Posts tagged: MACOS

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.

This nifty little app just got installed on my PowerBook for extra peace of mind as I’m traveling next week. It’s a rescue utility designed for single-user mode. A couple of its functions are simple wrappers for fsck and diskutil repairPermissions; but it also can clean up cache and virtual memory files, and check the integrity of preference files. Read the reports from MacFixIt and xlr8yourmac for more info if you’re curious.

Best Mac developer book title ever.

Introduction

I’ve been a confirmed Mac Person since at least 1992, when I bought my first PowerBook, if not since 1984, when I first doodled in MacPaint.

But I’ve used a lot of different platforms over the years, from CP/M to MS-DOS to Windows to Classic MacOS to OS X. I play with other operating systems to retain perspective on MacOS’s strengths and weaknesses; to learn things relevant to my work as a web developer; to hedge my bets in case I decide to jump ship someday; and, of course, to waste time in classic geek fashion.