And then, I was slacking off while studying for my final and out of nowhere I found PyInstaller‘s explicit support for PyQt and its recent support for the mac. And after trying, almost everything works out without much of a kink. Credit goes to ChrisWayg who produced an amazingly complete and up-to-date set of instructions to follow. I’m merely telling how my application did using his instructions (April 2010) and hopefully doing my part to draw more attention to the excellent PyInstaller.

My Application

A PyQt application to help photographers apply custom watermarks in a manual but in an assisted way.

Uses:

• PIL 1.1.7
• Qt4 4.6.2
• PyQt4 4.7.2
• SIP 4.10.1

All from MacPorts on Python 2.6.5, OSX 10.6.3.

Prepare PyInstaller

PyInstaller is kinda special in that it’s not installed anywhere. It’s just a bunch of Python scripts that work on stuff in place. While you’re at it, read the manual.

svn co http://svn.pyinstaller.org/trunk ~/PyInstaller

Or put it somewhere you want.

Then you need to build the bootloaders. If you’re making PyQt applications, you probably have XCode already. Anyway, you need it.

cd source/linux
python Make.py
make
cd ..
python Configure.py

Making your Application

So far, PyInstaller has a problem of not showing your application at the front when you run it. You can fix it in your own code by adding

form.raise_()

right after

form.show()

with “form” being whatever you called your instance of MainWindow().

Like with py2app, you gotta first make a “spec file”.

python Makespec.py --onefile /path/to/YourApplication.py

This will make a YourApplication/YourApplication.spec file in your PyInstaller folder.
To make it work on mac, add

import sys
if sys.platform.startswith("darwin"):
    app = BUNDLE(exe,
                 appname='WhateverYouWantToCallIt',
                 version=1)

at the bottom.

For my application, it made 70 files inside the .app file on default. –onefile makes it more neat and 3 times smaller in size! but it does make it a bit slower. If you care to make it as fast as possible, leave out that option but you have to fix a bug yourself.

Finally, build the application!

python Build.py YourApplication/YourApplication.spec

This will make your application and leave a YourApplication.app in your PyInstaller folder.

Fix the Application

Put your own nice icon on the application. Copy your graphic, right-click your application and choose Get Info, click the icon and paste the graphic.

Open the content of your application, open Contents/Info.plist, uncheck “Application is background only” and save. If you’re using a plain text editor, change LSBackgroundOnly to false.

There is only one last problem to deal with on mac. You have to copy the qt_menu.nib file.

locate qt_menu.nib

to find it. If you use MacPorts, it’s probably somewhere like /opt/local/libexec/qt4-mac/lib/QtGui.framework/Versions/4/Resources/qt_menu.nib

Copy it to your YourApplication.app/Contents/Resources

Boom, you can double click your application and it will run!

Ok, one last problem, I swear. When you run, it shows 2 icons on the dock… pretty ugly. This hack can fix it, but it’s not perfect as it leaves junk on your computer. Hopefully PyInstaller can address it soon.

Conclusion

The program is beautiful! You don’t have to worry about your Python plug-ins, your 64-bitness, anything (mostly). It just works. I have yet to figure out how to make 32-bit binaries on 64-bit systems and how to make upx work properly to reduce executable size. I’m currently running at 32mb for an application that really should be 1mb. But then again, it’s packaging a whole new GUI framework that doesn’t exist on the target computer with the application. Consider Skype (yes, it’s infinitely more complex than my thing), it is still 43mb.

1. Get the latest versions of PyQt and SIP. You need Qt installed of course.
2. Configure SIP using

python configure.py --arch i386

3. Configure PyQt using

python configure.py --use-arch=i386

4. Finally, make sure your python is running in 32-bit mode because current Qt doesn’t support 64-bit mode. Add

   export VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes

   to your .bash_profile in your home directory

5. If your Python still refuses to run in 32 bit mode, try

   arch -i386 python

Just got Snow Leopard and installed Boot Camp 3.0 on Windows? Boot Camp 3.0 is definitely a well welcomed update. The trackpad works much better now with 2 finger tap for secondary click, it finally works like in OS X. Even better, you can now access HFS+ without third party apps in Windows. Definitely nice for Windows 7 x64 users that MacDrive doesn’t even support. But one problem that seems to trouble people in the forums is that navigating to /Users/[yourname] in Windows shows an empty folder. You can’t access your music or pictures or anything from Windows.

One possibility is the presence of a .Xauthority file in your $HOME directory. Delete the file and you may access your home directory in Windows. Remember that running X11 will recreate the file. Delete it again.

To automate the whole process, consider creating a script that lets you boot into Windows worry free.

tell application "Finder"
	if exists file "~/.Xauthority" then
		delete file "~/.Xauthority"
	end if
end tell
do shell script "bless -mount /Volumes/[your Windows device]/ -legacy -setBoot -nextonly" with administrator privileges
do shell script "shutdown -r now" with administrator privileges

Put this in AppleScript editor and save it as a .app to make it executable. You can manpage the bless command for more options. You can also change the icon like any other app. At that point, you can invoke this via QuickSilver and a GUI dialog will prompt you for password.

It’s also possible that there are no .Xauthority files in the subdirectories so simply type in explorer the subdirectories to access them directly. ie: D:/Users/[you]/Desktop