OS X is da shit.

So hansandersen and I were drinking coffee, and we got an idea for an OS X program. Since then we’ve written and debugged it, and by tomorrow PM we should have a distro ready. It provides command-line access to the clipboard: you can copy and paste, and you can stick it in the center of a pipeline, so a copy of your data gets forked to the clipboard.

It’s one of those simple little things that’s remarkably handy. (On my old NeXT there was a command-line ‘copy’ utility; somehow it disappeared in OS X…)

The fact that we could go from conception to completion in under 2 hours of work, including feature creep, is really damned neat.

Published in: on May 7, 2003 at 23:47  Comments (3)  
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Computing thought of the day

(more…)

Published in: on April 29, 2003 at 13:47  Comments (4)  
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Yeesh….

…I’d forgotten what a crawling horror C++ is. It would be really, really nice to create a good, portable version of the Objective-C standard library (the Foundation Kit) that would let this become a language of choice for more than just OS X.

But I suppose nowadays everyone wants to code Java instead. Which, I’ll confess, solves some of the problems of C++, but it seems to leave a lot of the basic nonsense intact. As Hans has pointed out: The beauty of Objective-C comes from the fact that almost no “boilerplate” is necessary. Your code simply does the things it needs to do. C++ and Java both require a great deal of code that’s just doing routine tasks like making sure exception handling is working properly. A great deal of repetition, more opportunity for bugs, and code becomes an illegible mess. Ultimately, both of these languages have the feel of early attempts – a lot of radical new ideas (in each), but they really don’t feel like final, production-quality products. Objective-C does. It’s an amazing difference.

Mrph. OK, end of rant.

Published in: on April 22, 2003 at 15:28  Comments (12)  
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