Long, long time between postings…
and I should blame Leopard, which Apple recently announced the ship date for and so which I guess I can now say has been consuming most of my time for much of the summer. Leopard ships on 10/26, so it’s pretty clear that we’re done with it by now and busily making DVDs and boxes of Leopard to ship out as fast as we can.
My main contribution to Leopard isn’t really visible to end users — I wrote a component of the OS which is part of LaunchServices, and which creates, maintains, and updates the notions of “running” applications on the system. When a user launches an application, I’m the thing that actually figures out what bits on disk should be run, and ask a system service called launchd to run in, and then tell the rest of the system that an application launched ( which the Dock uses to start the icon bouncing ), and then later tells everyone that the app is running. If a process wants to know what apps are running, well, I’m the thing which keeps track of all of that and provides the answers, hopefully in an efficient and correct way. When you hide or show an application, I’m the thing which actually does that. When a user hits command-tab to bring up the application list, I’m the thing that provided that list, and when a user does something to bring an application forward, I’m the guy who tells the application that it should come forward ( and the application which was in front that it isn’t anymore ), etc. It’s a necessary but kind of thankless bit of the os.
The weird thing about working on an operating system is knowing what’s actually cool about it, because when I’m working on it I get really head-down, and it’s hard to see the new features from inside the forest. A couple weeks ago we had a meeting where they showed the video that will play in the Apple stores demoing Leopard, and there were features in there that were new to me, and I’ve been using Leopard of various flavors for the past two years.
Cool features that I do like include
- Back to my Mac — On each machine you own, go to System Preferences, pick “Sharing”, and enable screen sharing and remote login. Go to the .Mac preference pane, enter your .Mac id ( and, this feature requires a .Mac account, so sorry if you don’t have one ) and then click on the Back to my Mac tab and make sure it’s running.<p>Now, you can go to the Finder, and under the “Shared” tab you’ll see all your machines listed, and you can mount any machine’s disk volumes or ever view and control the screen from any of your other computers. Need a file from work? Go get it. Want to look up an address in your address book on your home machine? Connect to your home machine’s screen and run Address Book and look it up. Everything happens over an encrypted vpn set up
- Time Machine — I’ve never been able to stick with a good backup system at home, even though I know I should. I’ve always been lucky — when a file got lost, or a drive started to go bad, I could always recover enough of it that I didn’t lose things.
- I haven’t used it yet, but once I get my father’s machine on Leopard ( and, I hope it runs Leopard ) we’ll be able to use Screen Sharing so I can help him when he has a problem.
I’ll probably come back and add stuff to this list as it occurs to me.