For the fontophile in your life, how about this translation of a book by Hermann Zapf (of Dingbats, Palatino and Optima fame amongst others). Other Zapf books are selling on Amazon (albeit not necessarily cheaply :).Alternatively there’s this cool “Upper Case, Lower Case” poster.via Quarter Life Crisis.
Category: Books
Books related to the Mac
MacTalk edition #1 available as PDF
I saw my first copy of Australian Mac magazine MacTalk today, and it looks pretty promising. Articles include from photography (“Clearing up Depth of Field”), podcasting (“Podcasting in the Real World”), programming (“Build Core Data Applications”), software and Mac culture.
If you want to have a look the PDF is available for download.
MacTalk, A New Australian Mac Magazine
It looks like AppleTalk.com.au is now MacTalk.com.au and there’s even a paper version doing the rounds. Keep your eye out for it!
Mac OS X Internals
Whilst at WWDC I got a chance to see Amit Singh present a section of his book Mac OS X Internals (apparently sold out in Australia, who would have thought!).
Amit demoed custom kernel panic screens (for example replace the standard Apple Kernel Panic image with an image that tells the user to call their support desk immediately. Or in the case of Amit, a blue screen of death).
He is also the author of
HFSdebug which he demoed by creating a fragmented file on disk, showing the list of blocks it occupied, and then reading the file back in and showing the new list of blocks, which are now contiguous.
He also demoed shared memory by creating a block of memory and then writing to it to show how the block was duplicated by the copy-on-write operation.
As the book’s so large (1680 pages!) I asked about the PDF version that’s available on the web site, but apparently there have been some complaints about it as it’s restricted by DRM, and the DRM doesn’t work on the Mac! Hopefully his publishers are fixing this.
It looks like a must have for every MacGeek’s bookshelf.