Recently I had occasion to deal with the Finder, beyond what NSFileManager or NSWorkspace could handle. Now, the easy way to do this is through AppleScript, and Cocoa does provide a way to run AppleScripts (NSAppleScript). The trouble is, (a) NSAppleScript is slow and only runs on the main thread, and (b) you can’t pass input easily.

AppleScript is built on Apple events, a mid-to-high-level form of interprocess communication that’s been around since System 7. Apple events can be constructed and sent off using either pure C code (what’s now part of the CoreServices framework) or the Objective-C wrapper, NSAppleEventDescriptor,…

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As any programmer knows, feature creep is dangerous, deadlines tend to slip, and work expands not just to fill the time allotted, but far past.

As a Dockyard fan would know (though I doubt there are any), Dockyard 2.0 is now almost two years late. Yes, there was supposed to be a release shortly after Leopard, after I could work out the kinks. What happened?

Well, first I didn’t get my hands on Leopard for quite a while. Then I noticed one of its big new features—Spaces—had turned out to be a big new problem for Dockyard. (Basically, the…

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