Google offers a potpourri of source code snippets from their varying Mac projects qua Google Objective-C Toolbox.
The Box contains Mac and iPhone compatible sources and offers several additions to Foundation and Appkit as well as new classes to aid in integrating Google services. In brief:
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Those of the more OS agnostic might agree that the package management solution for software installation is a great enhancement over traditional means of distribution. Especially when it comes down to open source software, which often needs to be compiled for the underlying hardware, package management can be a salvation – since it allows one to turn away from complicated problems like finding all the necessary libraries / headers to satisfy “./configure” or finding RPM’s in the right version so the selected software will finally install.

If you’ve ever worked with Ubuntu’s Synaptic or Debian’s dpkg you know how easily software installation via package management can be.

For Mac OS X, there’ve always been several solutions to package management: Fink, MacPorts, DarwinPorts and even Gentoo Portage.

While some of these already come with a solid UI, MacPorts doesn’t. It’s standard distribution contains the powerful but not-so-easy-to-use “ports” commandline application. Porticus is a 10.4+ GUI package manager which tries to fill this gap. It offers a (quite synaptic-like, if I might say so) overview over available and installed packages, and allows of easy package installation.

Features:

• Viewing the current MacPorts categories
• Installing, uninstalling, updating, activating and deactivating ports
• Port variant handling
• MacPorts self-update support
• Growl Integration
• Sparkle Software Update

Porticus is freeware and can be found here.

Today is the first day of the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. With over 5,000 people in attendance, this is one of the largest WWDC’s yet.

The House That Steve Built has some exciting announcements that have been coming seemingly every minute. Among the highlights are for the first half of the day are:

- Not only is iPhone 2.0 in beta with over 4,000 people in the beta program, but that there will be three parts to the SDK: Enterprise, SDK, as well as new features for the end users.

- Several demos from SEGA, Apple, eBay, Pangea Software, MIMVista, among others.

- SEGA shows off a video of Super Monkey Ball, which will be a launch title in the new App Store for $9.99 USD.

- MIMVista shows off a program designed to help medical students study and learn various parts of the body with almost realistic images.

- Steve anounces new iPhone 2.0 features, including contact search, support for Microsoft Office documents, and support for Asian languages. The iPhone is set to be released July 11th.

- Mobile.Me is the replacement for .mac, current .mac subscribers will be automatically updated to the new service. A 60-day trial of Mobile.Me will be included with the iPhone 2.0.

- The new iPhone will be thiner, sexier, include support for a 3G network, Enterprise support, more affordable, available in more countries, and have advanced GPS support.

- Target price for an 8GB iPhone 2.0 will be $199, a savings of $200 over the current price of the iPhone.

- Later in the day, Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard was announced, but would feature no new features, only improvements over older ones.

The WebKit developers just announced SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine for Safari (et others). To quote the developers: “SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.”

So instead of building and parsing a syntax-tree, like other Javascript-Engines do, SquirrelFish builds executable bytecode. You can find the new engine in the nightly builds. Good chance to play around with it and see how it performs with Javascript-heavy applications. I just rolled a test against our primary product at work, a big and extensive javascript layout application. One could really “feel” the speed differences.

For the past months, Peter Bright, a former Win32 Programmer, has given a in-depth overview to the perspective of being a developer for Win32 and for Cocoa. Part one in the series described how misfortune and adversity left Apple with a new OS platform free of legacy constraints; part two discussed how Microsoft had failed to do the same, choosing instead to hobble its new OS with way too much legacy baggage. Now in the third part, Peter exposes in detail what Apple has done with its platform to make it so appealing.

The series is a very interesting read, even if you’re not into Cocoa development, as it explains just why Mac OS X offers so many advances to a normal Developer – especially compared to Win32. If you haven’t read the other parts yet, it’d be wise to start at the beginning before you start to read part three.