Web 2.0 Conference 2005 October 5-7, 2005, San Francisco, CA

Sponsored by:

Automator Automaton - David Pogue's Podcast  Listen to David Pogue cover Automator workflows that can help save on computing time. Learn how to use Automator to automate backups, zip up applications, and set alarms for automatic processing. (4 minutes, 26 seconds)   [MacDevCenter.com]

What Is NeoOffice/J (and Can It Replace MS Office)  NeoOffice/J is the long-awaited Mac-friendly version of OpenOffice. This open source project provides Mac users with most of the functionality of Microsoft Office, but for free. Is NeoOffice robust enough to serve as your only office suite in a Microsoft-dominated world? Matthew Russell explores. Plus, an in-depth interview with its lead developer, Patrick Luby.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Important Notice for Mac DevCenter Readers About O'Reilly RSS and Atom Feeds  O'Reilly Media, Inc. is rolling out a new syndication mechanism that provides greater control over the content we publish online. Here's information to help you update your existing RSS and Atom feeds to O'Reilly content.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Digital Photography Hack: A Hands-Free Shooting Rig  Here's how to build a hands-free photography rig using an iSight, a Bluetooth headset, a backpack, and a dash of AppleScript that enables you to capture images on the go by simply speaking, "Take shot." Romain Guy shows you how to build it.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Dashboard Widgets - David Pogue's Podcast  Listen to David Pogue cover Dashboard Widgets--what they are, how to use the Widget Bar, and what Widgets can do for you. He provides tips on some of the crazy and fun widgets available for free download. (6 minutes)   [MacDevCenter.com]

What Is Flickr (and Hot Tips for Using It)  Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application. And it's also one of the most innovative photo services available today. In this article, Giles Turnbull shows you how Flickr works, then introduces you to some of the great tools you can use to interact with it.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Using Perl to Manage Plist Files, Part 2  Part 2 goes into much more detail on managing Plist files. You'll change some values and save the altered Plist file back to disk. Then you'll loop over entries in a Plist file, get a dump of the NetInfo database, and print all the users in the database using Perl foreach loops. To do that you'll convert the Cocoa dictionaries and arrays to Perl hashes and arrays. Finally, you'll create a Plist file from scratch, build the sample Xgrid cal job listed in the Xgrid man page by creating the structure using Perl hashes and arrays, and then convert them to Cocoa equivalents.   [MacDevCenter.com]

Using Perl to Manage Plist Files  A common question is how to manage complex Plist files with scripts. The defaults command, which is often used to manage simple values in Plist files, does not easily manage the nested arrays or dictionaries that are present in most Plist files. In this first article of a two-part series, James Reynolds pulls together a little Perl and Cocoa to solve this problem.   [MacDevCenter.com]

What Is FireWire (and How Best to Use It)  FireWire is a high-speed, data serial interface that has many practical uses. In this article, you'll learn the ins and outs of this powerful technology, plus some inside tips to take advantage of its unique features.   [MacDevCenter.com]

All About Spotlight - David Pogue's Podcast  Listen to David Pogue's secret Tiger tips for Spotlight super searches--how to use spotlight to help access your data faster, streamline searches, and even launch applications faster. (7 minutes, 6.6 MB)   [MacDevCenter.com]

Automated Backups on Tiger Using rsync  Previously on Mac DevCenter, the rsync command was discussed in Intro to Tiger Terminal, Part 2. One of the uses for this command is to compare the files on your internal drive to those on your backup drive, and only archive the files that have changed. Richard Hough explains.   [MacDevCenter.com]

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]

Click here for all Mac content listed in chronological order.