Volume Number: 13 (1997)
Issue Number: 1
Column Tag: Uniform Resource Locators
By Nicholas C. "nick.c" DeMello
The usenet hierarchy comp.sys.mac.programmer.[] includes forums for discussing Macintosh programming topics related to creating games, understanding programming tools, miscellaneous MacDev issues, or just asking and answering fundamental questions. These groups - csmp.games, csmp.tools, csmp.misc, and csmp.help - are so heavily trafficked that not everyone has the time to keep up with their content. That's where the comp.sys.mac.programmer digest comes into the picture.
The csmp digest is a collection of articles from each of these newsgroups, carefully collected and organized by the digests moderator. The digests were first created by Michael Kelly in May of 1992, when csmp was a single group (rather than the collection of many groups that it is today.) Francois Pottier took over the responsibility of moderator in March of 1994, and has only recently been succeeded by Mark Aiken marka@ee.mcgill.ca, who assumed the role in September of 1996. According to Mark, the digest is designed to target folks who read the news only semi-regularly, or just want to archive important discussions for later reference. Each issue introduces important topics (threads) that have appeared in the newsgroups, and presents the component articles in their original and unedited form. Mark waits until the last article in a thread is at least two weeks old before adding that thread to the digest.
If you are interested in receiving the digest via email you can send a message to majordomo@ee.mcgill.ca, with no subject and "subscribe csmp" in the body. The digests will then be mailed to you as they are generated (roughly one or two every week.) You can later remove yourself from the list by sending a message to the same address with "unsubscribe csmp" in the body.
Beyond just being a way to keep track of current events, the csmp digest offers a wealth of reference information about Macintosh programming. Whatever aspect of the toolbox is currently keeping you up at night, odds are that topic exists in the csmp digest back issues. The last two years of archives are available from the Info-Mac archives in the periodicals directory at ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/per/csmp/. If you are looking for a specific topic, and you are not sure which of the back issues has the information you want, search and view the contents of the csmp digests (and other Info-Mac archives) with Tim Tuck's "Sensei" archive search engine at http://wais.sensei.com.au/searchform.html. If you still can't find the topic, you can search and view digests all the way back to 1992 with Andrew Barry's csmp search engine at http://marvin.stattech.com.au/search.html.
PowerPlant is the MacOS class library that ships with Metrowerk's CodeWarrior. It is versatile, powerful, and relatively easy to get started on. Relatively easy. However, let's face it - we can all use a helping hand with something as challenging as learning a new class library, and Darren King of BreakPoint Design is offering that hand. The PowerPlant Beginners Home Page, located at http://www.netaccess.on.ca/~breakpt/html/powerplant.html, provides visitors with links to six lesson pages created by Darren. These lessons review the conventions of PowerPlant; give an overview of the PowerPlant classes; breakdown the issues of networking with PowerPlant; discuss how the LApplication class is constructed; and even introduces the topic of threads with PowerPlant.
Like most web sites, the PowerPlant Beginners Pages is a work in progress. Last time I checked, Darren was adding a PowerPlant tutorial section that expands on the PPEdit project that comes with PowerPlant. Check out Darren's pages, but make a stop on your way there to insure that you have the latest version of Netscape, since the Beginners Pages makes use of panes.
