Welcome to the MacHack 1997!
Did you know that MacHack papers form the cornerstone of the premiere Macintosh technical conference? Papers can cover a wide variety of cool topics. Anything from Adaptive Computing, the Business of Being a Mac Developer, and Game Programming, to Internet Development, Debugging PPC code, and figuring out spiffy NeXT OS hacks.
Some of the exciting (and useful!) papers we expect to bring you at this year's MacHack include:
This paper provides a brief overview of some high-level design features in
PowerPlant. These design patterns are presented both for their aesthetic
beauty, and as an indication of current trends in framework and software
design.
This paper discusses ideas to override components of the popular Internet
Config extension so as to keep preference information on a central server,
instead of the local Macintosh Preference folder. Doing so removes
traditional limitations that have made it difficult to get a consistent
user experience for users who move between multiple machines, or for users
of shared machines, such as computer labs. The Application Configuration
Access Protocol is proposed as a means to accomplish this location
independence via open Internet standards.
This paper describes five graphics techniques for getting the most out of
QuickDraw. The gems described show: how to draw dashed lines at any angle;
how to use the patXor pen mode in color to display a color marquee; how to
combine multiple polygons into a single PolyPolygon; how to speed up the
drawing of large numbers of polygons at once; and how to use Xor drawing
modes to overcome Region complexity limitations.
This paper describes a mechanism to allow MP tasks to display directly to
the screen. By partially overcoming the limitation of not being able to
call QuickDraw, MP programmers can thus increase the functionality and
capabilities of their MP software. In addition, this paper introduces MP
GrafLib, a MP aware graphics library that can be extended to allow full
featured drawing capabilities.
With the Internet becoming a hot topic in more and more countries outside
the U.S., distributing your Next Great Software solution to foreign
customers instantly has become a reality. But what if they start using
their own language in it, and encounter bugs in your text engine? What
are the internationalization features in MacOS and how can you use them?
Is multi-byte text that difficult to code for? What about Unicode? What
about cross-platform development? These and other issues will be covered
with both code examples and explanations, centering on the author's
experience culturalizing software for the Japanese market.
Using the MacOS for acquiring and displaying real-time data is a problem
with not-too-well documented solutions. Recent advances like the Thread
Manager and (for Internet applications) OpenTransport, as well as
asynchronous I/O, are of course helpful and indeed indispensable for
whoever tries to do real-time programming but it is not always clear how to
deploy these facilities to the greatest advantage. The MacOS, because of
its single-user, single-application origins, still places some restrictions
on what can be done in this regard. Some of those restrictions can be
overcome; this is what this paper is about. Reasonable familiarity with
Macintosh programming and PowerPlant is assumed.
This paper explains input/output (IO) on the Mac OS. After detailing the two IO models, the paper provides an explanation of how two match the Thread Manager with Mac OS IO with three examples. This paper finally introduces a new method along with the code behind it.
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Last updated: June 10, 1997 by mtc