Uniform Resource Locators

By Jim Straus, URLs@mactech.com

Spare your fingers and find this column online at:

http://www.mactech.com/URLsColumn.html

If you want the latest complete list, you can find it at:

http://www.mactech.com/URLs.html or (for a limited time), send mail to

MacTech-URLs@class.com and you’ll receive the latest list back.

Latest Updates

New Technologies

OpenMac http://puma.bevd.blacksburg.va.us/openmac/

NetBSD http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/mac68k/

MacLinux http://nucleus.ibg.uu.se/maclinux/

Portable Net. Graphics http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/PNG/

QuickDraw GX Fanclub http://www.ixmedia.com/quickgx/

Lawrence D’Oliveiro http://www2.waikato.ac.nz/ldo/gx/intro.html

Other Programmer Resources

ALM (KeyQuencer)

ftp://ftp.alpcom.it/software/mac/LMontalcini/html/alm_home.html

Debugging Tips

http://www.scruznet.com/~crawford/Computers/macsbug.html

Unofficial Future Basic http://www.ids.net/~paumic/FutureBasic/

Jumbo-Programming Mac http://www.jumbo.com/prog/mac/

MacMania http://www.europa.com/~bubba/mac/appleindex.html

Fabrizio Oddone

http://www.di.unito.it/pub/WWW/www_student/apple/FabrizioOddone/

PowerPlant Dream Team http://petrified.cic.net/powerplant-dt

Word Services

http://www.scruznet.com/~crawford/WordServices/wdsvindex.html

Vendors, Products and Miscellaneous

Aladdin Software Security http://www.aks.com/

Be, Inc. http://www.be.com/

ForeFront Group (WebWhacker) http://www.ffg.com/

MacMall http://WWW.MacMall.com/web2/MacMall/MMMainPage.html

MacWarehouse http://www.warehouse.com/

MacZone http://www.maczone.com/maczone/

MIND (formerly MacDNS) http://www.dronf.org/mind/mindInfo.html

MindVision Software http://www.mindvision.com/

Piazza http://www.piazza.com/channels/piazza/piazza.html

Star Nine http://www.starnine.com/

Stone Tablet http://www.teleport.com/~stack/

Just in time for the holiday seasons, three of the Macintosh mail-order catalogs are on-line. Do all your buying for your Mac friends without having to leave your screen.

MacMall http://WWW.MacMall.com/web2/MacMall/MMMainPage.html

MacWarehouse http://www.warehouse.com/

MacZone http://www.maczone.com/maczone/

Internet

In case you haven’t noticed, MIND (Mac Internet Name Daemon) is now the name of what used to be called MacDNS. Apple bought the right to the MacDNS name from the Jourvian Group. MIND is a Macintosh implementation of the standard Unix Domain Name Server. This allows a Mac to manage of a domain (i.e. MacTech.com) on the Internet. Normally, when someone tries to access www.mactech.com for the first time, their domain name server will ask one of the well known “.com” servers who to ask about MacTech. Then a request will be sent to that server. MIND (or its equivalent) allows a Macintosh to be that server. It used to be that if you were setting up a Macintosh Web server, you still needed a Unix host to be the name server. With MIND the same Macintosh can act as the name server as well, without relying on any non-Macintosh servers.

MIND (formerly MacDNS) http://www.dronf.org/mind/mindInfo.html

Macintosh

This month we’ll look at some mailing lists you might want to join (besides Semper Fi, mentioned last month). The first is the PowerPlant Dream Team. This is a self-help group trying to learn all about PowerPlant. They plan on picking projects and having teams develop them and share the learning to the entire group. If you’re trying to scale the steep learning curve on PowerPlant, this looks like a good place to hang out. The Dream Team is being organized by Steven Jovanovic, who helped organize the team that created FilterTop. He is often found on the IRC channel #macdev.
PowerPlant Dream Team http://petrified.cic.net/powerplant-dt

OpenMac is several efforts porting various flavors of Unix to the PowerMac platform. These include MacLinux and MacBSD, which are both public domain Unixes. There are mailing lists available for both ports accessible from the OpenMac web page. I should also mention that Apple and IBM are supposed to be porting AIX to the PowerMac and Tenon has recently released MachTen 4.0 for the PowerMac. For those interested in Unix on a PowerMac, check out this site.
OpenMac http://puma.bevd.blacksburg.va.us/openmac/

The QuickDraw GX fan club has two mailing lists for those interested in GX. The first is general discussion of GX and the second is for developers using GX in their products. If you are interested in QuickDraw GX, you should check out the fan club.
QuickDraw GX Fanclub http://www.ixmedia.com/quickgx/

Neat Non-Macintosh Site of the Month

This month, the site’s related to the Macintosh. Be, Inc. introduced their BeBox recently. Be is the brain-child of Jean-Louis Gassée and the company is populated with several well known Macintosh developers. The BeBox looks like it might be an interesting platform (with two PowerPCs and development support from Metrowerks). It’ll be interesting to see if they can successfully sell a new platform.
Be, Inc. http://www.be.com/

Well, that’s it for this month. As always, if you find something interesting, or have updates, send them to URLs@MacTech.com

Thanks this month to Kenneth Trueman, Mike Crawford, Alessandro Levi Montalcini, Ron Hale-Evans, Bill Moore, Carl B. Constantine, Stephen Jovanovic, Andrew C. Williams, Mike Crawford, Steven Kortze, and many others for their contributions for their suggestions and pointers to new and old sites. Apologies to those who contributed to the November list. Thanks for November contributions and suggestions to Mark Richter, Johan Dahl, Scott S. Lawton, Dave Koziol, Paul Celestin, Ray Sauers, Igor Mikolic-Torreira, Patrick Woolsey, and G. Neufeld.