Does anyone know where the receiver files are meant to go on mac os x?
No, but, in general if you locate yourself (change directrory to; use the cd command) where they are, it will pick them up and put them where it actually wants them.
So basically if you compiled from a taraball it should have come with a bunch of them, in the main dir of the tarball. Both tarballs contain enough receiver files to get you started, so if you fire up the program while sitting right there it should pick them up and put them wherever it likes to put its datadir on your type of system, in a subdir named receiver of the data dir.
You could also try searching for wallet.dat, as where it ends up putting them should be in subdir named receiver of the dir where the wallet.dat is kept.
(If you have many coin types on your system, you'll need to guess which one is the devcoin one, hopefully the directory will have "devcoin" somewhere in its name to help you figure that part out.)
If mac os X is as similar to Linux as I have sometimes heard, then try looking for ~/.devcoin (a directory named .devcoin in the home directory of the user who runs devcoin.) The receiver files go in a subdirectoty named receiver inside that directory.
-MarkM-
Thanks for the response.
I have copies of the receiver files in several of those places, so I'm starting to think that that isn't the problem. The client is stuck at block 76221, which was mined well before I got devcoin, and I have only ever used it to get an address. I downloaded devcoin-qt from one of the links on devtome and built it with qt creator. This has worked fine for other altcoin clients, so I'm not really sure what I've done wrong.