On February 11th from 4-6pm in BA 1130, Steve Hayman, Apple Consulting Engineer, is coming to campus to share his knowledge, expertise and humor!
Join Steve as he talks about software development on the Mac with Apple’s Xcode tool suite. We’ll look at building applications with Xcode and Interface Builder; the role of scripting languages including Applescript, Ruby and Python alongside C and Objective-C; reusing objects from Apple’s Cocoa, WebKit and ImageKit frameworks; nifty higher level tools including Automator for workflow design, and the groundbreaking Quartz Composer graphic development environment; and if Steve messes up, we may see some brief usage of the debugger as well.
Overview of some topics covered:
- The core UNIX operating system of the Mac
- The open-source tools used to build the operating system (the GNU C and C++ compilers, the BSD OS, etc)
- Simple programming by scripting other applications, e.g. writing scripts to tell, say, iChat or iTunes or Safari what to do
- Easy building-block style application development for non-programmers, power users etc using Automator and its 150 powerful actions
- The Xcode suite for building complete Mac OS X applications (the Xcode developer environment, the Interface Builder design tool, etc)
- Quartz Composer, a groundbreaking graphics development environment that lets you harness the power of the Mac OS X graphics technologies – Quartz 2D, Core Image, OpenGL, Quicktime, etc.
- Reusing pieces of Apple applications in your own application; e.g. using the WebKit frameworks that are the core of Safari to build your own applications that harness everything Safari can do, or the ImageKit framework (drawn from iPhoto) providing sophisticated objects for editing and presenting images
- Performance monitoring and analysis tools – what can you do with dtrace, Instruments.app, Shark.app and so on to peer inside your system and measure its behavior
- Using Xcode and the iPhone SDK to build applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Steve Hayman is a National Consulting Engineer for Apple’s Education Sales group. After graduating from Waterloo with an M.Math in 1986, he earned his hacker credentials as a Unix network manager for UW and Indiana University; at the latter institution he became the first, and perhaps the last, private individual in the entire state of Indiana to purchase a NeXT cube. Steve joined NeXT Computer in 1991, attracted by NeXT’s blend of a powerful Unix core with a great graphical interface. You can imagine his delight as Apple acquired NeXT and the NEXTSTEP operating system evolved into Mac OS X. A frequent speaker at Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference, he’s currently a field resource for Apple on the topics of Unix, the Mac OS X developer tools and the Cocoa, AppleScript Studio and WebObjects developer environments. In his spare time Steve directs Argonotes, the Toronto Argonauts Band, which he thinks is the finest band in the Canadian Football League.
Who Should Attend?
Mac users, software developers, faculty who teach programming and might be interested in using the Mac platform, anybody interested in the idea of writing their own applications, anybody interested in the guts of the operating system, UNIX aficionados who might be open-minded to doing the odd thing outside of the Terminal window once in a while, power Mac users who might be curious what you can do inside the Terminal window once in a while, and more.