Peter’s Programming Notes

Peter || Programming Notes || Amy || Robert || Belinda || William Dawes || Stairways || Keyboard Maestro

Contents

• Original Material
• Third-Party Material
• Links
• A Final Note on Programming

Original Material

This section lists my novel contributions to the topic of programming and authoring shareware professionally. The next section has an assortment of links related to programming. Of course, there is no lack of information on programming on the Internet, so our list of links is basically just a random sample...

• Scripted Image Drawing- A summary of tools for use in creating drawings (graphs, charts, images, text layouts, etc) from scripts (AppleScript, Perl, Python) on Mac OS X
• ImageMagick Hints- A list of hints I have learned playing with ImageMagick on Mac OS X
• Memory Madness- An article I wrote about handling Memory on the Macintosh, first published in MacTech Magazine. Recommended for intermediate level programmers.
• Assertions- An article I wrote about using Assertions, first published in MacTech Magazine. Recommended for intermediate level programmers.
• Becoming A Shareware Author Part I- A brief discussion of the economics of being a Shareware Author as your major source of income.
• Authoring Shareware Part II- An assortment of questions and answers: where you can distribute your shareware, how to register Creator codes, a posting check list- further questions welcome!
• Mac OS Error List- A list of many of the standard Mac OS error codes.

Third-Party Material

This section describes similar or related material by other people who know what they are talking about...

• Successful Shareware by Rick Holzgrafe is a more extensive article on the economics of being a successful or full-time shareware author.
• The Seven Deadly Product Release Sins by Matt Deatherage at TidBITS documents how to handle the actual product release
• ReadMe Rules Series by Tonya Engst at TidBITS documents how to write good ReadMes - essential especially if you have not got complete documentation.

Links

Here are some links to interesting Pascal or Macintosh specific programming resources.

• Pascal Specific

  For all Pascal programmers an invaluable resource is Bill Catambay's Pascal Central. Also on that web page is Ingemar's Corner: a collection source code from Ingemar Ragnemalm, Macintosh Shareware programmer and author of "Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus".

• Macintosh Specific
  • Apple Developer Connection is the definitive starting point and contains most of the information that Apple makes available to developers.
  • Apple Developer Documentation contains the online documentation for programming the Mac.
  • Metrowerks’ home page was well worth a look. The makers of CodeWarrior, they have a strong commitment to developers.
  • Metrowerks’ programming links page was an excellent, much more complete list than this one.
  • MacTech Magazine is the established industry resource of news and information for Macintosh programmers. It features articles and columns written by some of the industry's top professionals (including Apple engineers), and includes source code, industry news, product reviews, conference reports, and much more.

A Final Note on Programming

We recommend to you Writing Solid Code by Steve Maguire. If you read this book and implement the techniques he suggests you will write more bug free, reliable code. It is that simple.

Writing Solid Code is really about a particular attitude to coding, with lots of specific advice about how to avoid doing Bad Things. For a sample of what Writing Solid Code is like, see the (otherwise unrelated) article The Veteran Neophyte: Killing Time Killers.