There is now macOS builds for Maverick Model 3D 1.3.13 and 1.3.14. Downloads are available on at the Maverick Model 3D web page.

How not to update Qt

The most recent build of Maverick for macOS had been 1.3.12 released in 2019. Maverick uses the Qt GUI framework. The Maverick 1.3.12 release uses Qt 5.11. I wanted to update it to Qt 5.15 but Qt 5.11 was the last version to support macOS 10.11 which my MacBook Pro is limited to.

I forked the several repositories required for building Qt and patched it to cross-compile from Linux for macOS (as it must be built using a newer macOS SDK) and readd support for macOS 10.11. Building had some hard coded paths specific to my machine and it didn’t handle new Qt rendering classes correctly for macOS 10.11.

I thought I would also use this customized Qt for other applications I develop (in Toy Box). Ultimately I dropped interest in using Qt aside from maintaining Maverick. I don’t want to maintain Qt or feel like I need to ensure the customized source code (1 GB zip) remains available long term.

Continuing to use the existing version of Qt was a problem due to sort of breaking the install. I had updated Qt to a non-working version and Homebrew package manager was in a broken state. I did get Homebrew and Qt 5.11 working again at some point.

Conclusion

There is now Maverick 1.3.13 and 1.3.14 macOS builds using Qt 5.11. I don’t think they should be any worse than using Maverick 1.3.12.

These new builds are still made on a 2008 Intel MacBook Pro. Thank you to the people who donated toward new Mac hardware for being able to update Maverick. The money is still set aside for Mac hardware whenever I have enough.