words by patrick

There are a bazillion rumours floating around on the internet about what is going to be announced at WWDC next week. Everything from an Apple cell phone to Core 2 Duo “Mac Pro” machines, to the “iTunes Movie Store” and more. Hardware always seems to attract the rumour-mongers, but after getting more involved with programming for OS X I am finding myself much more interested in the obvious: Leopard, the next generation of Mac OS X. This might also be because I recently bought a MacBook, and thus don’t and won’t really care about hardware for a while.

There’s a lot of big, big things Apple could do Leopard, since they stated they want to slow down major releases. In my mind, slower releases is akin to having bigger major releases. That said, I’m thinking Leopard is going to pretty big and special so that it has a longer life-span.

Here’s my short, crazy unrealistic wish-list:

• Xcode 3 will be open-sourced, and will be able to benefit from the community just like WebKit already has.
• Leopard will FTFF (”Fix the Fucking Finder”, for the uninitiated) but it will go further than that. The entire OS will receive an slight appearance overhaul, and improve the oh-so-elusive UI consistency that is lacking in Tiger.
• Part of the new UI will have BeOS style window title bars. Okay, I know this isn’t likely… but they are just so much nicer and more efficient.
• Quartz 2D Extreme will be turned on. And it will kick ass.
• Leopard Light - Apple will offer a stripped down Mac OS X that can run nicely on older/smaller systems.

So, I started up a blog again. You’re looking at it. It’s pretty snazzy, I have to say. Wordpress (and the associated K2 bundle) have come a long way since I first touched them years ago. I swore off blogging a long time ago, so you might be wondering – like I was – what the hell I’m doing with yet another blog, contributing to mindless, useless mess that has become… “The Blogosphere”.

Well, good call. I’m glad you are concerned with the state of the internet as well. There are way too many people who just don’t seem to care, and feel that it is somehow useful (even though it isn’t, at all), to post about how cute their cat is or what they ate for lunch. So to answer the question, what is it that I’m doing here? Well, I thought it would be useful to have this site so that I can document and contribute my discoveries and knowledge to the growing Mac OS X developer community. It’s somewhat of a specialized field, and sometimes it can be hard to find the information you want, so if it’s not already out there, my goal is going to be to try and put it out there.

I’m just a student, and I’m learning constantly, as are most devs, so I won’t claim to know everything or try to answer every question. I’m going to post when I stumble across interesting information, and do things as I go.

I’ve set up a bunch of useful links to the best OS X Dev resources on the internet, and hope to publish my first article soon.

Hopefully this site will end up proving useful to my fellow OS X developers. Wish me luck, here I go.