Customising a Mac OS Installation

This section applies if you installed Jim on an Apple Mac computer. It describes how to tailor the installation if the programme will not start, if you wish to improve the performance of Jim, or if you want to run Jim's stand-alone tools in batch (text-only) mode.

The install folder for Jim 9 is /Applications/Xinapse/Jim9. Open a terminal window and change directory to the install folder:
cd /Applications/Xinapse/Jim9
In the installation folder you'll find various application folders, such as the one for the main Jim application (Jim9.app). There is one application folder for each the applications in the Jim suite.

To customise the behaviour of one particular application, for example Jim9, change directory into the application's Contents/Resources folder:
cd Jim9.app/Contents/Resources
In that folder you will find a file called (in this case) Jim9.sh, which is a shell script used to launch Jim. You can edit that file using your favourite text editor. Inside the Jim9.sh script file you'll see various comments that allow you to customise the behavior. For example 

# Set the maximum amount of heap memory that the program will ever consume as a percentage
# of the installed RAM.
# If the program gives messages about not having enough memory to load an image, then increase
# this value. To conserve memory, reduce it. It must be a number between 0 and 100.
MAX_MEM_RAM_PERCENTAGE=75
You may wish to change this line, for example:
  1. If you receive messages from Jim that it does not have enough memory to load images, or if it hogs memory. The setting MAX_MEM_RAM_PERCENTAGE=75 allows Jim to use up to 75% of the installed memory. You can increase this number if you find that Jim runs out of memory, or reduce it to reduce the amount of memory used byJim.

  2. If Jim cannot find the license file, you can tell it explicitly where to look. Change the setting of:
    LICENSE_FILE=${JIM_HOME}/license.txt
    to tell Jim where to look for the license file.

You can customise each of Jim's stand-alone tools in exactly the same way above, to tailor the amount of memory used, etc. Do this by editing the appropriate shell script file for the tool.

Running the Stand-Alone Tools in Batch (Text-Only) Mode

Also included in the Jim install folder is a sub-folder called Unix, which contains shell scripts that allow you to run tools either in graphical (GUI) mode or in text-only (batch) mode. Make the scripts executable, and copy them all to /usr/local/bin using the following commands:

cd /Applications/Xinapse/Jim9/Unix
sudo chmod 755 *
sudo cp * /usr/local/bin

One of these scripts (called RunTool) is a master script that contains comments and instructions on how to change certain settings for Jim and the stand-alone tools.

Open the script RunTool (in the folder /usr/local/bin) using your favourite text editor, and customise it using the instructions written in the script.

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