. (I have heard of
other people being stuck with 10.3 because of some QuickTime issues). XO Wave
CAN be run on OS X 10.3, but there are some problems, and it is not a supported
platform, so you have to realize when you try to use XO Wave on OS 10.3, you
won't get official support. Still, lots of people want to do professional CD
Mastering on OS X, and there aren't many alternatives to XO Wave, so here's
some info on using XO Wave on OS X 10.3:


Why 10.3 will probably never be supported:

XO Wave was originally developed on Linux and FreeBSD. I bought a cheap used
mac and installed OS 10.3, and tried working with it. Unfortunately, I found a
number of problems with their Java engine which, for a while, really slowed
down development. When OS 10.4 and Java 1.4.2 came out, many of the problems
went away. Since I had already spent a long time with 10.3 and really never got
it to work, it's not likely that something I do will make it work now. It is
possible that apple will port Java 1.4.2 to OS 10.3, which would probably fix
the problem, but my impression is that Apple really wants us all to upgrade to
10.4, rather than fix the problem, so I wouldn't count on it.


What issues you will have on 10.3:

The biggest problem with OS X 10.3 is this: sometimes, often from the moment
you start the program, the menus (along with all associated keyboard shortcuts)
become completely non-functional. The worst part is that they are not all
greyed out, so you might think you saved a file, even when you didn't.

The Workaround:

One user suggested the following work-around:
+As soon as XO Wave opens, goto XO Wave:Preferences.
+In the preferences window, select "Show Advanced settings"
+then select appearance and change the look and feel to something else, like
"Plastic".
+click "OK"

This doesn't always work, of course, because you need the menu system to get to
preferences. So you can either try starting XO Wave a few times until you can
poen the prefs window, or you can use this more complex alternative:

Open the terminal program and start a new terminal. Type this command to delete
your existing preferences:

rm ~/.xowave/settings.2.props

Then, run the following two commands to set the look and feel to something else
in the default preferences:

echo "Appearance_Look_and_Feel=com.jgoodies.plaf.plastic.PlasticLookAndFeel" >
~/.xowave/settings.2.props
echo "Appearance_Theme=javax.swing.plaf.metal.DefaultMetalTheme" >>
~/.xowave/settings.2.props



At this point, XO Wave will look a little weird, because you'll have the
menu-bars appearing in the windows rather than at the top of the screen, and
you'll have a generally un mac-like look and feel, but most features will
probably work. Keep in mind that by doing this you'll be waiving you right to
official support, both because you are running OS X 10.3 and because using
alternate look and feels is unsupported.

best of luck!

bjorn

-------------
Bjorn Roche
Check out my CD Mastering Software
for Mac OS X : http://www.xowave.com