For Mac users the Cool VL viewer has in periods been a gem to access OpenSim grids, despite the viewer not being directly supported and built by the developer who in a blog post says "Don't expect me to spend a single cent (or loose my time) on anything to get a MacOS-X system to compile and test it onto…” , but rather compiled by a separate developer and published on the Cool VL Viewer announcement forum.
We earlier praised the viewer for making updates that sped up the login process, but with the latest build version 1.26.12.24 the viewer has unfortunately taken a turn for the worse by the original developer adding a third party memory manager that is both unsupported by any Apple development tools, but also increase memory foot print and CPU use of the viewer.
The increase in CPU use is not seen in the viewer itself but for the OS X Window manager where the Window Manager process is being interrupted much more often with the result every window on the desktop feels more choppy.
This adds to the removal of support for the native OS X File Open dialog earlier this year replacing it with an archaic interface for accssing files the likes of which Apple users have not seen since the Apple II pre 1984. Some users have tolerated the change because of other qualities of the viewer, but for regular Mac users the “enhancement” has been non-compelling.
The Cool VR viewer is built with the GCC 4.2.1 compiler that Apple discontinued in favor of the Clang and LLVM compilers first introduced in Xcode 4.3. It is also built with the Carbon framework that was discontinued in July 2012. Carbon makes it impossible to build the viewer as a modern, 64-bit OS X application.
We do not recommend any Mac user to take this latest update.