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I use Win to play games and develop. Now I can get best from both worlds, in a single boot w/o virtual crap. For me bash in Win is win.

You mean like this?

Apple demoed Core Video on July 1, 2004
http://macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/07/01/wwdc.html

As for the APIs, Core Image and Core Video will be the graphic equivalents of Core Audio. For performance the key is that image processing will not be done in the CPU but in the GPU. Phil Schiller demonstrated the use of some of the more than 100 filters and transitions that will be supplied. He applied filters to live video using a simple application built on top of these APIs.

It shipped as a working OS X API in April of 2005.

It's the libraries that are fucked up: the .NET base libraries are basically the managed versions of the Win32 platform.

I think it's more they are copies of the Java libraries, then added onto as Microsoft does.

Compare Qt, which is built on C++ (their greatest flaw), but actually do magic along the nice library to make manual garbage collection look easy

I like it better when it's called Autorelease and the convention is that objects returned to you are always in said state so you don't have to do it manually...

and have an event system which is multithreaded by default

Why does the event system need to multithread? You get the same benefits by easily moving heavier tasks in the background.

With Qt, C++ looks more like a scripting language (with the byte-level stuff available if you need it), which is exactly what .NET would have needed to do.

I looked into it but it looked like kind of a hot mess to me. I spent a number of years doing C++ but I'm not sure I see this model as an improvement.

I hate that people keep repeating this, it's utter bullshit. Sure they put on too much extra paste, but it really does not affect the temperature very much at all. I tried this with my brother's machine (reapplying the thermal paste thinly and evenly, using the "good" stuff), and the difference was negligible, 2-4 degrees in our case. I'm not the only one to have the same experience.

More time than they can spare from playing lesbian sims, I reckon.

It includes a link to the awesome notebook page and it's timeless classic, "Memory layout is a bitch."

The depressing thing is that the editor who posted this story is not Zonk or kdawson or one of the other nitwits with zero reading skills. It's Rob Malda himself, the boss of this noble web site. I guess he's too busy playing Killer Lesbian Sims to actually pay attention any more.

there are already a lot of object models out there.

There's various incarnations of CORBA on linux, COM on windows, XPCOM which is used for firefox components, DBUS on Gnome and now KDE.

Component software is a Good Thing(tm), but all the various implementations essentially do the same thing, which is to allow a cross language interface to be specified in a way that doesn't require wrapper libraries to be written. Also, it is common to include some kind of remote procedure call specification.

>>In over a decade and a half, no one (but maybe Apple) came close.
Funny story, Apple uses COM.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that apple doesn't have a component model (you have to use wrapper libraries or objective-c++). In a few instances where this is a pain (plug-ins) they just use com.
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/04/16/com_osx.html

It should be noted that Apple's com implementation is *very* basic and not really meant for developing cross platform COM libraries like the article suggests.

Not as much fun as Bluetooth and ad hoc networks will cause. Just think of all the things malcontents could ruin

Thanks for the Verisign links, they were (frighteningly) informative.
I guess I'll wait until the GPGMail plugin is Leopard compatible. I was pretty impressed with Mail.app otherwise, but perhaps I'll just have to go back to old "reliable" Thunderbird, its Enigmail extension seems well-regarded.

"Whoever recommended you use S/MIME instead of GPG, probably considered security to be a very, very distant second priority"

I guess you must be right... but I wondered as I was reading such guides... what other priorities could there be?

[So the first step after starting Leopard should be to activate the firewall. The obvious choice to do so is the option to "Set access to specific services and programs", which promises more control over network traffic.]

This very early sentence tells us that these people know absolutely nothing about security in OS X. The firewall is already on - it is on by default. The first thing they actually did was to _allow_ incoming connections. Other than changing that setting, they did nothing to the default firewall rules. And they certainly didn't "activate the firewall".

Then they changed it to "block all incoming connections". This admittedly didn't do exactly what it said. However, Apple has never said that you get perfectly granular or absolute control over the firewall through the gui controls in Preferences. To really control any firewall, you have to know what you are doing, and modifying the appropriate unix config settings - in this case, for ipfw. See http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/03/15/firewall.html.

What Apple has done is to put into the preference pane a set of simplified security settings which make sense for most people running consumer or workstation machines. They've added more granular control to the simplified settings, which is impressive. But it would not be good PR for Apple if consumers who thought they had to "activate the firewall" messed around and disabled some key functionality.

If you are a network admin who really has to worry about these things, you will 1)be more knowledgeable, and 2)be running OS X Server, which I'm just guessing doesn't work quite this way.

For what it's worth, Apple has made a fairly idiot proof system. A casual user can't mess this up too much.

Well, 'under the hood' of OS X, it's really just Unix. As long as you have a decent knowledge of how Unix/BSD works, and a familiarity with a CLI, you can figure most everything else out.

For example, dig around in the packages of System applications, like the Dock (right-click, then select "Show All Applications"). All the graphical elements that the new Leopard dock uses are in there. I've changed those so I have a black dock (without the annoying curvy highlight), and white application indicators - much easier to see.

Also, a lot of the preference lists (plists) for applications are kept in your /Users/Your User Name/Library/Application Support/Name Of Application/ folders, and digging around in those with Plist editor can be fruitful (always make backups first, though).

Mainly, get as familiar as possible on Unix/BSD, and you will become more knowledgeable of OS X's underpinnings. Some good sites are Mac OS X Hints and O'Reilly's Mac Dev Center.

While third party lookupd agents were written, they were the exception rather than the rule." http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/08/05/a ctive_directory.html

Openldap works good for me.

What exactly is open about a mac?

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/13/ 1120215

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/08/ 2145206

Wait, maybe OpenDirectory is all-powerful?
"lookupd had some limitations, though. Designed in a time when libc calls expected to return full user records -- including crypt() passwords -- it has no specific authentication support. It is, additionally, a read-only architecture. While this is the norm for libc interfaces, it makes sense that in a world of evolving directory services to support write operations. Finally, lookupd is relatively difficult to extend. While third party lookupd agents were written, they were the exception rather than the rule." http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/08/05/a ctive_directory.html

Openldap works good for me.

I have not seen evidence supporting that claim. On the contrary, Bertrand Serlet, SVP of Software Engineering at Apple, was quoted in August deriding Windows activation.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/01/01/p aris.html

O'Reilly's (no relation) has a great site for Mac tech/programming at MacDevCenter.

Also, Server Logistics, a Mac based web hosting company with cred, offers pre-packed mySQL for free. Gotta love that Aaron Faby.

Yep. And in addition to that, the creator (well anybody) can also add predefined chapter settings, which is really nice for longer, multi-section files. O'Reilly had a nice little intro to Apple's ChapterTool the other day.

Open source stuff, installs, usually without any reboot,

Unless, of course, it doesn't.
While things are getting better, the number of times a configure; make; make install run works properly is still far too low. Adding to this are the far too high number of packages that toss an "oh yeah... you also need to download and install packages X, Y, Z, and libSnood first, then alter Makefile.in appropriately," at the installer (who may have no clue what the appropriate changes to make are). Admittedly, a lot of this is made better via package management systems, but they aren't exactly foolproof either. There was an entry over at Mac DevCenter about the subversion packages being broken for both Fink and DarwinPorts. That's the kind of stuff that's truly maddening.

If I do need help there is usually better documentation than the commercial stuff provides

Wow. What kind of crap products are you buying? Documentation is the single biggest annoyance that I have when it comes to OSS. People just don't want to take the time to write something that is both complete and clear to a newcomer. Again, things are a bit nicer now that a developer can throw up a wiki and rely on his userbase to write the documentation for him, but it's still no great shakes.

The most annoying example of this that I had lately? Trying to figure out how to use OpenMCL to compile some code as a standalone, native app. The ability to do this is listed as one of its features, but I'll be damned if I can find that information in the "documentation". This is covered (albeit in a less than stellar manner) in e.g. the Franz-Allegro documentation.

and practical help is much easier to get if I should need it.

Well, here you're pretty much right. There are an awful lot of mailing lists, newsgroups, etc. out there where you can get help in a jiffy. Some of them still suffer from the RTFM disease, but this is getting much better.

You really want to Google for 'using crontab' since that's the userland tool for setting up cron jobs.

If you run that search, you get this page as the first result, which is pretty good.

And crontab will use whichever editor you specify in your shell's EDITOR variable, the default is vi on some systems, but you can just as easily put a line or two in your /etc/profile file to fix this.

It would look like (correct me if I'm wrong here)
EDITOR="/usr/bin/pico"
export EDITOR

Obviously, you can replace the path to pico with whatever other editor you prefer.

I just set up a crontab task on my Mac OS X box at home to back up my Documents directory over rsync every night at 0330 to a remote machine, and send the results to me in an email on the local system, following these pretty-good instructions:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/07/02/t erminal_5.html
I don't guarantee that those instructions will help you on a non-Darwin based system, though. The mail trick requires sendmail to be installed and working, for one.

You can't record with an iPod?

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/06/22/i pod_recorder.html
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2004/04/23/cx_ah_ 0423tentech.html
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/118245 &mode=thread
http://createdigitalmusic.com/index.php?option=com _content&task=view&id=130

The BSD license allows big software companies to reuse code without contributing back to the larger community, and often without even an acknowlegement.

I don't really know for sure but it's my undrestanding that the BSD license requires anyone who takes BSD software and modifies it to acknowledge all previous software contributors and that it only allows the modification to be closed. Anyone out there who's used the BSD license can verify this?

One large (unnamed) software company has even resorted to paying other companies to attack both GNU/linux and the GPL.

That's not the fault of the BSD License, that's the fault of the one company. Other companies who use BSD software do contribute back, Apple has released Darwin under the Apple Public Source License (APSL) 2.0. For thier Safari browser Apple started with khtml and has contributed it's modifications back as well. Sometyme back there were a number of articles on /. about this with some complaining that Apple was returning a big mess of changes all at once. But the idea isn't to blame the actions of one or a few companies' on the license but on the companies.

An explanation of how Paris Hilton's Sidekick was hacked can be found here. A pretty interesting read.

//J

Have you checked out O'Reilly's MacDev Center? O'Reilly actually has a book specifically tailored to your stated need.

(Despite the similarity in our names, I am not related to Tim O'Reilly and have no financial stake in his company.)

Wasn't trying to have a contest. Just saying that I've used a few and have had the worst experience with Linux. But you have compiled a very impressive. Yes, there are more OSes out there than you can shake a stick at.

I'm not attacking Linux. For being free and developed mostly in people's spare time it's absolutely phenomenal. What I'm trying to get at is the fact that it really isn't as great as the Linux evangelists make it seem. Granted, many distros are quite user-friendly (heck, I dual boot WinXP and SuSE 9.1), but in my opinion they're just not ready for prime-time, wide-spread, desktop use. Give Linux another three years and it will probably be a viable alternative for the hundreds of millions of Windows users out there.

As for the server argument, Mac OS X Server comes preinstalled on a 1U Xserve with Postfix, Apache, and MySQL support.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/05/10/q t7.html?page=2

Better compression. Takes longer to compress though..

Quicktime 7 has h.264, and the next gen dvd players will use it..

I think Apple provides excellent documentation and tutorial at http://developer.apple.com/. I've always been a fan of the O'Reilly books, and they provide lots of free articles at their MacDevCenter. That should be enough to get you started.

did a search on google and found these reviews:

Sharp's Zaurus SL-6000L: A Free Software PDA
Zaurus with VGA Screen, Wi-Fi Now Available in U.S.
Sharp Zaurus SL-6000L Linux PDA
Review of Sharp Zaurus SL-6000
Sharp Zaurus SL-6000L Review

------------------------
here are all the reviews from customers on amazon.com.

I do wish that Apple would extend this further and add hooks to the context or "right click" menu in the finder like Windows does. Again, this adds to direct manipulation of the files. I love the fact that you can choose to enqueue a media file or play the file via the context menu in Windows. There is no such thing in Apple land.

What? Mac OS X has CMI's (Contextual Menu Items). There's not much installed by default but go and look for them and you will find more than you ever need. Installing a CMI means just dropping it into "/Library/Contextual Menu Items".

o'reilly's article - a little out of date now, but still valid.

and AFP548.com - run by the guy i took OS X server classes from.

We do cross-realm authentication:

http://www.4am-media.com/sso

Also find quite a bit of good data here:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/12/09/a ctive_directory.html

A good idea is to take Apple's Directory Services class http://train.apple.com./ The author of the above articles taught ours (and wrote part of the class.

They needed cheap transcoding to a lossless format for the AirPort Express. Read the streaming sound section of this article.

Have you looked into doing a Samba share. You can use it on a mac..

Some people might scare you with security issues, but that only applies to earlier versions. If you get the latests build, you will be safe.

there's a good article over at o'reilly's macdevcenter about getting album art for all your collection.

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2005/02/22/a lbumart.htmlhttp://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/ 2005/02/22/albumart.html

NextStep/Cocoa, on the other hand, actually stores the object graph into a "freeze-dried" file in Interface Builder (the famous NIB files), serializing all the objects and bringing them up in a flash when the application runs.

One of the interesting off-shoots from this system of having an archived interface is that the end-user can easily change the GUIs of their Cocoa applications without any programming simply by loading those NIB files into Interface Builder. Want to move the order of buttons in Safari around? No problem. Want to add a scrollbar and a font selection button to Stickies? Easy. The NIB files (the 'N' still stands for "NeXT") make interface hacking a breeze. You don't need access to the source code, as in the case of Cocoa applications, there is no source code for the standard GUI elements (that is, unlike most other GUI design tools, Interface Builder doesn't generate code based on what you've designed, but simply archives the live objects you've laid out inside of it to the NIB file, serializing their state information).

The one drawback to this system is that the NIB file spec isn't open. GNUstep uses a similar system with a different format because of this, which IMO is unfortunate. Still, your average user can become a UI hacker quite easily, making it very easy to customize Cocoa apps, making it one damn slick system.

Yaz.

TeXShop is an excellent Mac OS X application for those who want to give LATEX a try. Installation is easy and does not require using X11, but you'll probably need to learn some LATEX first.

I really think it's worth the effort.

TeXShop is an excellent Mac OS X application for those who want to give LATEX a try. Installation is easy and does not require using X11, but you'll probably need to learn some LATEX first.

I really think it's worth the effort.

apparently equals 36. Take a look in the left margin. Apple's finest.

IBM has published a paper on speeding up the boot process using something like a make to launch things in parallel that are not dependent on each other.

That sounds very familiar.

• Repairing priviledges
• Repairing the disk
• Forcing periodic maintenance
• Updating the prebinding

And a Web browser takes about half a page worth of calls to wininet.dll.

Or no code at all if you're a Cocoa programmer.

Pleased to meet you. I own a mac powerbook, and I'd like to tell you how much OS X sucks. Why?

These are some interesting points you make. I'd like to offer my input on them.

- Only one mouse button. Thats really debilitating. Sure, you can get a USB mouse for a desktop system, but on a laptop you are stuck having to hit the keyboard and the mouse button every time you want to right click. Not that there are ever any usefull funcitons in the drop down menus anyway - Mac applications are designed for people who can't use computers very well to be able to use. Those of us who want more functionality from their applications are stuck.

I'm using a $25 wireless USB mouse on my Powerbook right now and it works great. I hate track-pads on ANY laptop. I find hitting ctrl-and the trackpad button is a little counterintuitive at first, but eventually I just got used to it.

As for the contextual menu being useless by default, I rather agree... FruitMenu is a neat little app that makes the contextual menu completely customizable, and Menu Master does the same for drop-downs. Yeah, they're payware, but pretty inexpensive.

The phrase "Mac applications are designed for people who can't use computers very well to be able to use" makes me wonder if IHBT, but I'm going to continue on anyway.

- Window management is rediculous. You can't maximize a window without jumping through hoops. And those pretty eye-candy window control buttons in the tilte bar are way to small and easy to miss.

OS X is skinnable, so you can find a skin that makes those buttons bigger. Maximizing is different than Windows, and I agree can be a bit counterintuitive, but it's not a big deal in my opinion. Just click and drag the window to its maximum size... the Finder should remember it next time.

- The Finder is lame. Windows Explorer is crap too, but you can get a lot more functionality out of it if you know where to look.

I barely use the Finder anymore, as I use Quicksilver to launch all my apps and find things. Much easier that way. I actually find the opposite to be true now; the Finder's search function works seamlessly and quickly, while searching in Windows explorer takes too many steps for my taste. For an out and out Finder replacement, Pathfinder looks good, though I haven't worked with it enough yet to know if it's worth the money.

- Crashes just as often as my windows PC. I bought the thing for stability and have been very dissapointed.

I hate to be one of those guys that says "my Mac never crashes," but it never does. I had maybe three or four lockups back during 10.2 and none since. My uptime regularly runs into the months, until I need to reboot for security updates. And it's not like I don't try out a lot of new applications, either. It really should not be crashing that much, or at all, if it's running right. You might try doing some maintenance.

- Safari is way better than Internet Explorer on Windows, but far, far the inferior of Firefox

I find Firefox way too slow on OS X -- which is sad, because I like Firefox, but it's just too much of a hog on my Powerbook. I've gotten really used to working with Safari, and have very few complaints with it, even compared to Firefox (which I like a lot).

Don't get me wrong, I think Windows sucks too, and I do appreciate the OS X command line. But OS X's much ballyhooed GUI interface runs a far second behind windows in terms of actual utility.

So to anyone who is considering the switch, I say, dont. Take the extra money you would blow on a powerbook and buy yourself a nice Sony laptop.

I would have to respectfully disagree -- I think OS X takes

ActiveX/COM was ported to the classic MacOS by MS for IE/Office. At one time there was a couple Internet plugins that used it.

Apparently Apple themselves support COM on OS X.

They are some of the best PDA's around, but the manufacturer don't appear to want to sell them to anyone. See the review by a fellow Ukonian, "A Free Software PDA", for more on the latest models features (and scarcity). There are more in-depth reviews around too if you google.

If anyone knows where abouts I might get one...

I can tell you a thing or two about shareware, but not retail software. When I was getting started with my shareware biz I had to wing it. I have learned a lot, though.

Recently I found a site called Software Marketing Resource. It seems to be a comprehensive guide. There is also a good O'Reilly article on macdevcenter.com called The Do's and Don'ts of Shareware. It is Mac oriented, but the same principals can be applied to any platform. Make sure you read all three parts.

By far the most difficult thing for me has been finding contacts to send press releases, and then sending them. Tedious and nerve racking.

No, it creates a blank window that you can move, resize, close, etc, but it displays no text. In order to display the text, you'd have to either rename the window, put a text controller into the window and modify the properties of that, or display a dialog with the text of your choice. The easiest is to change the text of the window.

If he's just playing around, it's not surprising that he's having trouble. XCode and Cocoa are extremely easy to learn and use, but you actually have to do a bit of work to learn to use them. I would suggest looking at this article from O'Reilly on the subject. It's a basic text editor, which is more complex than Hello World, but should get him in the right direction.

=Brian

R these FA's if you think that Apache isn't built into every recent Mac. X11, however, is merely an option when you install the OS, but many of us have since it's so easy. Pheh! who modded that informative?

I'll grant you, anything more than the basic "dump files into a CD" type of burning is not nearly so intuitive. (And not anywhere in the documentation, because Apple's help files are just so *good*), but there is an article on how to do it at MacDevCenter

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/06/03/m acosxhints.html

C# and Java provide "reflection" APIs for implementing things like this. It would be quite easy to create a class entirely analagous to NSUndoManager in either language

No it wouldn't. Check the documentation; NSUndoManager intercepts *any* message sent to it, and stores it for later invocation on a different target. You can't do that with reflection, which only allows you to call one of a fixed number of methods.

Another example: there are third party libraries that add higher order messaging to Cocoa collection classes. They allow you to write code like "[[array select] isFroody]", which will return all objects in array for which the method -isFroody returns true. Again, the initial "isFroody" message is intercepted, then forwarded to each object in the array.