There has been quite a bit of discussion the last few days about the momentum-based scrolling that Apple uses on the iPhone. The discussion has largely been fanned by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog. He has been arguing for some time that one of the reasons web…

Around 3 years ago, I co-authored the book Beginning Mac OS X Programming with Mike Trent. It takes a broad look at developing software on the Mac, covering as much ground as possible, from Carbon to Cocoa, and even AppleScript. As far as I know, it is…

One of the great things about developing for the Mac or iPhone is the suite of performance and debugging tools that Apple provides: GDB, Shark, Instruments, etc. However, there’s one tool which has received a lot less attention than it should, potentially because of its…

I don’t know about you, but I often have to go through rings to retrieve output data from calculations run on clusters or supercomputers, in order to analyze it on my Mac. Most of these systems are well protected, with access only via SSH. That…

Fortran 90 can include reasonably complex dependencies, which must be taken into account when building a multiple-file program. Unfortunately, most build tools either don’t support Fortran, or don’t help the developer much. A standard make file, for example, requires you to enter dependencies manually, or develop a…

I recently started a postdoctoral position and one of my first tasks was to get Sun Grid Engine up and running on our new Xserve cluster. I downloaded the sge-6.1u2 darwin binaries from http://gridengine.sunsource.net/ and then began the installation. The installation scripts are very picky…

Within this section, I’ll show you how to answer even more specific questions about your application via the use of custom static probes, and I’ll demonstrate how easy it is to use DTrace within Instruments to extend its already powerful data capture capabilities. Custom DTrace…

This post is not specific to the Mac, but there are probably many MR readers that have to use Fortran in some aspect of their work, so it certainly can’t hurt… Callbacks for Mac A few weeks ago I was lamenting the difficulty of implementing…

Articles in this series include: Hello Brave New World Classy Cocoa Living Objects Good References It’s All in the Genes Jekyll and Hyde Into Xcode IB, Therefore I am MVC is not the ‘Motor Vehicle Commission’ Popping Up All Over the Place The Value in…

As my grant writing has ramped up over the years, I’ve gradually brought my workflow over to the iWork suite and found it much more satisfying than in the Office world. Surprisingly, there are no resources on the internet providing tips and tricks for research…