Continuing with Day 12 of my December Adventure, I decided to make the most of the little momentum I’ve built up around OpoLua over the past few days and continue working on Qt builds.

I had an outstanding branch with macOS Qt builds from the early days of development, so I cautiously cherry-picked the relevant changes to see if it still built. Much to my surprise, it did! I followed my usual pragmatic approach of hand-crafting a simple build script rather than trying to use any magic tooling; something I have found to be significantly more maintainable over the lifetime of a project. You can check out the full change here if you’re curious.

At this early stage, I’m making no attempt to publish the binaries—we need to update the OpoLua license to conform to Qt’s requirements around statically linking before we can do that. For the time being this will help give us greater confidence that we’re not breaking things, and allow us to test our work.

Having broken the back of—at least—the macOS Qt builds, I found my thoughts returning to the incredibly absurd and unsustainable situation we’ve found ourselves in: centralized web-based infrastructure, lock-in, spiralling service prices, aggressive deployment of unproven AI, inflation, and skyrocketing consumer hardware prices. These trends concern me, and I’m worried that, even though I try to build open tooling, by targeting closed platforms like macOS and iOS, I play a part in perpetuating this imbalance.

Day 11 of my December Adventure proved another slow one, in spite of the Organiser lucky dip demanding that I yet again return to OpoLua to, ‘ship OpoLua Qt’.

Mac App Store

The day got off to a good start with Apple approving the macOS Catalyst build. This is now available to download from the Mac App Store. 🥳

Discovering OPL programs is easy using the built-in Software Index

OpoLua Qt

Shipping the new Qt version of OpoLua is something I’ve been wanting to do for some months now—it brings a comprehensive suite of command line tools and the OPL runtime to Linux, Windows, and macOS, and it’s about time we get it out there.

I ended up spending the day doing the kind of boring project administration that is pretty thankless in the moment, but makes many things easier going forwards. The primary change was to move the iOS app into its own subdirectory, making the Qt and iOS targets peers in the source code. I also took a moment to update the app icon on the website to use the original EPOC32 OPL icon—this makes things a little less Apple-centric and, over time, I’ll make more changes to make room for the Qt app¹.

This early OPL icon now feels far more suitable

With some of the preparatory work for OpoLua Qt in place, I hope day 12 will bring more visible progress: I’d love to have automated Mac, Windows, and Linux builds in the next few days even if, in the first instance, they’re just smoke test builds to ensure we can’t break things.

Day 10 brought a much needed pause in my adventuring to catch up on other aspects of life, with a couple of exceptions:

• I added ‘try out Plan 9’ to the Organser lucky dip
• The macOS build of OpoLua was rejected from the Mac App Store as ‘incomplete’—it seems like they couldn’t figure out how to use the app, which makes some sense as it’s fairly niche. I’ve updated the instructions and provided some additional example files. 🤞