{"id":798,"date":"2004-03-17T15:59:39","date_gmt":"2004-03-17T20:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=798"},"modified":"2016-08-11T10:40:20","modified_gmt":"2016-08-11T14:40:20","slug":"mac_developer_journal_tak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2004\/03\/17\/mac_developer_journal_tak\/","title":{"rendered":"Mac Developer Journal, Take 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nWhen I first looked<\/a> at Mac Developer Journal<\/a>, I liked the content but not the clunky Zinio reader (which commandeers a top-level spot in my home folder) or restrictive file format. The second issue<\/a> fixes the most glaring problem: that the layout was designed for printing but could only be printed one page at a time. The first thing I did after downloading the sample of the second issue was to print it to a PDF file. This worked without a hitch, although some of the interactive content printed as solid black boxes. I could now read the issue in Preview.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nAlas, all was not well with the PDF file. Not surprisingly for a Quartz-generated PDF, it had no clickable internal links or URLs, and no bookmarks. What is surprising, though, is that the text was not selectable or searchable.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nI like to read magazines on paper<\/em>, but I was unable to print the complete sample issue at high quality. Whether this was because of software problems or my PostScript-emulating GCC printer, I don’t know. When I printed from Zinio Reader, nothing printed after logical page 52 (the first page of the REALbasic article). Author names printed as black boxes. The same thing happened when I tried to print the PDF from Preview, even if I asked it to start printing on page 52. I was<\/em> finally able to print the issue by asking Acrobat Reader to print the PDF as an image, but that took a long time and reduced the quality. The text wasn’t as sharp, and the code examples no longer had shaded backgrounds.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nPage 28 (the last page of the Search Kit article) printed with the body text in a sans-serif font, unlike the rest of the article. This article, by the way, was the one in the sample issue that most interested me. Unfortunately, it ended up being high-level and didn’t seem to provide any information that’s not found in Apple’s own PDF documentation for Search Kit<\/a>. It also commits the typographical sin of using ligatures in code examples.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nOn the plus side, some of the articles that aren’t<\/em> in the sample issue look interesting (the Rich Siegel interview and the two After Hours articles). And the Web site has a video interview with Brent Simmons<\/a>, in which he has some very nice things to say about SpamSieve (as well as Bare Bones, Omni, and SubEthaEdit).\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nOverall, I like the content of Mac Developer Journal, but it doesn’t really have the focus that I want. There are marketing-type articles and interviews, which I would read but that aren’t really enough to get me to buy the magazine. There are introductory technical articles. And there are more general-interest “how to” articles that wouldn’t be out of place in Macworld. The writing is definitely a notch better than MacTech<\/a>. What there are not, it appears, are the develop<\/a>-style technical articles that should be the core of a Macintosh developer magazine.\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\nFor a look at how good a developer magazine can be, consider the platform-agnostic Dr. Dobb’s Journal<\/a>. It manages to be both broad and deep—see, for example, the tables of contents from the March<\/a> and April<\/a> issues—and features columns from Verity Stob and Mike Swaine. I realize that the prices are not directly comparable due to the Mac market’s small size, but at $50\/year Mac Developer Journal seems very expensive compared to DDJ ($35\/year). The issues are smaller, they’re quarterly rather than monthly, and they’re delivered in Zinio format instead of on paper.\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first looked at Mac Developer Journal, I liked the content but not the clunky Zinio reader (which commandeers a top-level spot in my home folder) or restrictive file format. The second issue fixes the most glaring problem: that the layout was designed for printing but could only be printed one page at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1088,1087,1086,993,946,71],"class_list":["post-798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-dr-dobbs","tag-mac-developer-journal","tag-mactech","tag-macworld","tag-magazine","tag-programming"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10333,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions\/10333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}