Saturday, September 6, 2003
The Macintosh Programming Special Interest Group (MPSIG) had a lively meeting this last Saturday, running from 10:30am (our new starting time) to about 12:30, with 20 attendees (one of the largest attendances yet!). Again, many thanks for MacMobile and Yukio for hosting us!
Randy kept our group entertained and engaged and informed with a really good "Introduction to Javascript". He started with the simplest possible examples, then kept folding in complexity to build up some very useful code. The most impressive part of his presentation was the way he would take audience suggestions, meld them into the code, then show how to debug on the fly. Coding and debugging on the fly, with a hyperactive audience, takes considerable grace and coolth under fire -- which Randy showed in full measure!
Randy recommends the Visual Quick Start book on Javascript for getting started; the O'Reilly Javascript book for reference. He develops Javascript using Netscape and recommends the Javascript Guide from Netscape. (Mozilla will also work for Javascript development, but if I remember Randy correctly, Internet Explorer supports Javascript but not Javascript development.) You can find a lot of resources by just doing a yahoo search on Javascript. And Randy has very generously posted his examples at http://www.stonerosedesign.com/JS_MLMUG/ and at http://www.StoneRoseDesign.com. It is well worth a look in its own right: Stone Rose Design is now ranked as the #1 Philadelphia Website Design firm in Yahoo, Google, AOL, and MSN.
Randy has also come up with a wicked cool advertising idea: send out postcards with, say, six small ads for your clients on them. The clients pay for the ads but not much since this is a very economical format. And as each ad also contains a small picture of the web page Randy did for them, each ad also shows off Randy's work as well! So: clients pay you to advertise yourself! I wanted to steal this idea but Randy -- alert business person that he is -- is already en route to patenting this as a business method!
John Ashmead
Saturday, October 4, 2003
The Macintosh Programming Special Interest Group (MPSIG) had a lively meeting this last Saturday, running from 10:30am (our new starting time, second announcement on this change) to about 12:30, with 10 attendees. Again, many thanks for MacMobile and especially to Yukio for hosting us!
As usual, the meeting started with a Q and A session. After that, Kevin and Jeremy from MLMUG and Anomaly Industries kept our group entertained and engaged and informed with a really good presentation titled "RealBasic and object oriented programming".
They did an on site creation of a Mac OS X application from scratch. The application, with a very nice GUI, would display all the contents of a folder, whether the documents in the folder were visible or invisible. The application also could display the preview of any image file. They created this application in such a way that changing the size of the window, would also change the size of the preview image. (No, the Finder does not do that!)
They were very patient in explaining the methods used in RealBasic to create such an application. From the talk and the way they both meandered thru the application, one could infer that either RealBasic is very simple or these guys are really pros. I believe that both are true, but more weight to the latter.
Kevin and Jeremy also used the opportunity to show other applications they had built and distributed. There was brief discussion on problems on how to distribute applications. A major concern if you are a developer. The icing in the cake was a clock that was partially built, but was enhanced live for the delighted audience. A nice clock (or was it a stopwatch?) with a myriad of sound effects. Sorry, but one had to be there!
Deivy Petrescu
Saturday, November 1, 2003
The Macintosh Programming Special Interest Group (MPSIG) had a lively meeting this last Saturday, running from 10:30am to a bit after 12:30, with twelve enthusiastic scripters in attendance. Again, many thanks for MacMobile and Yukio for hosting us!
The Q and A started with a lot of questions on Panther and upgrading: 1/2 the group had already upgraded and were very enthusiastic. As one put it "I just did the upgrade. I didn't follow any instructions anywhere. And it worked fine."
Our speaker Ben Waldie has already, of course, got Panther up and spent much of his talk showing some of the new features of Applescript Studio in Panther. Applescript Studio is now a significantly more mature product. And in Panther, the Finder is now recordable! (Think of the possibilities!)
Ben has been using Applescript for all sorts of client applications. He treated us to demos of a few of these: workflow management, a real estate catalog, merging sound files, all sorts of neat stuff.
The Applescript Group's web page is http://homepage.mac.com/applescriptguru/AS_Guru/pages/user_group/user_group.html.
MPSIG's next meeting is Saturday, December 6th. I'll be doing "The Key, The Whole Key, and Nothing But the Key: everything you need to know about normalization and relational databases". This isn't my fault: Randy Zeitman told me I should do some kind of intro to relational databases. And I realized as he spoke that if you understand keys and normalization, you really have got the basics of what makes a relational database tick (and if you haven't you don't!). So this talk could also be entitled "everything you wanted to know about relational databases but were afraid to ask" in an hour or so.
John Ashmead
Saturday, December 6, 2003
The Macintosh Programming Special Interest Group (MPSIG) had a lively meeting this last Saturday, running from 10:30am to a bit after 12:30.
I had been planning to give a talk on database normalization -- the most fundamental single part of relational databases -- but figured with the snow no one would show up, or if some one did I would just share mournful commiserations in re snow and then head home. Instead Ann Goodman and Chris Schmutte showed and made clear that they expected the speaker to, as it were, speak. Which I did. I think I learned more from the audience then they did from me, quite frankly. I started with the textbook approach, which is pretty mathematical, but Ann and Chris made clear I needed to cut to the chase and explain in clear, non-technical terms what normalization is, why it is worth doing, and how you know when you've done it right.
Based on their feedback, this talk (secretly a chapter in a debugging book I'm doing) is being completely revised. Thank you Ann and Chris! Once I've done the revisions I may give it again, if people are interested. But at a meeting with no chance of snow! :)
John Ashmead
Saturday, January 3, 2004
The Macintosh Programming Special Interest Group (MPSIG) had a lively meeting this last Saturday, running from 10:30am to a bit after 12:30. We had an enthusiastic crowd, fourteen I think.
Our own Sam Leidy gave an extremely informative talk on Applescript, including a lot of sample code and lots of useful hints. He even wrote, debugged, and ran some code on the fly: always impressive! Sam has very graciously posted his notes on the web, at http://home.comcast.net/~mlmug_sam/AppleScript.pdf.
John Ashmead
Saturday, February 7, 2004
The Macintosh Programming Special Interest Group (MPSIG) had a lively meeting this last Saturday, running from 10:30am to a bit after 1:00pm. We had twelve people plus a few stray visitors to MacMobile who wandered by to see what the fuss was about.
Karl Kuehn, Mike Zornek, and Sam Leidy each did a stellar job of building a short program (or programs in the case of Karl) on the fly and showing "How to Get Started with COCOA".
Karl did a simple "Hello, World" program three times: in Objective C, then in Java, and then in Applescript. He got it done in just a line or two of code in each case! Three programs in under 45 minutes! What do you do after you say hello? Mike came on and did a simple text editor, in less than 45 minutes! And only 15 lines of code! And with rich text, rulers, undo, spell checking, ...
Mike sent his recommendations along:
Now as far as resources to help one learn Cocoa:
1. While not my first Cocoa book Aaron's is probably my favorite as far an introduction goes. It is a little old (2001), and as such references the now retired Project Builder but most stuff carries over to Xcode without any loss in translation. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201726831/
2. CocoaDev.com - is a wiki, and as such is a collaborative help space for cocoa programmer. Discussions, tutorials, tips, tricks, book reviews... not much CocoaDev doesn't offer.
3. The cocoa-dev mailing list from Apple, and one from the OMNI guys is very good for asking questions and while I am subscribed to them I actually get more use out of there archives. A very good (and searchable) version of both mailing lists combined can be found at http://cocoa.mamasam.com I'd recommend looking there before posting to the list and frankly to get your answers faster.
4. Finally I'll recommend Huevos. It's a little cocoa app that let's you search useful archives and search engines (including the above mentioned cocoa.mamasam.com) using simply the keyboard for those who like the speed or it's interface for those who like to click. See some more descriptions of huevos at my website http://mikezornek.com/archives/2003/02/25/ranchero_software_does_it_again_h uevos.php and at http://ranchero.com/huevos/
Mike sent his code along as a zip file which I will be putting up at http://www.ashmeadsoftware.com/mpsig.html later this evening.
And of course, what is a text editor for which you can't set preferences? Sam batted cleanup, showing how to build a simple get, reset, and save preferences application. Again, in under 45 minutes. And Sam has written up his code as well: The finished 'PoPreferencesDemo.pdf' File, approximately 800 KB in Size, can be download at 'http://home.comcast.net/~mlmug_sam/PoPreferencesDemo.pdf.
Big thanks from MPSIG to our three speakers: who spent a lot of time and thought prepping for the meeting and each of whom did a great job! This is what SIG's are about!
John Ashmead