28 October 2007 in Apple, Code | Comments enabled

Once again, Apple did well with their logistics and our pre-ordered copies of Leopard arrived at the Mindscape office at about 11am Friday. I did my install in the evening and much like Rod’s comments, it took a wee while but was about the most painless OS upgrade I’ve ever done.

I was certainly looking for “wow” features and so far I have not really found any – it is very much just additional polish to the OS. Spaces seem cool, the dock update is nice, having a “current time” line in iCal is finally there. There is apparently 1500+ of these types of changes and I’m sure I’ll keep coming across more of them as time goes on.

So what are some of the more major features for the developer crowd?

XCode 3.0 is included and Leopard also adds support for Objective-C 2.0 which is a nice step up from previous versions which did not have automatic garbage collection. I’ll certainly be having a bit more of a look into what else is lurking in the XCode box (so far I haven’t had the time).

Instruments is an interesting new tool for profiling your applications. I haven’t had a chance to poke around with this tool yet and it looks from screen shots that it’s mostly somewhat “fuzzy” in profiling (e.g. showing cpu load or network load in a graph rather than giving extremely detailed dumps of what is going on). I’m looking forward to seeing how Instruments performs.

Dashcode is a tool for helping build dashboard widgets. I’m not quite sure why it’s not included in XCode which seems to have templates for just about every other sort of project under the sun. I’ve never been a big user of widgets so I doubt I’ll use this tool very much.

One of the pain points with doing any development on the Mac is that the books currently in circulation all seem rather out of date. This could be because the documentation explorer, so far, seems quite impressive. Can anybody suggest a good book on Mac development?

– JD

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2 comments. Add your own comment.

James Sugrue says 29 October 2007 @ 22:23

The Hillegas book is considered the bible:
http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-2nd/dp/0321213149/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b/105-0362874-2186859

I tried a couple of goes with Objective-C and didn’t really get it, read this book and it stuck. Note this book covers Objective-C 1.1 not 2.0 – would be worth checking to see if he intends to do a refresh

Skinny says 31 October 2007 @ 21:17

I just knew you would have bought it. Apart from the wow for developers what’s good for the general non-developer like Skinny? Will it go well on my PowerBook G4?

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