Posts tagged: MACOS

Last fall I posted a blog entry titled “Serving Notice” about the inadequacies of OS X notifications compared to their OS <=9 predecessors, and about my hope that Apple would look to cool projects like Growl for interface ideas. Well, Apple is holding out on me, but good work on Growl continues and the list of applications using it is growing.

One of my favorites is the unassuming NetGrowler, a faceless app which uses Growl to display information about changes in your network connection. If you’re a laptop user like me, often changing networks many times a day, it’s nice to know the exact moment at which you’ve received your new IP; and if you deal with flaky wireless connections it’s good to know whether that IP is real or “self-assigned” (i.e. non-functioning).

The Apple Developer Connection recently posted what looks like a nice introduction to PyObjC. It’s even got QuickTime movies showing how to work with Interface Builder. Cool. The enthusiasm on the page is palpable:

PyObjC’s maturity is unmatched - it’s been around longer than even Apple’s Java bridge (it originated on NeXTstep).

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, the Cocoa-Java bindings are deprecated:

Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface. Therefore, you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features.

I have little to add to this but I’m sure glad it’s being said somewhere as visible as The Washington Post:

Either Palm should – finally! – update its Mac software so it talks directly to Address Book and iCal, instead of relying on the obsolete Palm Desktop for contacts and calendar management, or Apple should put some more effort into iSync so it doesn’t have this habit of dropping data on the floor at random times.

A lot of people who want to switch from Safari choose Firefox. There are some great reasons to do that, like the web developer toolbar. But ironically, I think a lot of Firefox’s Mac mindshare is a side effect of the gains it’s making (for good reasons) on Windows IE. Clearly it’s the best choice for most Windows users and most Linux/Unix desktops as well. But on the Mac there are other good ones.

Last fall I got all fired up about a fork of the GPL’ed Smultron editor for OS X which we called Saskatoon. The project died on the vine, so I zipped up the source code, posted it on Sourceforge, and sent an e-mail to the few dozen people subscribed to our announcement list.

In the aftermath, I noticed an interesting thing – with 30 downloads in one week, our “Activity Percentile” rose to 99.33%. Unless I’m misreading something, that means that only about 700 of the 100,000+ projects on Sourceforge were downloaded more than 30 times that week.