The winners of the third O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Contest have been announced. In the USA category, first place was awarded to Omni Outliner, with iBlog a close second. In the international category, iStopMotion took the top prize with ACSLogo coming in second place. F-Script received an honorable mention for its object-oriented scripting layer for Cocoa.

Posted at 11:16 AM PST with these tags: mac, tools

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This morning we’re providing live coverage of Mac OS X Conference keynote speeches by Adam Engst and Andy Ihnatko. This report will be updated continually until the talks end at 10:15 AM Pacific, so refresh frequently.

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Posted at 8:44 AM PST with these tags: mac

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We’re providing live coverage of this morning’s Mac OS X Conference keynote speeches by Tim O’Reilly and David Pogue. This report will be updated continually until the keynotes end at 10:15 AM Pacific, so refresh frequently.

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Posted at 9:03 AM PST with these tags: mac

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Being the first day of the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference, we’re seeing a flurry of interesting announcements. We’ll cover these as soon as we can put our notes together, but first we wanted to note the release of two important server software tools: iTools 7.2 and the Tomcat 5 Java application server (Tomcat 5 appears to be marked as “beta”). We just reviewed iTools 7.1 last week, so we’ll soon be posting our initial impressions of 7.2.

Posted at 3:48 PM PST with these tags: mac, tools

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Creating Easy-to-Deploy Unix Applications for OS X is a terrific article penned by Mark Roseman for MacDevCenter. The deployment obstacles mentioned in the article are exactly why we have to write lengthy, convoluted tutorials here on MacServers. If more developers took Mark’s advice, we could spend our time talking about which tool is best for the job instead of describing how to get them installed and configured. Highly recommended reading!

Posted at 6:41 PM PST with these tags: mac, cli

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MacCentral has a brief overview of Mac OS X Server 10.3, which Apple’s director of server software calls “open source made easy.” That was indeed the opportunity available to Apple when they originally released Mac OS X Server, but it seems the initial focus was on LAN administration rather than Internet servers. Will Panther get it right this time? Next week we’ll take an in-depth look.

Posted at 11:27 AM PDT with these tags: mac, network

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We were going to put together a guide to creating StartupItems for Mac OS X, but the folks over at MacDevCentral saved us the trouble. Andrew Anderson has put together a solid introduction to writing and understanding OS X StartupItems, which among other uses are handy for starting, stopping, and restarting background daemon processes.

Posted at 3:30 AM PDT with these tags: mac, cli

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Joel Spolsky writes about multilingual software development and how many programmers are unfortunately not paying enough attention to Unicode. While this has nothing to do with Macs in particular, it raises an important question: which development environment is best suited for multilingual web applications?

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Posted at 1:28 AM PDT with these tags: web, unicode

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So you have a Mac, and you want to turn it into a web server. Thankfully, Mac OS X comes with Apache, PHP, MySQL, and other useful server tools pre-installed. But for most Mac users, the UNIX underpinnings of OS X are alien, intimidating, and far from user-friendly. While Apple provides a basic graphical user interface (GUI) for starting and stopping Apache and FTP services, more advanced configuration requires a trip to the command line.

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Posted at 1:34 AM PDT with these tags: mac, web, apache, dns

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Volker Weber notes the existence of a UNIX-based music server called daapd that streams files via the same DAAP protocol used by iTunes. The key advantage to using daapd is the ability to both stream and download tracks from locations outside of the local subnet.

As you may recall, iTunes 4.0.1 removed the ability to stream music from another machine running iTunes unless both machines are the same subnet. So if you want to listen to your own collection of music at home from a remote location, stick with iTunes 4.0.0 or use daapd in conjunction with cross-platform DAAP clients such as iSlurp or One2OhMyGod. The latter clients also allow you to download tracks, which isn’t supported even by iTunes 4.0.0.

Posted at 12:00 AM PDT with these tags: music

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