Linked List: July 11, 2005

Monday, 11 July 2005

Danny Goodman has written a bunch of great books on Mac and web scripting; now he’s combined the two and written a 233-page book on Dashboard programming. $15 gets you a PDF e-book; $30 gets you a printed copy.

‘untitled’ vs. ‘Untitled’ ★

Michael Tsai points to a thread on the Cocoa-Dev mailing list that pretty much boils down to an argument about whether it matters that the HIG recommends naming new untitled documents “untitled”, but Cocoa’s NSDocument class defaults to the capitalized “Untitled”.

Kick-Ass Asteroids Dashboard Widget ★

Excellent rendition of Asteroids as a Dashboard widget, programmed by Paul Neave and turned into a widget by Christopher Marks. Very faithful in spirit and feel to the original coin-op version: the sounds are perfect, the game play is simple (the only controls are rotate, thrust, fire, and pause), and, in a cool twist, the high-score board is shared globally. Free of charge.

Marks also had a Pac-Man widget (also based on code from Neave), but had to remove it after getting a nastygram from Namco — but as of this writing you can still nab a copy at DashboardWidgets.com. (Namco’s response is reasonable — I think Namco is still making money on the Pac-Man brand.)

(Via Andy Baio.)