In January 2006, Apple moved from PowerPC processors to Intel processors. This brought with it a number of changes to the way that a Macintosh works. These changes involved the move from the IBM ...

Connections is a new industry newsletter in the MacInTouch style that covers issues related to networking on the Mac. Connections and MacTutor have agreed to promote each other as "sister" ...

Ironically, the main performance bottleneck for game programmers today - as ten years ago - is getting pixels up on the screen. With the advent of 100 MHz bus speeds, built-in hardware support for ...

Even in the Linux world, where cluster and grid computing are well established, there is often confusion about how to distinguish a grid from a cluster. Let's look at characteristics of each. Grid ...

The dew is cold. It is quiet. I hear nothing except for crackling sounds coming from the little fire burning two inches to the left of my keyboard. It wasn’t there a minute ago. Seems that Doo-Dah, ...

For the past couple of columns, we have discussed various ways to store and access data using AppleScript. One column provided an introduction to Database Events, a background application in Mac OS X ...

Software is abstract and non-tactile by its very nature. It can be difficult to see what it is doing and why it may be misbehaving. To get a better view of software, we often use tools like gdb, leaks ...

The Apple “Hierarchical File System” is a major advance in Macintosh technology. From the programmer's standpoint, HFS is an an extension to the current file manager. Many calls are the same, some ...

Warning: These programs use the alternate screen buffer, an area of memory that is also used by the Mac Plus RAM cache. As a result, when the program exits, Finder information previously in the cache ...

Home Magazine About MacTech in Print Issue Table of Contents Issue 342-Current Contents Volume 29 Table of Contents Volume 28 Table of Contents Volume 27 Table of Contents Volume 26 Table of Contents ...

In January 2006, Apple introduced Intel Architecture based Macs. They took this hardware move as an opportunity to also upgrade their choice of firmware. Their previous firmware, Open Firmware, was ...

In AppleScript whitespace is automatically added by the compiler so that nested commands (such as those in an if, repeat, try, tell, etc) are always indented properly. In Python whitespace is also ...