Development of TeXworks has picked up over the last couple of months, with a drive to get to version 0.4. Several builds for Windows have been posted on the TeXworks downloads page, so testing there has been pretty easy. For Linux users, the instructions for building from source are not too bad, so anyone wanting to test on Linux has also been okay. However, Mac users face more a more difficult time. The last official binaries were posted in February 2010, and most Mac users don’t build software from the sources.

There was a post to the TeXworks mailing list yesterday asking for volunteers to get Mac binaries sorted out. This will not be a trivial process: Mac OS X is used on PowerPC and Intel chips, and the later covers both 32- and 64-bit cases. However, the aim has to be first to solve the more basic problem of getting the software to build at all! Bruno Voisin has managed that, but this is a test case and not really suitable for distribution.

As I’ve got a Mac, I’m having a go at solving some of the problems, but my experience with serious programming is pretty much non-existent, so whether I’ll be much help I’m not sure. So any keen TeX-using Mac programmers reading might want to take a look at the discussion and make suggestions (or of course provide some binaries and build instructions!).