Sugar Maple Software

I’m much too busy to publish my initial impressions of Leopard in a timely manner; so, instead, I’m publishing my thoughts after two months of living with the big cat. I’m going to cover a number of different aspects of Leopard, some major and some minor. I’ll start with the upgrade and a litany of issues and then comment on some surprises, both positive and negative.

As a regular users of NewsHawker, one of my favorite features in Leopard is Alex:

Meet Alex — a new English male voice that uses advanced, patented Apple technologies to deliver natural breathing and intonation, even at fast speaking rates.

Alex sounds great when reading feeds at high speaking rates.

If you’ve tried NewsHawker before but didn’t like the sound of the voice in Tiger, if you’ve now installed Leopard, it’s time to give NewsHawker another try with Alex. If you haven’t tried NewsHawker yet but have installed Leopard, now is a great time.

The most requested feature for NewsHawker is support for the Apple Remote. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t provide a public API for this. I considered only supporting the Apple Remote through third-party applications such as Sofa Control and Remote Buddy. However, once I found Martin Kahr’s Apple Remote Controller Wrapper Class, I decided to integrate support directly in NewsHawker. …

As I’ve mentioned before, mailing lists are an excellent resource when looking for answers to your development questions. This is especially the case of the mailing lists hosted by Apple (at least those to which I subscribe). I frequently take advantage of this resource and also try to contribute. Often, I don’t have the answer or someone, who checks their mail much more frequently than I, has already answered the question, but, when the opportunity is there, I take the time to help. A couple of days ago, when I couldn’t remember the kernel equivalent of the gettimeofday function, I searched the Apple Mailing Lists and immediately found the answer (clock_get_calendar_value which lead me to kern/clock.h and the currently supported function clock_get_calendar_microtime). The signature of the reply to the original poster’s question caught my eye. It was mine. I had provided the answer exactly two years ago today. It’s like something out of a Sci-Fi movie… or maybe just good karma.

I needed to convert HTML to plain text for the application that I’m developing. I figured someone else had done this before; so, I searched for a solution. I found one that leveraged WebKit and worked well but was too slow for my usage. I found another that leveraged libxml2 and was fast but crashed. In the end, and only because I could browse the source to the version of libxml2 included in Mac OS X, I was able to work around the crash and keep the faster solution. …

While I usually write about programming in the land of milk and honey (i.e., Cocoa), I spent most of the previous ten years writing kernel-level code. Recently, I’ve ventured back into the kernel and was reminded of the challenge of logging from an I/O Kit driver. When writing code in the kernel for an I/O Kit driver, you can’t invoke printf to log messages. Instead, you usually invoke IOLog. …

I received confirmation from Apple that I may attend the Mac OS X Leopard Tech Talk in Chicago on 13 December. Since I missed WWDC this past summer and don’t have an ADC Select or Premier membership this year, I’m really looking forward to learning more about Leopard. …

I recently wrote my first draft of documentation for my upcoming application. Integrating this documentation into Apple Help was much easier than I expected. The Apple Help Viewer simply displays HTML files. More impressively, cascading style sheets (CSS) are supported. I hope this will allow me to share the identical HTML files between my application and the support section of my web site and simply have different CSS files for each. …

I’m a big fan of Perforce for source control. I have limited experience with CVS and Subversion, but compared to MPW Projector and tlib, Perforce is a godsend. While not free like CVS and Subversion, an unlicensed version of Perforce does not expire and support two users and five client workspaces. BBEdit integrates well with Perforce. Xcode also integrates with Perforce, but I ran into some difficulties getting it configured.

The Mac community is an amazing beast. More generally, the Apple community is an amazing beast. In the days before the advent of the Internet, when I first starting programming on Apple computers, the community was local and gathered at computer fairs held at area malls. Later, when I began developing for the Mac, the community had a fledging on-line presence (e.g., Guy Kawasaki’s Evanglist and various web sites), but I still eagerly awaited my Apple developer mailings and develop magazine. Today, the community is global and gathers on a variety of mailing lists and web sites. The general Apple community seems stronger today than ever before; this is especially the case of the Mac developer community. For someone starting down the independent software developer path, this is quite fortuitous since this community is an incredible resource.