Updated Launcher for OS X users of FDS and Smokeview...

Hey Mac Users... I have a little treat for you.

First off, this assumes that you have installed the NIST folder from the distribution in the main Applications folder on your machine.

Look in the NIST folder for a sub-Folder of the FDS folder called Utilities.
Inside there is an application called "FDS_5_RC4_OSX_Intel.app"
Sorry for the long name, I will change it in the next release.
In the meantime, give it a try.

Here is how it is supposed to work...

*** INITIAL SETUP ***

Double click the .app file and a blank text window will pop up.
Find the Icon in the Dock, right click (Control+click) and then click 'Keep in Dock'.

Now click the Quit button on the text window.

*** FDS ***

Find a FDS_5 .fds input file and drag/drop it on the new Dock Icon.
(Try the activate_vents.fds case from the defualt location, /Applications/NIST/FDS/Examples/Verification/activate_vents.fds)

You should see the text window pop up and the output from FDS being updated there.

Now look in the Verification folder where activate_vents.fds is located. You should see a new folder based on the filename. In this case 'activate_vents' and inside of it is where all the output files from FDS are located.

After the run is finished, click the Quit button to close the launcher.


*** SMOKEVIEW ***

Now to view the results in Smokeview.
Drag the activate_vents.smv file from the output folder to the same Icon on the Dock.
Smokeview should open up the file and run as normal.
To close Smokeview, you can click the Quit button on the Launcher text window that opened with the Smokeview window.


*** ADVANCED SETUP ***

You can associate the Launcher application with .fds and .smv files so that they will open with a double click of the file name. Just right click (Control+click) a .fds file and pick 'Open With' > 'Other...' from the menu. In the Choose Application dialog, browse to the FDS_5_RC4_OSX_Intel.app file in the Utilities folder. Make sure to click the 'Always Open With' checkbox to keep this association. Now do the same thing with a .smv file. After that, test it by double clicking a .fds file then go into the output directory and double click the .smv file. NOTE: You cannot open an .smv file while the application is still running an .fds file, since it is already busy running FDS. Likewise you cannot run a .fds file when a .smv file is running.

You can also pass a set of FDS files to be run in series with a single drag/drop.
Select a few .fds files to run in a batch. (Shift-click or Apple+click) Then drag the set and drop them on the dock icon. This will run all the files you have selected in series, reporting the progress to the Launcher text window.

If you run into any problems with this launcher, please post them to the Support Issue tracker.
http://code.google.com/p/fds-smv/issues/list

I hope this makes running FDS and Smokeview on the Mac a little easier.
-Bryan