It’s been a while since I’ve complained about Apple in the context of an actual bug report, so here is a little diversion back into “Apple Bug Friday” land. One of the aspects of Mac OS X programming that can really frustrate traditional Mac OS programmers is the lack of error reporting from many APIs. […]

Every good API (or language) should have a fundamental, powerful, impossible to ignore encapsulation of a primary building block in computer programming: the string. Wikipedia defines a string as a “sequence of various simple objects.” Wow! That’s an indulgent definition, but kind of nice in its flexibility. When such a robustness is properly implemented in […]

Update. Well I am a complete idiot. Of course I should have assumed that if I wanted to build something out of Darwin, other people in the past have wanted the same thing. I’m a fool for not noticing this page at opendarwin.org. The “darwinbuild” tool basically “follows the dark dependencies” for you. I haven’t […]

I’ve been pretty busy lately, and spread thin over a wide range of projects. One of the “new to me” experiences involves supporting a custom HID device via Apple’s IOHIDLib API. The IOHIDLib API allows plain-ol folks like me to interact with HID-conformant USB devices without installing any kernel-level drivers or extensions. Let me say, […]