Slashdot Mirror
Apple Developer Profile Changing?
rocketjam writes "According to InternetNews.com, Apple Computer is seeing large numbers of UNIX, Java and Open Source developers moving to its Mac OS X platform. Apple Vice President of Worldwide Developer Relations Ron Okamoto mentions that, in the three years since the introduction of OS X, 'people who have experience in those areas are showing a great interest in our OS. We're seeing a lot of first timers. It's really impressive.' The company said it has recently surpassed the 300,000 member threshold of registered developers. Apparently, the increase in enterprise code writers has prompted Apple to add more sessions focusing on enterprise and IT to its upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference."
I think alot of people are starting to make the move over to somehting that is more usable that strikes a very safe balance between a easy to use desktop and unix. It also shows the level of effort that apple has gone to make development and skill even easier.
As a college Freshman I made the mistake of buying a brand new Apple PowerBook 5300. At the time it was the first PPC laptop and was touted as being really great.
It was a total piece of junk and the worst $2300 I have ever spent. There ended up being a product recall (twice) on 5300s, but mine had already gone back and forth to Apple twice and they'd claimed both times that everything was 100% perfect. Obviously it crashed all the time for no reason which was why I had sent it to them.
Apple has gotten its act together a bit since then, but I still think you'd be better off with an x86 running linux or Windows.
Amazing magic tricks
True, if by "take their head out of their ass" you are referring to substantially lowering their prices. The Xserve is priced fairly competitively, but a G5 starts at $1800 and you can get a IBM ThinkCentre S50 for around $900. When ACME Corporation has to purchase 1000 new pc's, which do you think they will choose?
Have you tried any FTP clients built for X11? Of course, if you know UNIX commands then the terminal app in OS X is a good place to work.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Fugu is a fantastic open source SFTP client.
Personally, I think Transmit was worth the $25.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
There is a captainFTP with a free version, at least for educational purpose. And I am using Axy FTP via Fink
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I was the same way, until I learned my way around the api, a great resource, if you don't already know about it is the Cocoa Mailing lists. http://cocoa.mamasam.com/ is a nice archive. I do agree it would be nice it some parts of it were more modernized (e.g. a nice Quicktime API) but im not sure when/if that will ever happen.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
The thing is--with Mac software--you don't need multiple mouse buttons any more than you need multiple letter keys.
Why don't we see anyone shouting for multiple X, C, V, or Z keys because it's too hard to cut, copy, paste and undo the way things are now?
Still stuck on the mouse button issue? Just go buy one... any generic two-button USB mouse will work. One of my co-workers prefers the Microsoft Intellimouse Optical on his Mac. It works fine. Scroll wheel, too. If you want one, go buy the kind you like. You'll be even happier with that than the $2 branded Logitech rip-off that Dell gives you.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I wrote an article on this a while back. Someone else in this thread asked why would anyone lock themselves into a proprietary development platform when Linux is available. Well, it ain't necessarily so proprietary.
Beyond the obvious allure, i.e., OS X is the only easy to use desktop Unix that natively supports the major productivity applications (i.e., Microsoft Office). That combination is just not available. Yea, OpenOffice is nice, but for those that *need* 100% compatibility, it's not ready for prime time. Just like linux for the desktop.
Anyway, ever since NeXT opened the developer spec for OPENSTEP, GNUstep has been doing a great job of recreating a compile compatible version. What this means is that Cocoa really isn't as proprietary as you might think because it sticks to the OPENSTEP spec. The result is apps developed for GNUstep can be compiled for OS X's cocoa with relatively little fuss or muss. In essence GNUstep is someone Mac compatible.
Personally, I wish people would dump GNOME and KDE and adopt GNUstep with display ghostscript, a unified class structure, a great GUI, and Linux underpinnings; it is OS X for Linux. Ok, it's more like NeXTSTEP for Linux. Anyway, if anyone takes it mainstream it could mean big problems for Apple.
However, if you're writing a GUI application, the APIs are totally different.
And demonstrably better. Don't make me haul out the fact that a fella named Tim wrote the world's first web browser in just a few weeks on a NeXT cube using an API that's basically identical to the Cocoa API family for Mac OS X.
I'm in that boat. I got a WWDC scholarship to go to Apple's developer conference, and my application was basically "UNIX UNIX UNIX". I think they see this as a major new market: We can't get all the Windows users to switch, why not take a stab at the already-busy niche market? If you took a look in the OS 9 days just about everything popular that was a hobby OS is a close UNIX or direct UNIX deritivative. BeOS, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. If all these hobbiests are willing to do it for free and fun, why not take advantage of that and make it even better?
I just started my mac os x programming. I wrote a lengthy objective-c tutorial to get familiar with the language, and I'm going to write similar tutorials for AppKit and AppleScript. (I like to write tutorials as part of my learning. Helps me and others at the same time I think). It's a great language and environment based on what i know so far. Much much nicer than C++ coding.
- tristan
People are verifiably moving to OS X.
:P
You: "Uh, no they're not, they're moving to OSS. I have no other reason for this statement other than I said so."
Meanwhile, what we're talking about is Cocoa and the Apple Developer Tools.
The only proprietary hardware components in a Mac are the motherboard (logic board) and the CPU.
Everything else is standard - hard drives, memory, expansion ports (firewire, ethernet, usb) graphics cards (with slight ROM modification to work with open firmware), optical drives, PCI cards...
You can pretty much stick anything from awhitebox PC vendor in to a Mac. I buy all my memory from Crucial.com and it's the same stuff that goes in PCs.
I bought my iBook's new internal HD from a PC vendor and it works with no problems.
The Mac is no more proprietary than an Intel or AMD system - you can't interchange CPU/motherboards between the two manufacturers, but you can transfer everything else inside the case.
The only difference is that you can't run Apple's OS on anything other than Apple. You can, however, run other ones if you so choose - Linux, Darwin etc.
Sigh. To reiterate. Macs are not more expensive than PCs by more than about $100 for any given model. Compare like to like. Don't look at some cheapie eMachines rip-off for $400 at Wal-Mart and complain that a nice dual G5 tower is $2500. Instead look at something like a high end IBM or HP box that is going to have components of comparable quality to those of the Mac, and suddenly the prices are almost identical. I've done casual comparisons of Macs, Dells, and IBMs every quarter for the last 3 years and in some instances the Macs are even cheaper than the PCs.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
On the other hand, Visual Studio is such an amazingly great product that those who /do/ end up buying it tend to be happy enough to stay. Due to Microsoft's market domination, I doubt they'd gain much developer mindshare by making VS.NET a free download. The Academic version is already only $90, and most businesses don't have much difficulty justifying the cost of the development environment.
I agree to a degree (seriously, I did not intend that to rhyme).
For example; NSString has methods for getting a UTF8String, getCString, fileSystemRepresentation, etc, but there is no method for "pascalString" or "initWithPascalString".
That's why you use a cool Objective-C feature called categories. They let you add methods to any existing class (without subclassing anything). I've written a good number of convenience-methods for NSMutableString & NSFileManager.
Categories are also pretty handy for beefing up interface-object classes.
However, Apple has pretty much always had a superior OS [..]
C'mon! By "pretty much" you mean "except for every release of MacOS and the original OS X?". If so, yes, I guess they've "always" had a superior OS.
That slow-as-molass cooperative-multitasking non-MMU OS where "multitasking" was more like "select a program to run up front", that was kicked up and down the street by AmigaOS, is just a figment of my imagination I guess.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
the single button touch pad
Ask, and thou shalt receive.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
I would suggest Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass. Its not the newest book out there on OS X development using Cocoa, but Aaron knows his stuff and wrote one hell of a good book.
Can I Play With Madness?
I'm gonna blow the 5 mod points I allready spent in this thread.
Dude, you're totally off. Metrowerks DID drop Mac Codewarrior. sure, they still have the product, but it took'em ages to upgrade it to decent OSX compatibility. Powerplant is nowhere. There's no decent resource editor. The docs are completely outdated as are the header files.
No, they didn't drop it, they just left it hanging where it was. Remember that Metrowerks is now owned by Motorola, who have a rather tacky relationship with Cupertino after the G4 debacle.
they did not choose Windows as new platform, but rather went for the embedded PowerPC market.
lookup your facts before spewing nonsense
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
I wouldn't really describe NeXTSTEP as basically identical to Cocoa. It's Cocoa's ancestor, and many things are carried over, but Cocoa has an awful lot that NeXTSTEP never did.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Is GNUstep really *that* much different from Cocoa?
They're trying really hard to track features with Cocoa, but yes. GNUStep's still using Display Postscript, for one thing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Right now, you can write Cocoa apps using Obj-C, Java, Python, Ruby, F-Script, and LISP (!)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I love numbers like that.
I'm a registered Apple developer. I don't have a Mac, have no immediate plans to buy a Mac and am definitely not going to be doing any Mac-specific programming anytime soon.
But I had to register to download Rendezvous source. Which doesn't bother me, just don't call me an Apple Developer!
Bryan
There's also a book by Scott Anguish, and one by Bill Cheeseman, but I haven't read either of those.
I have.
Bill's book is excellent for people who learn well from a task-based, cookbook approach.
Anguish, Buck & Yactman is a pretty comprehensive "best practices" tome, which is worth reading no matter how much Cocoa experience you already have.
I will also give a thumbs up to the new Stephen Cochan book on the Obj-C language, which AFAIK is the first book to teach the language as a whole as opposed to its delta from ANSI-C.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/
Is this rock and roll, or a form of state control?
To answer your questions, Cocoa Java is pretty good, not as good as Cocoa w/ ObjC, but still damn good. Cocoa is refrence counted and can also be "GC'ed" (via autoreleasing). Comming from Java, I actually prefer the refrence counting over GC but that is just me. You can create your own cocoa 'controls' (called Views in Cocoa speak), and they damn pretty damn easy just need to implement the drawRect: method. As for the web browser stuff, not that I know of, and funky datatypes, nope, just stuff like, NSImage, NSString (remember Cocoa came from NeXTSTEP), and yes, you can pass object references.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Look in /Applications/Installers (from memory). Can't remember if it was the eMac or iMac or such, but there was a dev tools CD image in there along with AOL or some such. You very well might have it on your system and not even know it.
Whaaaa? My 12" PowerBook most definitely has cursor keys, in the lower right-hand corner of the keyboard. Take a look at Apple's PowerBook page and observe the from-above picture of the PowerBook. The cursor keys are there, in the standard inverted-T layout.
Hell I've run iTunes on a 400 Mhz P2 and the performance isn't nearly as bad as some people say. Sure visualizations arn't super smooth like on macs or higher end PCs, scrolling through the list is a little jerky, and the launching time is longer than normal, but those are the only things I've noticed and they don't bother me, I've seen much worse performance in media players (such as MusicMatch).
The nice thing about MIT is that most of their computing system is unix based. There are some windows machines and some macs in the administrative offices etc. but practically as a rule (except for the microsoft funded teal-laboratories) everything runs on athena (which is a customized solaris/linux). This means that running a unix-variant can actually be an advantage.
From experience I can say that at least for the first two years it really doesn't matter what kind of a computer you have (as long as it does web browsing and word processing) and even after that you're likely to not have to worry about it. Matlab and maple might be nice to have but everything is available in the public clusters that are practically everywhere.
Also, mit definitely does not emphasize microsoft tools. Your programming classes are either on scheme or java and those run on just about everything. I have neighbours who are running everything from linux to mac to solaris to windows to no computers and are doing just fine. What's more, as much as possible is done with open tools. You're likely to be using gnu tools a lot of time. As a matter of fact openoffice is the standard office environment, netscape the web-browser and the use of emacs/latex is much liked, and you're likely to be running all this on a linux box(or solaris).
In general, people pretty much get to use the tools they are comfortable with and there are as little restrictions imposed by the school as possible.
And majors vary too.. There is a lot more than just technology. I came to mit thinking about majoring in cs now doing mathematics (with some cs) and thinking of concentrating in economics and finance... So far it hasn't really matter what kind of a computer I have had (well, business school tends to have ms-bias, which is understandable).
- The Mach microkernel, derived from 4.2BSD
- BSD kernel, based on 4.4BSD and FreeBSD 3.2. (This runs in kernel space, so it's not a true microkernel.)
- IOKit, a new I/O driver architecture
Unix utilities:- some derived from FreeBSD
- and some from NetBSD.
That lot together is open-sourced under the name Darwin.On top of it are:
- Aqua, the user interface.
- Quartz, the 2D graphics subsystem (based on PDF, derived from NeXT's Display PostScript).
- QuickTime, for playing multmedia.
And the APIs:- Classic, Mac OS 9 running as a stand-alone app within OS X.
- Carbon, an API extracted from the older Mac OS's Toolbox.
- Cocoa, an OO API based on OpenStep (a port of part of the NeXTStep API).
- Java
- AppleScript
HTH...Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
The issue is the firmware on the PCI card. For the Mac, it has to has to work with Apple's flavor of OpenFirmware (which, btw, is less proprietary than common x86 BIOS'es). This is really only an issue with PCI devices that need to support booting. An network card, for example, doesn't need that kind of support.
Some cards have both - x86 and OpenFirmware. For example, most ATTO SCSI cards can work in either. Apple's Fibre Channel cards are LSI Logic FC HBAs and will work in x86's, Sun UltraSPARCs, etc. Most of the stuff you see at CompUSA only has x86 specific firmware - so for booting, they're not going to work.
If you were going to design a system that work with multiple processor architectures, OpenFirmware is about as open, cross platform, and diverse as it gets. It's actually the x86 side which is proprietary.
And Perl, and AppleScript. (John, how could you of all people forget to mention ASK???)
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
OS X is basically the latest version of NextStep/OpenStep. NextStep always had a BSD core (I believe it started with 4.4 BSD). This article provides a history of Apple's operating systems, including the transition from NextStep to Rhapsody to Mac OS X.
Apple's own documentation might be just as good:
Reference Library
Cocoa
Getting Started
Fundamentals
API reference
Must read:
The Objective-C language
Overview of a SimpleCocoaApp
Developing Cocoa Objective-C Applications: A Tutorial
and in the case of Eric, direct fascists: Eric moderates the Cocoa-dev mailing list, and anyone he doesn't like gets the boot. [...] The worst of it is that all of this is taking place with the implicit nod of Cupertino: for example, Cocoa-dev is run by Apple themselves.
:)
I think you've got your lists mixed up. Erik doesn't moderate cocoa-dev. He did moderate cocoa-pro, but that list was decomissioned when I took over Cocoa Dev Central from him. He's been a friend of me for a while, so he can't be too bad.
I trade emails with Scott Anguish occasionally and have met Aaron once. Neither strike me as rude. Aaron was extremely friendly, in fact. Scott A. has always gone out of his way to help people on the lists I've been on.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I would just like to point out that even when writing GUI apps, non-GUI C, C++ and Java libraries can be compiled and called from Cocoa pretty much as is. So if you have most of your business logic (Model) already in one of these languages, and factored out of the GUI, you pretty much just need to build the GUI in Interface Builder (View) and write a thin layer of Objective C "glue" code to connect it to your library (Controller). The new Controller classes in Panther mean even less glue code is necessary.
So even when building a Cocoa GUI app, you can still get a lot of reuse from existing libraries.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Well, we don't really advocate writing Cocoa apps in AppleScript. AppleScript is more for controlling apps than implementing them, as it were.
Of course, if you want to get a GUI around some CLI app, AppleScript is a very fast, easy way to do that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."