Many open source community experiments succeed. One that met with at least partial failure is the OpenDarwin project.
That project sought to create a lively open soure development community around the underlying layers of the Macintosh operating system, with commity-written software eventually findings its way into the Macintosh.
OpenDarwin:
OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a
development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as
well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was
meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and
features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for
inclusion in the canonical sources.
OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and
moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this
reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
Someone has pulled off a neat coup and ported the original Adventure game into a Dashboard widget that runs on the Macintosh (OS 10.4 or later).
gandreas:products:Advent:about:
Explore the depths of Colossal Cave with the grandfather of all text adventure games. Includes an enhanced UI featuring inventory, exits and scores.
I think this demonstrates just how much capability can go into a Dashboard widget on the Mac.
When I first heard about this game (Advent) back in the late 1970s, it sounded almost like magic.
Then a couple years later, I heard about Zork. I read an article about it in
Creative Computing
magazine. Zork sounded even more amazing, and the article was very educational.
That article was the first time I ever heard about object-oriented computing, object
properties
, and so on. This was back around 1981!
Anyway, the Mac is becoming such a great gaming platform, even the Dashboard can play some heavy duty RPGs now.
Macintosh users have reported a load of problems with Mac OS X 10.4.8 to Mac troubleshooting website
MacFixIt.
Some Mac users have reported some pretty
serious problems after installing the Mac OS X 10.4.8 update.
Probably anyone who has it or is about to install it should read
MacFixIt - Special Report: Troubleshooting Mac OS X 10.4.8.
There is a huge 40+ pages long PDF document available for download on that page above too. Might be worth a gander for interested Macintosh users.
I just finished going through a training blitz consisting of 15 very short screencasts. Each screencast had an audio narration by a guy who obviously knew what he was doing, and knew how to explain it quickly and simply.
Anyone who is programming the Mac, or contemplating it - needs to take a look at these videos. They teach the viewer/reader how to use Apple's powerful Core Data facility of Cocoa really fast, using the revolutionary Xcode 2 IDE. The sample program that is swiftly created is written in Objective-C, the primary language for writing Cocoa programs on the Macintosh.
In the 1970s, following publication of some articles on good/bad programming practices in the late 1960s,
structured programming
became all the rage. Structured programs were modular. They could be created and modified swiftly. All that was required was a little clear thinking, discipline, and organization.
In the 1980s, the computer programming field was revolutionized by OOP (object-oriented programming). OOP was basically structured programming on steroids. The buzzword MVC (model-view-controller) started getting bandied about as the ideal way to write GUI programs in an OOP language. The only popular implementation of MVC was MacApp, an Objective-Pascal library later rewritten in C++ (object-oriented C).
Most programs written in the late 1990s probably used OOP.
However, it is a virtually certainty that most programming in the late 1990s did not use MVC. Some used a watered down form of MVC called Document-View.
However, the granularity of the model and view objects in a Document-View application is too course. Most of the benefits of MVC are not obtained with Document-View.
In the 1990s, there was this big deal being made about RAD (rapid application development).
RAD (rapid application development) programming also arose in the 1980s. RAD was based on three elements common to objects in object-oriented GUI applications:
- properties
- methods
- events
This trio of things, which were available on any field or other control in a view, as well as the view itself, could be edited in a tabbed
property sheet
in a sidebar of a WYSIWYG editing window for the view being created.
This trick, which all major OOP IDEs had adopted by the early 2000s, solved the problem of GUI applications being written slowly or modified quickly. At least, if they were simple ones.
If they were database clients or graphical editors, then they would use parts of a framework to implement the glue between the screen and the back end of the program. Data management and graphical operations usually still had to be coded by hand, at a layer of the application built just above these framework facilities.
Apple changed all that for Mac programmers in 2005, when the company released Core Data as part of the Tiger operating system - accompanied by improvements in its free IDE for the Mac:
Xcode.
Using the latest version of
Xcode (now at version 2.4), a programmer can start off creating his application by defining its
model in a graphical UML diagram view. There he defines entities, their properties, and their relationships to each other.
He then goes on to create his view, where controls that reference these model objects via bindings are organized onto a display view.
Custom controllers can be used to initialize/modify model objects at apropos times in response to events.
Here is the training series of screencasts that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
Building a Sample Core Data Application (Apple Developer Connection video series):
Core Data is a powerful data-management framework introduced with Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. When you take advantage of Core Data, it slashes the amount of custom code you need to write in order to manage application data. Opening, saving and undo management can all be handled by Core Data, freeing you to concentrate on creating unique features for your application.
If you are a programmer, and you own or use a Macintosh,
you have to watch these videos. They are that good. You will be picking your jaw up after the floor, going
I own that?
.
Because you do.
Every Macintosh comes with the latest Developer kit for the Macintosh, as well as giving its owner the right to join the Apple Developer Connection (
free!). That membership gets you into the
developer.apple.com website.
From that site, you can get the latest version of the Developer toolkit (Xcode, documentation, frameworks/libraries) as well as sample programs.
By the way, Mac OS X 10.5 (
Leopard
) will be coming out next year. Sometime around its release date - in early 2007 Q2, I would imagine -
Xcode 3.0 will be released.
Two things that arrive with Xcode 3.0 are super-powerful new visual components: iChat-like chat views and Keynote-like presentation views, for example - and something really impressive.
The impressive new feature in Xcode 3.0 is the debugging timeline.
In electronics, it is well-recognized that the state of a device changes and that being able to watch, record, and affect these state changes (e.g. voltage levels, frequency changes, etc.) is extremely useful and important.
Well, Xcode 3.0 brings this capability to Mac programmers with a program called Xray. The Xray GUI sports a Garage-band like timeline that lets a programmer track I/O actions and GUI events in chronological order.
Xcode is built upon the
DTrace utility from Sun.
Xcode 3.0 was written using Xcode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0. Apple's own technology has proven itself.
While it has long been known that some other vendors eschew their own technology they sell to programmers when it comes to building their own application products, this is not the case with Apple.
And since Apple is closely tied into the whole open source movement, fantastic technologies like GCC, DTrace, and so on - come their way - and are passed on to the Apple programming community - easily and seamlessly.
Check out the Core Data training/demo video screencasts, and you will see what I am talking about. It is RAD MVC GUI OOP WYSIWYG
MDA programming delivered to you in the form of one sweet little IDE that leverages off of some truly great frameworks.
Basically, this is the solution that the history of computing has been pointing to for the past four decades. Apple delivered it last year, and they are continuing to make it better as each year passes.
I just finished going through a training blitz consisting of 15 very short screencasts. Each screencast had an audio narration by a guy who obviously knew what he was doing, and knew how to explain it quickly and simply.
Anyone who is programming the Mac, or contemplating it - needs to take a look at these videos. They teach the viewer/reader how to use Apple's powerful Core Data facility of Cocoa really fast, using the revolutionary Xcode 2 IDE. The sample program that is swiftly created is written in Objective-C, the primary language for writing Cocoa programs on the Macintosh.
In the 1970s, following publication of some articles on good/bad programming practices in the late 1960s,
structured programming
became all the rage. Structured programs were modular. They could be created and modified swiftly. All that was required was a little clear thinking, discipline, and organization.
In the 1980s, the computer programming field was revolutionized by OOP (object-oriented programming). OOP was basically structured programming on steroids. The buzzword MVC (model-view-controller) started getting bandied about as the ideal way to write GUI programs in an OOP language. The only popular implementation of MVC was MacApp, an Objective-Pascal library later rewritten in C++ (object-oriented C).
Most programs written in the late 1990s probably used OOP.
However, it is a virtually certainty that most programming in the late 1990s did not use MVC. Some used a watered down form of MVC called Document-View.
However, the granularity of the model and view objects in a Document-View application is too course. Most of the benefits of MVC are not obtained with Document-View.
In the 1990s, there was this big deal being made about RAD (rapid application development).
RAD (rapid application development) programming also arose in the 1980s. RAD was based on three elements common to objects in object-oriented GUI applications:
- properties
- methods
- events
This trio of things, which were available on any field or other control in a view, as well as the view itself, could be edited in a tabbed
property sheet
in a sidebar of a WYSIWYG editing window for the view being created.
This trick, which all major OOP IDEs had adopted by the early 2000s, solved the problem of GUI applications being written slowly or modified quickly. At least, if they were simple ones.
If they were database clients or graphical editors, then they would use parts of a framework to implement the glue between the screen and the back end of the program. Data management and graphical operations usually still had to be coded by hand, at a layer of the application built just above these framework facilities.
Apple changed all that for Mac programmers in 2005, when the company released Core Data as part of the Tiger operating system - accompanied by improvements in its free IDE for the Mac:
Xcode.
Using the latest version of
Xcode (now at version 2.4), a programmer can start off creating his application by defining its
model in a graphical UML diagram view. There he defines entities, their properties, and their relationships to each other.
He then goes on to create his view, where controls that reference these model objects via bindings are organized onto a display view.
Custom controllers can be used to initialize/modify model objects at apropos times in response to events.
Here is the training series of screencasts that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
Building a Sample Core Data Application (Apple Developer Connection video series):
Core Data is a powerful data-management framework
introduced with Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. When you take
advantage of Core Data, it slashes the amount of custom code
you need to write in order to manage application data.
Opening, saving and undo management can all be handled by
Core Data, freeing you to concentrate on creating unique
features for your application.
If you are a programmer, and you own or use a Macintosh,
you have to watch these videos. They are that good. You will be picking your jaw up after the floor, going
I own that?
.
Because you do.
Every Macintosh comes with the latest Developer kit for the Macintosh, as well as giving its owner the right to join the Apple Developer Connection (
free!). That memvership gets you into the
developer.apple.com website.
From that site, you can get the latest version of the Developer toolkit (Xcode, documentation, frameworks/libraries) as well as sample programs.
By the way, Mac OS X 10.5 (
Leopard
) will be coming out next year. Sometime around its release date - in early 2007 Q2, I would imagine - Xcode 3.0 will be released.
Two things that arrive with Xcode 3.0 are super-powerful new visual components: iChat-like chat views and Keynote-like presentation views, for example - and something really impressive.
The impressive new feature in Xcode 3.0 is the debugging timeline.
In electronics, it is well-recognized that the state of a device changes and that being able to watch, record, and affect these state changes (e.g. voltage levels, frequency changes, etc.) is extremely useful and important.
Well, Xcode 3.0 brings this capability to Mac programmers with a program called Xray. The Xray GUI sports a Garage-band like timeline that lets a programmer track I/O actions and GUI events in chronological order.
Xcode is built upon the DTrace utility from Sun.
Xcode 3.0 was written using Xcode 3.0 and Objective-C 2.0. Apple's own technology has proven itself.
While it has long been known that some other vendors eschew their own technology they sell to programmers when it comes to building their own application products, this is not the case with Apple.
And since Apple is closely tied into the whole open source movement, fantastic technologies like GCC, DTrace, and so on - come their way - and are passed on to the Apple programming community - easily and seamlessly.
Check out the Core Data training/demo video screencasts, and you will see what I am talking about. It is RAD MVC GUI OOP WYSIWYG MDA programming delivered to you in the form of one sweet little IDE that leverages off of some truly great frameworks.
Basically, this is the solution that the history of computing has been pointing to for the past four decades. Apple delivered it last year, and they are continuing to make it better as each year passes.
MacFixIt has some good-sounding advice about how to recover from problems Macs could be experiencing in the aftermath of the OS X 10.4.8 update.
MacFixIt - Mac OS X 10.4.8 (#3): Startup problems (cont.), more fixes; More on the blue tint, fixes; Menu items missing, fix; moreI applied to to a Mac a couple weeks ago and boy did I have problems afterwards. Not sure if they were hardware or software but the Mac would only stay up for one or two minutes after boot.... and then power
itself off.
Google has a really great way to add some pizzaz to web pages or blogs.
new GSvideoBar AJAX component from Google for video thumbnail sidebar:
The GSvideoBar Solution is a simple to use application of the
Google AJAX Search API that is designed to let you easily add
application and page controled video search and playback capabilities to your pages, sites, and blogs.
After basically just being a curiosity for almost a decade, desktop video publishing has moved from the realm of the possible - to that of the everyday, commonplace occurence.
I remember Steve Jobs saying back in the 1990s that desktop video editing/production would become just as popular as desktop publishing was in the 1980s.
Desktop publishing really did take off, and Apple was the first consumer computer company that positioned itself to be a player in it.
They had the first affordable laser printer, the first affordable windows/icon/mice/menus desktop user interface, and the first WYSIWYG word processor.
Put them together, you get desktop publishing.
Today, all iMacs include the IEEE.1394 (FireWire) digital media interface, an iSight camera built right into the bezel above the display, video editing and DVD-burning software, and high speed 802.11g wireless broadband-speed networking.
Put those together, and you get a lot of digital video - really quickly.
My brand new Apple Remote was not working when I brought my iMac home this weekend and set it up.
Apple provides some
troubleshooting tips for the Apple Remote.
I turns out, all I had to do was go out and buy an inexpensive new CR2032 battery, and follow Apple
instructions for replacing Apple Remote battery.
Simple.
The troubleshooting tips Apple provided were very good, and really indicated that the battery was bad (assuming the unit was good).
On the other hand, if I pay over two grand for a brand new computer that was only manufactured a couple of months ago, is it too much to ask that the battery for the remote control be in working condition - instead of dead?
Good technical support - but bad quality assurance.
To be fair, all the other batteries Apple supplied - those for the wireless mouse and the keyboard, which technically they did not really have to throw in worked.
On the other hand, you really expect a top computer system to come with
everything you need to start using it as soon as you take it to the box. Without making trips to the store. A trip to the store is exactly what it took to make my Apple Remote work.
Plus, since instead of simply leaving the battery out of the unit and saying
buy one
, I had to read a lot of information online hunting for a solution to make the thing work - and then go through the troubleshooting process.
Realistically, this probably took me over an hour. I would rather have spent that time doing other things.
An
interesting article at CIO revealed that rather hire people that lied to obtain private information, Apple went thte legal route.
Apple sued in court to get the names of journalists revealed who published information about a product that the company had not released.
HP?
Well, they did the other thing.
One cannot help but recall the relatives of founders Hewlett and Packard saying that the merger with Compaq was a mistake. Compaq was embroiled in its own scandalous behavior at the time.
Looks like HP caught its bug.
Glad their are are companies around like Apple. Not all companies
do it
, as former HP board member/chairman would have everyone believe.
But hers did.
I was in the Apple Store yesterday - Saturday evening. There was something that may or may not be interesting going on.
A group of five teenaged girls were using 2 of the iMacs on display; the 24 inch and the 20 inch display models.
At the time, I was pretty rushed, so I did not really stop and think about what they were trying to do with the computer. They seemed to be using the Photo Booth application as a photobooth.
I was in a hurry to make a decision about which one to buy, after having my original choice, the Mac Mini, torpedoed because it is limited to just 1 GB of RAM - not enough for a programmer these days.
Guys are not really big into note-passing, from what I remember. Nor of having their pictures taken. Nor, for that matter, buying clothes.
It seems like a computer marketed to teenaged and twenty-something boys and girls would have to have some different features in order to suit both groups.
Yesterday, one of those features, Photo Booth - seemed to be the hit in the school girls crowd. It is an application that does the same thing as a coin-operated photo booth. It uses the built-in
iSight cam to take a picture. It is very easy to use. After the photo is taken, you can do some effects on it, if you want.
The average person in the computer field - programmer, manager, tester - is probably not going to think of a goofy built-in digital camera hardware+application feature as something that could lead to a sale.
However, I also noticed that the girls gravitated to the pair of Macs with the largest screens that were next to each other as the ones they wanted to use.
Macs look great. They take up less space than ever before. They are very functional but also aesthetically pleasing. They have built into themselves a lot of cool features.
Maybe Apple has created something that will really sell into the high school & college kid crowd in a way that earlier Macs have not.
Version tracker publishes a list of the latest
MacIntel Compatible Software.
I have been using
Dashflix for over a year.
I love it.
To use it, you have to have an
Apple Macintosh, be running
Tiger (OS X 10.4) or later, and have a Netflix account.
It shows you the movies you have checked out on the front, and your rental queue on the back.
It is one of the best, possibly the best, Dashboard widget I have ever used.
It is very nice looking - and very useful.
It is actually fun to use and a joy to look at on your desktop.
