O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference: October 25 - 28, 2004

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Basics of Transparent Blitting, Part 1  In this follow-up tutorial to his article, Basic Offscreen Buffering, Michael J. Norton focuses on how to copy sprites to the buffer. He also covers the role of the transparency pixel when rendering sprites (blitting).   [MacDevCenter.com]

Developing for Mac OS X
Developing for Mac OS X: Further Your CS Development with Mac OS X  As the new school year approaches, Julie Starr has some ideas about what type of computer CS students should be considering. We'll give you a hint: It isn't a Windows box.   [MacDevCenter.com]

The Inside Scoop on the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference  Sometimes, looking at a conference program grid is like looking at Edinburgh Castle. It's impressive, but you really don't know where all the bodies are buried unless you have a tour guide. Let me introduce myself: I'm the program chair, and I'd like to take you inside the upcoming Mac OS X Conference.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Making the Jump to Subversion  Subversion can run standalone or on a network as a repository server with multiple clients. The preferred client/server configuration uses Apache and WebDAV for network communication. It's a powerful alternative to CVS, and Adam Swift shows you the ins and outs in this tutorial.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Inside SSH, Part 4  In Part 3, François Joseph de Kermadec investigated more advanced SSH techniques, including editing configuration files. Now in this final installment, he shows you how to administer computers remotely, including running software updates, disk utilities, and more.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Mac OS X Innovators Contest Update  The Mac OS X Innovators Contest has been open for a month now, and Derrick Story is looking at some pretty good entries. If you haven't thrown your app in the ring yet, now is the time to do so -- the contest closes at the end of August.   [MacDevCenter.com -- Mac Innovators Contest]

Mo' Betta Indexes  Apache has had the same skin since around 1995. And while it's true that visitors interact with the pages of your site more than the HTTP daemon, the only real snapshot they'll receive is through your site's auto-indexes. So why not take some time to put some spit polish into them?   [MacDevCenter.com]

21.5 Things You Can Do with Office 2004  By now you've probably read about all the new features in Microsoft Office 2004. Good. Because we're not going to cover them here again. Instead, Giles Turnbull shows you 21-and-a-half things you can do in Office that you might not have previously realized.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Applying "Digital Hub" Concepts to Enterprise Software Design, Part 4  The "hub" of most enterprise software systems is a database. However, getting the information from the database to all of the applications that need it and then back again can be a challenge. Here in part four of his ongoing series, Adam Behringer shows you how.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Ruby/Tk Primer, Part 3  In Part 2 of this series, Chris Roach spent some time with the Tk library. Now in this final installment, he pulls together all of the pieces so you can finish your demo application.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Creating DVD/VCD Photo Slide Shows for Your Mac  Let's face it: you still have friends and family who've yet to enter the computer age. And yet you'd like to send them copies of your vacation photos (or your newborn, or your cat) taken with your digital camera. What to do? Wei-Meng Lee offers an alternative to using iPhoto for creating slide-show CDs -- Ulead's DVD PictureShow for Mac. He walks us through how to burn digital photos onto disc so anyone with a DVD/VCD player can view them.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Ruby/Tk Primer, Part 2  In part one of this series, Chris Roach introduced you to programming basics in Ruby, and in the process, created the back end for the GUI we're working on. Here, he spends some time with the Tk library.   [MacDevCenter.com]

OS 9, Mine, All Mine  What serious Mac fan in his or her right mind would consider booting anything other than OS X? Well, lots of them. Gile Turnbull interviews a handful of dedicated OS 9 users to find out why.   [O'Reilly Network]

How to Fall in Love with Your iSight, Again  Snaggy and Nitrozac are back to show you how to fall in love with your iSight, again, and provide a few chuckles along the way. Consider them your personal tech-therapists, willing to help bring you and your gorgeous hardware back together, with advice on apps and add-ons that will enhance your iSight relationship. If you like the way S and N weave humor and tech talk, check out their book, The Best of The Joy of Tech.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Inside SSH, Part 3  In Part 2 of this multipart series delving into the Secure Shell on Mac OS X, François Joseph de Kermadec showed you how to securely fire up the Secure Shell and start communicating. Now, in Part 3, he digs deeper, showing you more advanced techniques including editing configuration files.   [MacDevCenter.com]

12 Steps to Improving Your Mac's Performance  Keeping your Mac happy and performing as it did the day you brought it home takes a bit of degunking. Joli Ballew offers 12 steps to improving your Mac's performance that will have it humming along in no time. For more in-depth details on why the Mac slowdown occurs and what you can do about it, check out Joli's new book, Degunking Your Mac.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Programming With Cocoa
Programming With Cocoa: Higher-Order Messages in Cocoa  Higher-Order Messaging (HOM) refers to the treatment of a message as a data type, like an object, so that it can be used as the argument in another message. The grandest use of them by far is for fun uses of arrays; combining them, getting selections from them, and so forth. But they also have uses in exception handling. Rob Rix explains HOM in this tutorial.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Macworld Boston 2004: Brains Over Beauty  In the late 1700s, Boston culture facilitated debate by some of the greatest American minds. Now in 2004, it's once again the home for the Mac elite on the East Coast. Derrick Story photographs and comments on the character of this year's Macworld Boston.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Inside SSH, Part 2  Here in Part 2 of this multi-article series on tapping the power of the SSH server inside your Mac, François Joseph de Kermadec shows you how to securely fire up the Secure Shell and start communicating.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Announcing the 2004 Mac OS X Innovators Contest  The second Mac OS X Innovators contest is open and ready for your entry. Here are the links and info you need to shine a light on your great idea.   [MacDevCenter.com -- Mac Innovators Contest]

Inside SSH, Part 1  SSH is said "not to trust the network and to put minimal trust in the server or the domain name servers used by the network." In other words, SSH will consider the environment it is working in as a dangerous one and will try to rely as little on it as is possible. In this first article in a three-part series, you'll delve into SSH and learn how to master its power.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Unix Gems for Mac OS X  Mac OS X users benefit from the platform's Unix underpinnings every time they launch their system. But the Unix heritage brings more to the table than power and stability; it also includes dozens of time-tested, useful utilities. In this article Kevin O'Malley shows you three Unix gems he thinks you'll start using right away.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Hacking Mac OS X Panther  Rael Dornfest, coauthor of Mac OS X Panther Hacks, has selected three hacks from the book for your sampling pleasure. The first two detail how to find anyone in your Address Book who has an Amazon Wish List, and how to build a GUI to your Unix scripts with some Perl or Python glue code; the third is just for fun.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Steve Jobs Introduces Tiger at WWDC 2004  So many things to talk about at WWDC. So many things that can't be said. Here's an overview of what can be disclosed, including hardware announcements and a preview of Tiger, Apple's next version of Mac OS X.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Bioinformatics and Comparative Genomics  In this introduction to comparative genomics, Robert Jones explains why this is an important endeavor in life sciences, then shows you how to start exploring this treasure trove of data.   [MacDevCenter.com]

O'Reilly at WWDC 2004  The Mac crew at O'Reilly has lots going on at this year's WWDC. If you're attending the ultimate Mac bash in San Francisco, then you might want to make a mental note about the following O'Reilly-related offerings, including book specials, O'Reilly-hosted BoFs, and our ongoing conference coverage.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Ruby/Tk Primer: Creating a cron GUI Interface with Ruby/Tk  In this first installment of a two-part series, Chris Roach shows you how to use Ruby and Tk on Mac OS X. This tutorial creates a program that will act as a GUI-based front end to the cron daemon.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Voice Recording Magic with the iPod  Everyone knows that the iPod plays music unlike any other device, but many don't realize that it records clean audio, too. Here's a handy tutorial that shows you how to get started, then challenges your creativity with some nifty ideas about how to use these tools.   [O'Reilly Network]

More LDAP in Mac OS X Server  Now that you have your OpenLDAP server running smoothly, how about some additional tricks to better incorporate Address Book and email clients such as SquirrelMail? Tony Williams shows you how.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Applying "Digital Hub" Concepts to Enterprise Software Design, Part 3  In his previous two articles, Adam Behringer described how to build a flexible enterprise database. Here, in part three of this series, he shows how XML can provide great flexibility for database output applied to other applications.   [MacDevCenter.com]

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