Im running 10.4 dev tools on a 2.5ghz G5 and the GL shader builder as OSC put it "crashes left and right". I bought that orange book OpenGL SL by Randi J Rost. Should I just type source in text-edit then copy paste?

That's what I've ended up doing, to save myself misery when it crashes. It's still no guarantee of safety -- often it'll crash when you paste. If you're going to be doing a lot of work, it might be best to set up your own app with a "reload shaders" menu item

ack, well I guess thats that.

I'm surprised noone has mentioned nVidia's Cg. It cross compiles to DirectX & OpenGL vertex/fragment programs (although not GLSL). It is very similar to HLSL and is (as far as I know) the only high level cross platform solution.

You can download it here. With Cg you can target GL_ARB_vertex_program & GL_ARB_fragment_program.

FYI I'm new to Mac dev. Recently picked up a 15" PB w/ 128meg 9700 mobility. Cg is on my list of tools to install next.

kmeson Wrote:I'm surprised noone has mentioned nVidia's Cg. It cross compiles to DirectX & OpenGL vertex/fragment programs (although not GLSL). It is very similar to HLSL and is (as far as I know) the only high level cross platform solution.

You can download it here. With Cg you can target GL_ARB_vertex_program & GL_ARB_fragment_program.

FYI I'm new to Mac dev. Recently picked up a 15" PB w/ 128meg 9700 mobility. Cg is on my list of tools to install next.

The Cg compiler is less than optimal. In fact, it does a pretty terrible job overall. It doesn't always work with every renderer, and the code it generates is pretty awful. Far too many unnecessary swizzles, registers, and instructions. Best to just hand-code assembly for ARB_VERTEX/FRAGMENT_PROGRAM, which is actually quite a bit easier than it seems.