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.

[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.