PRACTICAL REUSABLE UNIX SOFTWARE book

You can find the excellent UNIX-related book "PRACTICAL REUSABLE UNIX SOFTWARE" from AT&T for free.

You can download the book in PDF format here.

Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition) is coming

The 2nd edition of Kochan's book will be published by the end of the year.

The CocoaHeads site

I recently found out the CocoaHeads web site and I have to say that I really like it.

They also have a very nice tutorial: Introduction to Cocoa.

Highly recommended!

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, 3rd Edition

The 3rd edition of the famous Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hillegass, is out.

You can find more information about the book here.

Dashcode 2.0 beta (136)

The iPhone SDK includes new versions of Dashcode and Xcode!

Please have in mind that Dashcode upgrades the existing projects making them incompatible with previous versions.

Mac OS X Architecture

Did you find the above information helpful? You will find a lot more information in my eBook "Programming Dashboard Widgets". You can buy it here.

Use a Dashboard Widget outside Dashboard

Although it seems strange, it is true: you can use a Dashboard Widget outside the Dashboard environment! The way to accomplish it includes the following steps:

- First you open Dashboard.

- After opening Dashboard, you should press the little circle with the cross on the bottom left corner of Dashboard.

- Then you select the Widget you want to bring outside Dashboard and click on it.

- You start dragging the Widget.

- You should now keep your mouse button pressed and close Dashboard (by pressing the F12 key for example).

- You now release the pressed mouse button.

- Your Widget is still there but Dashboard is gone! You are in Finder now.

Note: Before doing the above steps, you should give the following command at your terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

This command activates the Dashboard Development mode and keeps it active until you type the same command, having a NO instead of YES at the end. You should now login/logout or restart your Mac for the setting to take effect.

If you want to insert a Widget that is located outside Dashboard, inside Dashboard you should follow the reverse procedure!

Did you find the above information helpful? You will find a lot more information in my eBook "Programming Dashboard Widgets". You can buy it here.

Widgets and the defaults command

You can use the defaults command (from Terminal.app) to learn more about the options of a Widget.

Example: defaults read widget-com.apple.widget.translation

gives:

{

    "41a9b19e2d5c5543-fromLanguage" = 3;

    "41a9b19e2d5c5543-toLanguage" = 5;

    fromLanguage = 3;

    toLanguage = 5;

}

Found it in Dashboard-dev mailing list.