Thanks entirely to Andrew Hunter’s labours, we now have Inform 7 running successfully on Mac OS 10.7, that is, Lion. As far as I’m aware, there are two issues at present:
(a) Apple chose to hide the “Library” subfolder of each user’s home folder in 10.7. It continues to exist, but is now invisible. In all previous versions of OS X, it was best practice for applications to place user-configurable settings inside this folder, and that’s where Inform stores user-installed extensions, and so on. (In ~/Library/Inform.) Apple apparently believes that users should no longer deal with applications in this low-level way, which is a problem for many high-end apps as they stand - BBEdit, Photoshop, and many others. It isn’t yet clear what we should do instead; we may one day have to rethink this when and if we adopt Lion’s sandboxing - as would be necessary if Apple forces all developers onto the App Store, something we are currently opting out of, but which may be a good idea in any case. But that’s a longer-term issue. For now, we’re simply telling people how to access Library despite its invisibility.
If you want to get access to this folder, you now have to use the Finder menu option
Go > Go to folder…
and type “~/Library”; alternatively, there’s a command-line command which will hack the Finder to restore the Library folder to visibility.
(b) For projects with the Glulx virtual machine setting, games would hang rather than play after a successful translation of the source text. This may be due to a bug in Lion’s implementation of NSPortCoding (I’m writing this as though I understood what that meant) - in any case, Andrew has reimplemented this part of the interface to avoid the problem, and we now have a fixed build, which I have uploaded here:
inform7.com/download/
This is still billed as 6G60 because the core of Inform - the compiler, the templates, and so on - remains unchanged. It’s the cleanest replacement I can make it, and people with ongoing Glulx projects should in principle be able just to replace Inform.app and carry on. Do please let us know if that turns out not to be the case.
(Work is indeed ongoing on a major new release of Inform, but this isn’t it.)
Graham