Archive for December 5, 2002
Mac OS X Binary Compatibility
Technical Note TN2064 explains:
how to ensure that a Mach-O application built against the latest version of Mac OS X can run effectively on older versions of Mac OS X, and what you should do if your application contains the use of APIs that do not yet exist in the older version of Mac OS X.
(link credit to Ranchero)
Jaguar’s Font Panel
Many people don’t realize that you can slide the preview panel up and down. There’s a hot zone near the bottom of the preview.
Perhaps that’s because there’s no affordance. The font panel would be really cool if you could type letters to navigate MenuType-style. I can’t find a link for MenuType, but I think that’s what it was called. It was a control panel that let you type to scroll through the Font menu, and it also provided WYSIWYG previews in varying sizes.
The Elements of Typographic Style
Aaron Swartz praises Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, an excellent book that’s a lot more fun than you might think it could be. Swartz also notes that despite the book’s beauty it’s hard to actually read it because of its binding and shape (I agree). This kind of irony is all too common—despite Tog’s knowledge of computer interfaces, his Web site was a usability disaster before he got help from Jakob Nielson.Functional Python
Daniel Sandler shows how to write objectcurry in Python:
Called with an object and the name of a method, will return a standalone function that can be called at any time (as if it were still connected to its object).
It seems that Python doesn’t have real closures, but I was able to write make-adder using the single-element array technique that’s often used with Java inner classes. I also found Peter Norvig’s Python for Lisp Programmers page, which has some great examples of when Python’s more mainstream syntax is and isn’t a win. Norvig says that “Python can be seen as either a practical (better libraries) version of Scheme, or as a cleaned-up (no $@&%) version of Perl.” Finally, the Xoltar toolkit adds functional programming support to Python.
