Sunday, September 30, 2007

Bad Intel-Only Icon for Minefield

Someone posted a while back about this icon. I thought they said they were not sure what caused it. I got one of these and saw what it was.



This is what happens when you have an app that is built only for Intel, and you are looking at it on a PPC system. It is not going to run. If it is built "fat", then it has both an Intel executable and a PPC executable hidden inside its bundle directory and it will run on either.

This particular app was the Mac OS X 10.4.x app put up by Chris Double for his SVG Video Demo.

Just FYI.

3 comments:

Chris Double said...

Interesting, can you do a PPC build on an Intel Mac? I'll look into how to do something that supports both.

Unknown said...

Yeah, it was me who put up the question (my website is dead at the moment, which would explain why you couldn't find it back). I know that this is one of the things that can cause it - but just one of them. I have a build that won't start from Finder (only if I set additional environment variables) because it's a xulrunner app that lacks libxul (see Bugzilla bug 395586). This also gets the icon. While the icon is 'right' in a way (it's impossible to start the app as-is), there's still nobody who seems to know exactly when it appears, that is, what exactly Finder checks for before displaying it. Apple's developer website doesn't seem to have documentation on it at all.

Anonymous said...

Chris, see http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mac_OS_X_Universal_Binaries so much fun to be had getting it working!

And the icon doesn't necessarily mean that the app can't be started. I've had it on a perfectly runnable app. It even appears in the app in the dock icon.