As threatened, newbie Mac questions

[fivemack]

1. Is there a sensible way of resizing a window whose resize handle is under the Dock?


2. Could someone point me at an XCode tutorial? I'm at the trial-and-error stage, and I can't even understand the error messages


3. Are Python-to-Cocoa bindings available, and adequate to write applications which look reasonable?


4. If I'm missing Excel, and find gnumeric from fink hopelessly ugly, kludgy and incompatible, is there any better move than picking up Office X? I don't need anything more than Excel97 gave me on Windows, but I feel I want at least that. For word-processing, I'm reasonably happy with TextEdit - I don't need more than a couple of styles and spell-check


5. I take several thousand photos a year, at 2.5MB each with my new camera, and my archive is 10,000 or so images. Picasa coped nicely on the PC; will iPhoto?


6. Where can I get a 'macish' (IE small, square and white) USB hub? Palm, compact-flash reader, Webcam, mouse and keyboard have used up all my ports


7. Is there a way to get fvwm2-under-XDarwin (or, if you prefer, some other window manager under some other X server) to do solid window drag and resize? Currently I don't even get an outline box; with twm I got no feedback, with fvwm I get a teeny little box with coordinates in.
   

Comments

[ckd]

1. There are several options.

Move the window (since the title bar won't be under the dock); move or hide the dock (right-click or control-click on the separator to do this most easily); resize the dock (dragging on the separator; option-drag will constrain to "even" sizes); or use the green "maximize" button to get the window both resized and out from under the dock.

There are probably some I'm not thinking of, too.

2. Have you signed up for an online account with Apple Developer Connection yet? The online membership level is free. Getting Started has links to lots of baseline docs.

3. Available here. Adequate, no opinion; I have not tried them. Latest release was 2004-12-29, though, so they appear to be getting active development attention.

4. Excel is basically the only spreadsheet option if gnumeric doesn't do it for you. Office X or Office 2004, or I think you can buy Excel separately if that really is all you need.

5. I haven't tried iPhoto 5 yet, but iPhoto 4 supposedly deals with 10K+ images; I haven't hit that yet (4K).

6 & 7. Don't know; I have a USB hub in my display, and use the Aqua-style wm that comes with the X11 install from the 10.3 discs.

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

Re: 4

Open Office is also available. As far as I know, the Mac version is still using X11, so it's not particularly speedy, but it does work reasonably. I believe there's a Cocoa version in the works ...

[emperor]

re 3:

They rather assume you've used Application Builder to sort out a lot of the GUI-ish bits of your application. YMMV as to whether this is a good thing or not.

[simont]

(DYM Interface Builder?)

I've recently been learning Cocoa using Objective-C, and although it took some thought, I did figure out how to avoid Interface Builder totally and build an application using no nibs at all and nothing but ordinary code. I've been arguing about this on Mono with more conventional OS X programmers, but they haven't yet said anything to make me change my mind... Don't know whether the same trick would work with the Python bindings, but I for one would be strongly inclined to try it if I were using Python.

fivemack: I found the Cocoa documentation supplied with the Xcode tools (start at /Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/index.html) to be basically adequate, or at least nothing I couldn't work with when supplemented with a bit of Googling.

It isn't entirely clear whether you're happy to try ObjC or whether you non-negotiably want to use Python, but if the former then I just read the ObjC introduction starting at /Developer/Documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjectiveC/index.html and that sorted out most of my essential language-level confusion, leaving me in a good position to learn the APIs.

[emperor]

yes, I did. oops.

Unfortunately, the python-cocoa documentation assumes you'll be using nibs, so starting off not knowing the bindings OR anything about cocoa proved to be rather a stumbling-block (but I have little time and brain ATM)

[ckd]

7. Missed the "or some other wm/X server" bit; yes, the Apple-supplied X11 default install and wm will do solid moves and resizes.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

My USB hub is bluish-green, which matches my CPU box. When it was new, it blew away all the Windows boxen on SETI@Home.

Beware of Apple's changes in fashion. If they come out with the Plaid Mac next year, your white USB hub will look so 2005.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I had a Belkin hub with my ruby iMac which came with coloured paper inserts so you could match the colour of your machine. It looks a bit sad next to my gleaming white iMac III, though.