ADC Reference Library

Apple has reorganised their developer's documentation and technotes into a new ADC Reference Library.

I like the way the information is organised. It reminds me a little of the support forum. The hierarchy feels logic (well, it suits my logic anyway). The topics are clearly outlined, with informative sidebar links to relevant internal or external resources. The search engine is a powerful way of finding what you're looking for. This reference will stand in good place in my reference bookmarks.

A comprehensive collection of Apple technical resources, including Documentation, Technical Notes, Sample Code, Technical Q&As, and Release Notes. Each of the links below leads to the resources for a specific topic. Key resources also include Getting Started documents, API references, and cross-references for related topics.

iPhoto Printing

Photo and Album Printing have been activated in iPhoto for (most) European users.

These features allows you to print your pictures and photo albums. I'll let you know how good they are as soon as I received my prints and albums.

The price in Switzerland is quite competitive (CHF 0.55 for a 10x15cm) - let's wait to evaluate the delivery times and quality.

iTMS where are you ..?

3 candles for Mac OS X

Mac OS 10.0 turns 3 today. It was launched on March, 24 2001, remember ? Seems ages ago, no?

After four major releases, Mac OS X has become as part of my every day life as Mac OS 9 was (and 8, and 7, and 6, ..). Moreover, this month sees the back of the last Classic application I couldn't do without (MacPay). Its final Cocoa version is due out on March 26. I must admit that my 9 icon has been bouncing less and less in my Dock for the last 18 months now.

Wink: Emma turned 3 too in March ;)

040326 update; ArsTechnica has a nice post on this event capturing the essentials of the last 3 years.

Asynchronous cron jobs

You are probably all aware that your Mac runs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts to check the integrity of your system and clean it up.

The Unix subsystems on Mac OS X were originally written for machines that were typically never shut off. Mac OS X inherits this assumption in version 1.x, and has many system maintenance tasks that are scheduled to run between 3 am and 5 am. In addition, there are scripts designed to run weekly on weekends, and once a month in the middle of the night.
Orig. MacJanitor

Utilities such as MacJanitor or Cocktail solved this problem by allowing you to run them manually. But you still had to think of doing it. Another solution is to change the time and day at which they are supposed to run, hoping that your computer would powered on then. Utilities such as CronniX help you do right that and more -- you can also edit the cron table by hand.

Downloading the latest version of DéjàVu, I fell on a reference to Anacron:

Anacron is a periodic command scheduler. It executes commands at intervals specified in days. Unlike cron, it does not assume that the system is running continuously. It can therefore be used to control the execution of daily, weekly and monthly jobs (or anything with a period of n days), on systems that don't run 24 hours a day. When installed and configured properly, Anacron will make sure that the commands are run at the specified intervals as closely as machine-uptime permits.
[snip]
It isn't a full-time daemon. It has to be executed from boot scripts, from cron-jobs, or explicitly.

Now this is just what I've been looking for for my AlPB which is seldom powered on at 3:00a. I changed the execution time of the maintenance scripts, but that doesn't help if the Mac is sleeping or off.. I'l give it a try and let you know.

Address Book Map function in Europe

The default map function of the Address Book is a cool trick, but isn't very useful to users living out of the USA. But there's a new plugin on the block: Mappy Address Book

A neat Address Book plugin which enables the Address Book to hook into the online Mappy services. You can map an address or route it. Works like a charm.