Running Hipmunk Playground on Mac OS X
I'm experimenting with using Haskell for a 2D game project in one of my computer science classes. It will probably involve the Chipmunk 2D physics engine (haskell has a binding to it called Hipmunk). Hipmunk comes with a demo app called the Hipmunk Playground, and it is a wonderful little demo of OpenGL and Chipmunk in Haskell.
Unfortunately, Mac OS X has some austere requirements for graphical applications. When I first ran Hipmunk Playground, the window would not respond properly to my keyboard and mouse inputs. The solution, it seems, is to wrap the Haskell-generated executable inside a well-formed ".app" directory. The (unrelated) wxHaskell library provides a nice shell script called macosx-app to generate the .app directory automatically. Here is a sample Makefile that I now use to build Hipmunk Playground and put it inside the wrapper directory:
# Make the Hipmunk Playground application for Mac OS XMacPlayground: Playgroundutils/macosx-app PlaygroundPlayground: Playground.hsghc --make Playground.hsRunPlayground: MacPlaygroundopen Playground.app
