September 94 - EDITOR'S NOTE
EDITOR'S NOTE
CAROLINE ROSE
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Around the time I was faced with writing this editorial, I had just attended the celebration of my
friend Mrs. Robertson's 100th birthday, and my 85-year-old father had flown over from Florida to
celebrate it with us. With the subject of longevity on my mind, I got to thinking about how it relates
to develop .
develop 's goal is to provide you with articles and code that will have a long life -- that can live in your
applications happily and compatibly even as new Macintosh systems are introduced. We do all we
can to ensure this (at the risk of incurring the wrath of our authors, who may wonder why it takes so
long to see something in print after
it's submitted to develop ). We'd rather an article "have legs" than be published prematurely and get
you into trouble further down the line. We do our best to test the code and get our technical
reviewers' opinions on whether a particular method is safe. This should be a primary concern of all
developers, especially now in light of the whole new world of Power Macintosh systems.
Evidence that we're succeeding is that we still get requests to reprint articles as far back as Issue 2,
and we often hear from readers who save every issue because they retain their usefulness.
(Remember that, the next time you're thinning out your bookshelves!)
Our being an Apple publication gives us the distinct advantage of being able to have a thorough code
review with future systems in mind, but at the same time it puts us in a unique position to have early
articles on new Apple technology. So we also try to give you articles as soon as possible after the API
for a new technology has frozen. And if we can, we give you a prerelease version of the new software
along with the code on our CD. These articles may have somewhat shorter legs, but the bulk of the
information should remain accurate for a very long time.
In the past we've given you early QuickDraw GX versions and articles; now that QuickDraw GX has
shipped, the two articles on that subject in this issue are only the most recent in a long line. Also in
this issue we're pleased to bring you our first article on OpenDoc, Apple's new cross-platform
compound-document architecture, even though the final version of OpenDoc will not have shipped
by the time you read this.
Further evidence that we're succeeding is that we've again won in the International Technical
Publications Competition of the Society for Technical Communication, this time the highest award
in our category. But nothing would please us more than to hear from you, the most important judges
of all, on what we can do to make develop an even better publication; please let us know at AppleLink
DEVELOP.
Caroline Rose
Editor
CAROLINE ROSE (AppleLink CROSE) As a child, Caroline wrote a one-page newsletter about the goings-on in her
neighborhood; it included news items, a gossip column, and a comic strip. Her readership was small, and the operation
folded after one issue. She's happy that develop has lasted longer than that, because after various jobs at Tymshare,
NeXT, and Apple as a programmer, writer, editor, and manager, she feels she's found her niche here. These days when
Caroline's not at work she's likely to be sailing, swimming, jogging, dancing, gardening, or otherwise not being
sedentary. She hopes to live 100 very active years. *
