Begin main content

Native MacOS Umbrello in KDE4

One of the consistently popular pages on this website is my blog entry about building Umbrello on MacOS. Umbrello is the KDE UML modelling program. UML modelling programs are mostly surprisingly rubbish, so Umbrello being not rubbish is one of the better ones and it's open source to boot.

It has, though, been tough to build on MacOS even just under X11 (as witnessed by the long list of comments on my earlier blog with various configure recipies). KDE4 promises to resolve that with the native MacOS Qt support allowing Mac native applications.

The Mac KDE project has beta downloads of the (nearly) full KDE environment for Mac. All the bits you need are at http://mac.kde.org/ but note they are hosted on an ftp server that allows you to only download one file at a time, so let one finish before you start the next. No compilation or commandline trickery needed - just installing normal MacOS packages.

After installing the various bits you will find a KDE4 folder in your Applications folder. Here's Umbrello running on my Mac:

There are a few oddities - I could maximise the window, but not drag the window size to anything other than the original or the maximum, but otherwise it seems quite solid.

10:38 PM, 17 Feb 2009 by Mark Aufflick Permalink | Short Link

Umbrello review

Have you tried to do other UML diagrams than class diagrams? From my experience, some diagrams were not available, and other were missing some diagram elements. Or maybe it's the version I've tried (2.2.0)? Which version have you used? If you're interested, I've published my review of Umbrello here : http://lau-sdl.blogspot.com/2009/02/uml-modeling-tools-reviews-umbrello.html

by Unregistered Visitor on 02/28/09

Detailed instructions

Hi Mark, I'm a bit of a noob when it come to terminal installs bt I really need umbrello, is there anywhere you know of that has more detailed instructions to dl and install kde4.4 (with umbrello) ? that you link you posted is quite vague to newbies...

by Unregistered Visitor on 10/24/10

Add comment