Core Image Fun House on Mountain Lion

All in all, I'm torn on what I think about OS X Mountain Lion.  If I'm lucky, I'll write a more detailed post explaining my personal pros and cons, but this post has to do with one of my biggest cons - the loss of Core Image Fun House (which I just wrote about in my last post).

The problem stems from Xcode 4.4.  It seems that Apple made some major changes to the IDE since the last version I had, including removing the /Developer folder, which was where Fun House, along with several other utility apps, resided.  The other utilities were retrievable through optional downloads from Apple's Developer site, but none of them seemed to contain Fun House.  I scoured Google for some sort of answer, and was able to confirm that it is, in fact, not being offered with newer versions of Xcode.  I still have no idea as to why, nor have I found anyone else who's wondering where it went (which was a reminder that the Internet doesn't always pounce upon every single change in the state of the world).

Thankfully, I did manage to find a solution. Fun House is an incredibly simple program, and it looks like Apple used to include it as sample code back with Leopard.  The code is still archived, meaning you can build it yourself a fresh copy of the executable.  Here are some general steps on how to do so:

1) Download the source code from the above link (look for the button labeled "Download Sample Code").

2) Unzip the archive, and open the project in Xcode (you should just be able to select File -> Open and open the folder itself).

3) Once the project is opened, it isn't runnable right away.  If you're on Mountain Lion, you're going to have project configuration errors to resolve.  If you click on the yellow exclamation point in the top-center of the IDE, it should bring up a list of errors in the left hand column.  Here's an image of what you should be seeing:

4) Double clicking on the second of the two errors will allow you to fix the settings.  You'll get a popup stating all of the changes Xcode will make.  It will look like this:

Click "Perform Changes".  If you get a message about enabling snapshots, choose whatever option you want.

Once the changes are made, the code should be runnable, with one final caveat. You have to run Fun House as a 32 bit app, rather than 64.  Most likely it'll be set to 64 bit by default, and you'll need to change that. In the top left corner, near the run button, you should see the something labeled "Fun House -> something something 64-bit".  Click on this to change it to 32 bit.  Then you can hit the run button.  If all goes well, Core Image Fun House will launch.

If you get a successful launch, you can move on to the final step - creating a .app file that you can run when you're not in Xcode.  In the left hand column, if you select the little folder icon, you'll get a resource view of your project.  Under the products folder, you should see the .app file.  Right click it, select "Open in Finder", and you can then copy the file to wherever you'd like.