A great article for developers: Exploring Leopard with DTrace. And Matt Gemmell has a fantastic rundown of all the great new Leopard features and API’s in his Get rid of your code with Leopard. I wish there were easier ways to use all of them without inexorably tying your software to 10.5, though. I’ve resorted to loading the QuickLook framework dynamically in DFX 4 so I can use it while still retaining Tiger compatibility, but that’s an easy case because there’s really only one API call I have to manually look up. Weak linking helps (thanks Apple!) but I don’t have a good structure set up for integrating a more complex framework without a lot of painful code. Anyone have any ideas out there? And no, “force your users to upgrade to Leopard” is not a viable answer in my book.
Archive for the ‘Leopard’ Category
Cool developer features in Leopard
Monday, November 5th, 2007Default Folder X 4 Look and Feel
Monday, November 5th, 2007
I’m excited about the new look for Default Folder X! Here’s a quick screenshot. In addition to the HUD-style translucent gray, DFX 4 gives you a preview window that floats below Open dialogs, finally letting you look at a decent-sized file preview no matter which view of the Open dialog you’re in (list, icon, or column view). The preview also zooms open to a full-screen image if you click on it – handy if you need to see more detail to be sure which of those two, very-similar-looking PDF’s is actually the one you want. And yes, the preview window also has”Get Info” information, comments, and permissions too.
The preview images come from QuickLook if you’re running Leopard, and from QuickTime if you’re running Tiger. QuickLook is faster and offers previews of many more formats (like MS Office documents), but I’ll try to squeeze in some more preview formats for Tiger before I get DFX 4.0 out the door.
Default Folder X ready for Leopard
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
To all those who are wondering (and haven’t emailed yet) – yes, Default Folder X 3.0.6 is mostly compatible with Leopard. It’ll run fine, but there are a few wrinkles – mainly that it doesn’t work with 64-bit applications. As far as I’m aware, that basically means it doesn’t work with Xcode – I don’t think there are any other 64-bit apps shipping yet (and yes, I know – if you’re a developer, Default Folder X not working in Xcode is still extremely annoying).
The good news is that I have a development build of Default Folder X 4 running in Leopard so I can get my own work done in Xcode. This new, Leopard-savvy version will be seeing the light of day (or the glow of other users’ screens) soon. The interface has been revamped, it uses QuickLook to generate nice previews that you can see even if you’re in ‘list mode’ in an Open dialog, and it fixes a few nigglety little things in Leopard. Some screenshots are on the way…
