Volume Number: 26
Issue Number: 11
Column Tag: Editorial

From the Editor, November 2010

It's November, and what a November it is turning into. I'm writing this just following the first MacTech Conference. Spanning three days, the conference brought attendees to Los Angeles, California for learning, networking with peers and a bit of fun. We'll have some more coverage of the conference in our December issue.

This month, we also wrapped up our Microsoft Office benchmarks, as you may have seen by the cover. We run rigorous, real-world tests on Microsoft Office and compare it to earlier versions. To many, the Microsoft Office suite is an important part of their workflow. How does the latest version fare? Check out our benchmarking article for details.

Greg Neagle, who also spoke at MacTech Conference, continues with his discourse on Munki for managing software installs (and removals, for that matter).

This month's Mac in the Shell column focuses on learning Ruby. Ruby is an interesting place to start learning development, as it can handle just about any task. With the introduction of MacRuby, you can also tap into the power of Cocoa and the Obj-C runtime. Learning Ruby on the Mac lets you scale from a small "Hello World" program up to a fully native, GUI application.

For System Administrators: Tom Limoncelli has a great reminder about how important what you do actually is. If you don't realize this, Tom's, "Open Letter on Teaching System Administration" lays it out incredibly clearly.

In this month's Developer to Developer column, Boisy Pitre continues his in-depth lessons on memory management in Objective-C. In this article, Boisy even includes an application that lets you visualize the memory allocation and de-allocation process. Pretty impressive.

New contributor Justin Esgar brings us "a consultant's guide to the complicated world of data backup." Backup is one of those things that you really can't do without. Well, not without getting burned at some point. For backup of all sizes, let Justin guide you through the choices.

This month's CoreSec column brings Adobe's Flash under the scrutiny of a security-focused lens. Battery life and CPU usage aside, why might not supporting Flash be an otherwise smart move on Apple's part? This month's CoreSec has the answer.

Finally, this month's MacTech Spotlight shines on the people and events that shaped the first MacTech Conference. If you were there, great - relive it a little. If you weren't able to attend, we hope you join us for MacTech Conference 2011.

Until next month, keep up the practice!

Ed Marczak,

Executive Editor