O'Reilly Open Source Convention: August 1- 5, 2005, Portland, OR

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What Is Preview? (and Why You Should Use It)  Apple's Preview app is best known as a PDF viewer and a Macintosh alternative to Adobe Reader. This software, however, is also a capable image viewer, and you can even edit your pictures with its tools. Giles Turnbull shows you that there's more to Preview than first meets the eye.   [MacDevCenter.com]

My Favorite Macworld Product: The IRISPen  Have you ever said, "If I learn just one great thing, then the whole conference was worth attending"? At Macworld Boston Adam Goldstein discovered the IRISPen, and he shares the details of this handy text-scanning device with us.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Creating Spotlight Plugins  Last time, we used Spotlight to query and manipulate metadata for existing files. This is great, but what if you want Spotlight to index a custom file format? Don't fret. Spotlight was designed to be extensible and to accommodate any file format. In this piece, Matthew Russell shows you how.   [MacDevCenter.com]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to ADHOC  ADHOC is about giving yourself a challenge that's just for you. In this article, program chair Brian Geiger talks about his personal experiences with ADHOC and why he thinks Mac hackers and developers will enjoy the upcoming event.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Programming with Spotlight  The API for Spotlight offers highly advanced search capabilities. In fact, you can develop some of the very features of Tiger we've already grown to love using Spotlight's API. In this piece, Matthew Russell will ease you into Spotlight programming from a Cocoa dev perspective, showing you how to make your applications Spotlight enabled.   [MacDevCenter.com]

How to End Wars Between Testers and Programmers  There's a natural conflict between testers and programmers because of the difference in perspective each role has. The best way to end struggles is to redefine the goals of the work so that their roles can be collaborative, not adversarial. In this article, Scott Berkun draws upon his years of project-leading experience to provide some inside tips for managing your development team.   [MacDevCenter.com]

An Introduction to Tiger Terminal, Part 3  In Part 3 of this Tiger Terminal introduction, you'll learn some helpful commands that you can use to view information about your network, including netstat, nslookup, traceroute, and more.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Inside Odeo with Evan Williams  Now that iTunes 4.9 has cast an even brighter light on podcasting, you might be interested in learning more about Odeo, the podcasting service from Noah Glass and Evan Williams (creator of Blogger.com). Here's an inside look at Odeo, as described by Williams himself.   [MacDevCenter.com]

What's New For Developers in QuickTime  In Part 1 of this series, Chris Adamson covered the new features of QT7 that end users will see. Today, he shows you some of the most prominent changes from a developer point of view, including: the QTKit API for Cocoa, the new QuickTime MetaData API, support for frame reordering codecs, Core Audio-based sound enhancements, and QuickTime for Java.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Music Gadgets  Every day, I seem to want to listen to music in a different way. Here are the gadgets I've been testing to "shuffle" my setup for music playback. A few of these are real keepers.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Going to the Movies (and More) in iTunes 4.8  Podcasting in iTunes 4.9 is just around the corner. Until then, have you played with the video functionality in 4.8? If not, here are a few things that Steve Jobs has mentioned--and a few he hasn't. By J.D. Biersdorfer, author of iPod and iTunes: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Tweaking Tiger Mail  The release of Mail 2.0 was largely overlooked amid all the fuss about Tiger's system-level features, but a number of people have made public complaints about changes made to the user interface. Mail's performance has improved, but the apparent willingness of Apple's designers to create an entirely new kind of toolbar icon just for use in Mail has irritated some. Giles Turnbull shows you how to bring happiness back to Mail.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Syncing iTunes  What happens if instead of sharing your iTunes libraries, you want to keep multiple libraries synchronized? This should sound familiar to anyone with a laptop computer on the go and a desktop sitting at home. Throughout the course of the day, you tweak some playlists and would like to have those changes automatically reflected in your library at home. David Miller shows you how to sync up your music.   [MacDevCenter.com]

An Introduction to Tiger Terminal, Part 2  In this second tutorial on Tiger Terminal, you'll learn how to use the terminal app to look at external volumes, then enable ssh to access files, scp to securely copy them remotely, sftp for secure ftp, and finally how to use rsync to synchronize files between two computers.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Ten PowerPoint 2004 Tips to Beat Tight Deadlines  PowerPoint 2004 lets you turn text, graphics, sounds, and movies into dazzling presentations that get your message across in high style. But what if you're on a short deadline? Franklin Tessler, author of Office 2004 for Mac: The Missing Manual, shows you ten ways to use PowerPoint to put together slideshows in no time.   [MacDevCenter.com]

It's True! Jobs Switches to Intel: A Review of the WWDC 05 Keynote  Don't get too comfortable after making the transition to Mac OS X. Steve Jobs decides to keep things interesting by announcing during his WWDC 05 keynote that Apple will switch to Intel processors. Here's what he said and how he plans to make it happen.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Let's Build Another Dashboard Widget  Even though no real development environment exists now, there are some tricks and techniques that can be used to make Dashboard widget development easier. Andrew Anderson explores some tricks and techniques and presents a widget that uses JavaScript's XMLHttpRequest method to retrieve spelling suggestions from Google.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Everything You Wanted to Know About Safari RSS, Part 2  In part one of this series, F.J. provided a solid overview of the Safari browser and the RSS specification. In this article, he shows you how to set up Safari RSS to serve as your newsreader, including lots of handy configuration tips.   [O'Reilly Network]

Everything You Wanted to Know About Safari RSS, Part 1  Safari 2.0 stands tall among the Tiger highlights. In this three-part series, you'll learn everything you need to know to customize this browser for newsreading. Plus, you'll explore the technologies that power Safari RSS beneath that beautiful UI.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Japan Primer for the Mac Techno-Tourist  Many of us believe that Japan is the land of geek nirvana. If you're contemplating a visit to the gadget promise land, you'll enjoy Todd Ogasawara's report on everything from cell phone coverage to buying Mac accessories.   [MacDevCenter.com]

A Closer Look at Spotlight  Spotlight integration with Tiger and its apps tilts the scales back toward Safari, Address Book, iCal, and Mail for your core applications. Matthew Russell shows you how this intelligent technology enables you to find just about anything, anywhere, regardless of where you are at that moment.   [MacDevCenter.com]

An Introduction to Tiger Terminal  Now that you've had a chance to enjoy all of the GUI goodies in Mac OS X 10.4, you might be ready to check out what's happening with the Terminal app. This article will introduces you to Tiger's Terminal app and CLI (command-line interface).   [O'Reilly Network]

Consumer Camera Time-Lapse Movies  Pocket digicams are great for still photos, and some of them even record quality video. But you can push the envelope even further with these devices, such as by creating time-lapse movies. Here's how two photo novices created their first production.   [DigitalMedia.oreilly.com]

Tiger's Powerful Migration Assistant  Transferring data, prefs, and apps from old Macs to new ones can be painful when upgrading computers. Fortunately, Apple's Migration Assistant has the brains and brawn to save users and system administrators alike much time during this process. Here's everything you'd want to know about this great tool.   [O'Reilly Network]

20 Cool Tiger Features You Might Not Have Heard About  Even though Tiger has been out for a while now, many of its major features have nuances that haven't received much press--and there a zillion minor tweaks to discuss. Scott Knaster takes you on a tour of clever, and sometimes even obscure, Tiger goodies.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Magnificent Seven: What's New for Users in QuickTime 7  Tiger is cool, but it's not the only new cat on the block. Apple has also released an updated version of QuickTime. Chris Adamson examines the user-visible features and changes in QT 7, including QT 7 Pro, renovations to the QuickTime Player application, and the implications of the powerful new H.264 video codec.   [MacDevCenter.com]

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