Volume Number: 23 (2007)
Issue Number: 11
Column Tag: Editorial

From the Editor

November brings Autumn in full swing with leaves on the ground, sweaters, and sitting by the glowing embers of our LCD screens. Leopard has been released and while many of us have had access to beta versions, we didn't always have the best documentation. Enter this month's MacTech. Starting with this issue, we're dedicated to getting you the information you need about Leopard.

The more we've dug into Leopard, the more we're finding that is revolutionary than evolutionary. Regular end-users will notice many of the nice little touches that show up in 10.5, but the real action is under the hood. When I initially heard developers speak about making their next releases Leopard-only, I thought that may be a short-sighted move. However, Leopard does so much for the developer and tech-type, I can understand that thinking now. End users will benefit from the parts of the OS that they never touch themselves by developers taking advantage of them!

To lead off our Leopard coverage, do not miss Greg Miller's article on DTrace. If you haven't noticed yet, gone are ktrace and some of our other tried-and-true debugging tools. As the biggest beneficiary to the open-sourcing of Sun's Solaris, Apple puts dtrace into 10.5. Now, dtrace is incredibly powerful, but isn't quite as straight-forward as some other tools. Greg has written the clearest introduction to dtrace that I've seen.

Ben Greisler talks to sysadmins and points out the 5 technologies in Leopard that they should be checking out right away. Separately, Ben has written an article on the inclusion of RADUIS support in Leopard - a very welcome addition, praised by system administrators familiar with the benefits it brings.

Dave Dribin takes the Leopard side-street in this month's Road to Code to talk about what's new for developers. Dave points out new features in XCode, Objective C 2.0, various frameworks and more.

Philip Rinehart and MacEnterprise get you started with the radical changes in directory services. Did you know that the venerable NetInfo is gone in Leopard? Gone! Directory Services play a much larger role in Leopard than ever before.

Well, we couldn't possibly cover all of Leopard in a single issue, and there are still plenty of non-Leopard-specific topics to discuss. One of my favorites this month is an article by Joe Froehlich that teaches us about a device that converts a VGA signal to one that can be captured - independent of the OS - on the USB.

Ever need a little more storage? Of course, we all do! However, sometimes, you're looking for something more than a single Firewire drive, but less than a fully-loaded XServe RAID. Robert Staehle shows us how to use FreeNAS, an Open Source FreeBSD-based NAS system that you can use at home, or in a business setting.

Back in Leopard land, don't forget that not only is the OS overhauled, but the built-in apps are, too. Mail.app, Safari and...Terminal?!? Yes! For you command-line people, Terminal.app 2 has some really nice features, and you can learn about them in this month's Mac in The Shell.

Last, but not least, is this month's MacTech Spotlight, featuring Kent Sutherland. Kent is currently a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology and has already graced us with code that we can't live without (ok, well, some of us). He's most well know for Chax, an Input Manager bundle that adds features to iChat, but he also....well...go read the feature!

Enjoy Leopard, dig in to our coverage here, and dig in on your own. If you find something that just isn't documented anywhere else, let us know! Send your thoughts to feedback@mactech.com. Hope to be hearing from you!

Edward Marczak,

Executive Editor