Saturday, November 3rd, 2007
Saturday, November 3rd at 10:30am, the Macintosh Programming SIG (MPSIG) will be meeting at Cheyney University.
It's been a while since we did a general discussion, so it is about time. If you have Q (or A) please bring. Specific topics:
I just put Leopard up yesterday & am having a lot of fun getting used to its features. I ran into Karl Kuehn at the Leopard party at University of Pennsylvania: he has been running on a beta version & tells me that Leopard has a lot of support for programmers. I'll try to see what is out there & bring some notes. (Karl: any specific thoughts? Thanks!)
It's been a while since we shared favorite URL's & references for programming topics. If you have stumbled across any books or websites you think can help your fellow programmers, please bring them in.
And given we have an internet connection at Cheyney, it might be fun to give the group's wiki a kick start, especially for those of us who haven't gotten into active wiki-ing to this point!
Any other thoughts for discussion topics, please post!
Reminder: new date & time: we are meeting the first Saturday at 10:30am at Cheyney University, in the Duckery Social Sciences Building room #117. Directions at directions (you can get there by Septa), map of campus at Cheyney.
See you Saturday!
Cheers,
John
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
Saturday, December 1st at 10:30am, the Macintosh Programming SIG (MPSIG) will be meeting at Cheyney University. Michael Pigg, who just joined the group, is going to do a presentation on how to program the iPhone! This is your chance to learn how to program the iPhone, make a fortune as an iPhone developer, & amaze your friends!
In Michael's own words:
Here's what I'm currently planning:
"Developing a Web Application For the iPhone"
We will build a dynamic web application targeted at the iPhone from the ground up using Java technologies on Mac OS X. We will look at the basics of designing web pages that are optimized for the iPhone, including the use of AJAX frameworks.
Although I'm planning to spend some time on each part of the application (database, web server, iPhone, etc.), I can probably focus more on certain areas if [people] think they would be of more interest...
Reminder: new date & time: we are meeting the first Saturday at 10:30am at Cheyney University, in the Duckery Social Sciences Building room #117. Directions at directions (you can get there by Septa), map of campus at Cheyney.
See you Saturday!
Cheers,
John
Saturday, January 5th, 2008
This last Saturday, 1/5/2008, we had a really energetic meeting, with Chris Heimark presenting his new software: "NYOB" None of Your Business.
This is a really nifty tool for letting you encode your files in a way that no one can break, not even in principle. It uses the "One Time Pad" principle (see Wikipedia for this), which was invented in 1917, but Chris's NYOB presents it in a way that you can use it without knowing anything about it. Which is pretty much the point of the Mac!
The most popular encryption system is public key/private key. This is used by amazon, paypal, and so on. It is pretty good, but might be breakable. The One Time Pad is not breakable but has two disadvantages: 1) you have to ship the keys out to the people you want to talk with and 2) the keys have to be just as large as the message you are going to encrypt them with, so they can get pretty big. Chris's software makes this as easy as possible, making the One Time Pad quite a bit more competitive with public key/private key.
We had a great discussion discussing how this worked & what it might be used for. I think Chris got a bit nervous when I suggested the real market for this is teen age girls, who require, I've heard, absolutely secrecy for their communications. Apparently Chris has daughters.
There were a lot of good points made about things like Mac's /dev/urandom, how to get truly random keys in the first place, and so on.
Chris suggests the following as reference for the talk:
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
Our speaker, Michael Pigg, will talk on building an
iPhone GTD (Getting Things Done Database) Using Ruby on Rails.
As Michael very eloquently put it:
'What is Ruby on Rails? According to the website, "Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment."
OS X Leopard now ships with Rails as a standard component of the system, making the power of Rails easily accessible to Mac developers. Instead of the J2EE stack and $60 development environment that I used to build my web-based iPhone GTD app in December, I will demonstrate how to build the same app using Leopard's built-in Rails and other no-cost tools.'
Cheers,
John
Saturday, March 2nd, 2008
How to use PERL and the Mac::Glue module to control Mac applications, in particular the Address Book application.
He will go over how to load the Mac::Glue modules, how to create "Glues" for different applications, and the code itself that works with address book.
Perl is the Swiss army language of programming languages: there is almost nothing you can't do with it. Being a perl monger is like being Dr. Octopus: you can reach out & grab anything you can see.
But perl is primarily terminal & text oriented, going between perl at the terminal level & the (just luscious) Mac graphical interface is awkward at best. Being able to talk between perl & Mac apps means you can achieve much higher levels of integration: more automation, less typing!
Rich is a great speaker: this is going to be useful & fun!
I'd like to thank Michael Pigg, last month's speaker, for his great presentation on using Ruby on Rails to build his Getting Things Done database on the iPhone. A great talk & a great discussion! I've started learning Ruby as a result & may talk on it at a future meeting.
The Macintosh Programming SIG [phillymacprog] meets the first Saturday of every month at Cheyney University, room #117 in Duckrey, which is great space: large, wired, & quiet (except for us).
See you Saturday!
Cheers,
John