Jeff Blogs

It seems that more and more often I am being asked if I can recommend a book or class that will help a user learn how to develop software on the Macintosh. This is a far different problem than I had just a few short years ago when I was asked why I continued to use a Macintosh when clearly Windows was superior. We won’t go there.

Suffice it to say there is no easy answer to what is the right book or training that will make you a Macintosh developer. The good news is there are many avenues you can take to learn programming on the Macintosh and many of them will be dependent upon what your level of knowledge is going into the development process.

(continue reading…)

I have to admit I have been eagerly awaiting the introduction of Apple’s Snow Leopard operating system since it was first announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference. This is not a typical operating system upgrade. There are very few aesthetic changes to the system causing many users to wonder what the big deal is.

When Leopard (version 10.5) was released it came with many changes to the way the user interacted with the Macintosh. It was relatively clear what the differences were from the old OS to the new version. That is not the case with Snow Leopard. It is analogous to walking into a garage and looking at two cars sitting side by side. On the surface they look the same except for maybe a difference in color. But popping the hood and looking in the engine compartment you realize that one of these cars has a fuel efficient 4-cylinder engine while the other one has a fully blown V-8 capable of melting tires in the hands of a proper driver.

(continue reading…)

Ok I will be the first to admit that when it comes to web development I am definitely old school. I have tried a multitude of code generation tools and every time I do I swear I will never do that again. Web code is equal parts science and art form. The problem is that most of those tools that create the code for you produce such bloated pages that they become nearly unusable. These tools rarely support all of the web standards you would like and in many cases they produce code that will not pass code validity tests. But while I like to write the code myself so that I know exactly what each line does, I don’t necessarily like using a plain text editor to manage the task.

(continue reading…)

It is an inevitable fact that if you have an email account you are going to have SPAM. I have used the same email address for over a decade and as you might can imagine, I am now being inundated with unwanted email messages. I have tried nearly every tool imaginable to try and minimize the number of SPAM messages I have to deal with. This has included white lists, black lists, and several tools and appliances that will stop these messages from being delivered. The problem has been that while some of these solutions have eliminated the SPAM messages they have also deleted some of my messages that weren’t SPAM. Even worse some of these have begun to filter out specific users and domains no longer delivering mail from some domains. These domains are not some small or questionable domains but rather some of the bigger and more respected companies on the Internet such as apple.com, mattel.com, or dbacks.com. Obviously this was unacceptable and I needed to make some changes so that I could continue to rely on email as a communications method.

(continue reading…)

I have been a big fan of Mozilla for as long as they have been in existence. Before that I was part of the Netscape crowd and worked with them on browser development even before Netscape Navigator 4. Early on I did some work on the Thunderbird project and Sunbird. During my time at Motorola I was a member of the Netscape Customer Council and worked closely with their server development teams integrating the Motorola PageWriter two-way pager into the Netscape environment. In fact I hold a patent for that work last I heard. So as Mozilla worked on the open source code that would become Firefox I was right there rolling up my sleeves. Firefox 2 has been my default browser since it was released. And while it has had its share of issues over time my loyalty has not wavered. That is not to say I wasn’t looking forward to its replacement. I was waiting rather impatiently to put it to the curbside and use something that was a little more memory friendly.

(continue reading…)