Saint Louis CocoaHeads Meeting 4/29/06 2pm CST @ St. Louis Bread Company, 10740 Sunset Plaza, 63127
Meetings are casual and we don’t have to stick to topics, but here are some:
* Programing with Quartz. I’ll be bringing my copy of the book to show, it’s a very good book. Although it’s focused mainly on C, it’s good to know what’s going on behind the cocoa drawing classes, plus you can always use C directly in Objective-C, and the concepts directly transfer.
See Also: Programing with Quartz by Gelphman and Laden
* Resolution Independence. This is a hot topic these days with both higher dpi and larger LCD screens becoming more and more prevalent. Tiger has apis to support it, although most applications aren’t ready for it. Cocoa gets a lot of support for free, but there are a few gotchas. Also lately there have been several interesting post in Surfin Safari about the need to deal with High DPI in web design and the ideas behind it transfer between that and cocoa ui design, not to mention as of Tiger your seeing more and more UI designed with HTML.
See Also: Surfin Safari
* OpenHUD.
The HUD user interface debuted in Motion, then showed up in iPhoto, and now is in nightly builds of Safari, IWeb and is starting to show up in closed source shareware apps. St. Louisan Andy Matuschak started an open source project to provide an open API for this must have GUI style. Andy may or may not be able to come to the meeting this month, so we might just gloss over this topic and save it for another month.
See Also: OpenHUD Intro
* Real Universal Binary!
So I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere but the LLVM project website, The Low Level Virtual Machine, released a new GCC 4.0 frontend that currently only works on Mac OS X (Both PPC & X86) and supports Objective-C/C++. If your unfamiliar with LLVM it can compile C to a bytecode representation about the same size a x86 binary (includes a JIT compiler too), the main goal of this project was to provide runtime optimizations and transformations, but there have been other extensions to this project such as providing memory safety for C programs. The implications of adding memory safety to Objective-C would be mean it could overcome one of it’s the biggest shortcomings compared to other modern programing languages. There are of lot of interesting potentials from this project and since Apple hired the lead developer last year, and now with the addition of objective-c support 4 months before the leopard preview, I think it’s not a bad bet to assume Apple is targeting Leopard Objective-C features based on LLVM?
From the Release Notes :
LVM 1.7 includes a brand new llvm-gcc, based on GCC 4.0.1. This version of llvm-gcc solves many serious long-standing problems with llvm-gcc, including all of those blocked by the llvm-gcc 4 meta bug. In addition, llvm-gcc4 implements support for many new features, including GCC inline assembly, generic vector support, SSE and Altivec intrinsics, and several new GCC attributes. Finally, llvm-gcc4 is significantly faster than llvm-gcc3, respects -O options, its -c/-S options correspond to GCC’s (they emit native code), supports Objective C/C++, and it has debugging support well underway.
