Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Lisp Intro Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp. [markpasc.blog] Lisp is fun. Honest. :) [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog Zilla] 11:12:47 AM

Automation vs. Programming Automation vs. Programming. Apple have updated their AppleScript page, replete with more documentation, sample files, and case studies. What I find interesting is their tagline: "Powerful, easy-to-learn automation for Macintosh systems." And that's been the story for as long as I can remember. If you want to script repetitive tasks on a Macintosh, AppleScript's your friend. It seems time, however, to tell a different -- and, in my book, far more interesting -- story. It's the story of AppleScript as programming environment with shallow well-within-reach learning curve for beginners yet high ceiling with plenty of head-room for advanced programmers. I'm talking the likes of Perl, Python, Visual Basic (not basic Basic). You have to know very little to hit the ground running and do something interesting -- and usually somewhat useful too. Yet by the time you feel the ceiling closing in on you, you're well on your way to the next level, be it Objective C, Java, or still more advanced AppleScript. "But I'm not a programmer! AppleScript simply allows me to glue together a pipeline of the functions and applications I need to get from here to there. I build droplets and scriptlets, not applications! You must have me confused with one of those Perl or Java people." I have news for you: I've seen magic cleverly disguised as automation that would make many a Perl programmer's jaw drop. Strings of Filemaker databases, Word templates and merges, Finder folders and files, data conversion, prompts, alerts, and speech. And it's gorgeous! With AppleScript Studio, Apple have bridged the gap between scripting environment and gorgeous application UI. Lest you fail to appreciate just what bridge this is, may I remind you of the functional yet hardly immersive UIs of Perl/Tk, Python/wxWindows, and JavaScript/XUL. With AppleScript Studio you end up very real applications able to make their way in the world as peers with heavier full-scale apps created with heavy-duty Objective-C and C++ rather than looking like poor cousins with knock-off widgets. And its all within reach of a tenacious AppleScripter thinking they're just doing a little automation and finding that the glue actually resembles something of an actual application. It's a magical line you cross, seen only from the other side. One moment you're scripting a Google lookup via their Web API; the next, you've built a primitive "what's related" neighborhood browser. And there's something about having a GUI app of your own making in your face where before there was a wodge of much-needed automation that lights up the imagination. Perhaps then the real power of AppleScript lies in its lack of differentiation between the glue and the apps you're gluing. Hey, that sounds like a certain programming language I use! Mac OS X provides a wonderful opportunity for some never-before-seen cross-pollination. Unix hackers and AppleScripters have quite a bit to learn from one-another. For the hackers is the promise of GUI aesthetics to graft onto their programmatic aesthetics. For the AppleScripter is the realization that what they've been doing all along is nothing less than -- dare I say the P word? -- programming. [raelity bytes] 11:09:04 AM

Very Nice Jaguar Feature! For today's Jaguar new feature (this one could be 5 or 6 features by itself but we don't count like that), there's the new Character Palette. Be prepared to be blown away by something as 'simple' as a palette with glyphs from your installed fonts. There is a ton of information in the Unicode spec, and this feature exposes as much of that info as you want. There are two ways to active the character palette. From the Font panel, choose "Show Characters" from the Extas popup or go to the International preferences panel and enable the Character Palette from the Input Menu. Here's a quick tour of some of the cool things you can do: Want to find special characters from a Roman font? You can browse for them in these categories and not worry about trying to remember the command-shift-left-elbow command key equivalent. You can remember favorites and see exactly what fonts include a given glyph, all from this palette. You have access to every Unicode code block and can view related characters for any glyph from the Unicode set. You can even scan through every glyph available in any installed font. Be sure to check out the Hiragino fonts with a massive number of exceptionally high quality glyphs.   [Ken Bereskin's Radio Weblog] 11:07:04 AM

0wnz0red 0wnz0red is a new science-fiction novella by Corey Doctorow published on Salon. I've read the first section, and I'm hooked. "It amounts to a science-fictional take on Trusted Computing, with generous dollops of Atkins Diet, hacker ethos and bloggy memes thrown in for good measure. It's a really fun, super-nerdy story (I've been jokingly calling it the first example of a new genre called "Nerdc0re") -- or so I'm told -- and I'm proud as I can be to have it on the Web where anyone can read it and link to it. I hope you dig it as much as I do." 9:27:53 AM

Jaguar upgrade notes A useful collection of upgrade narratives describing improvements, problems, and solutions. 8:36:43 AM