Dialogue Box

By Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief

AppleEvent Registry

I would like to register some custom AppleEvents. How do I do this?

- Jonathan Ashwell

[You can try calling Apple Developer Services at 408-974-4897 or APDA at 800-282-2732. - Ed.]

Thanks for your response. I called APDA and found that the AppleEvents Registry is available from them or Apple DTS (where it’s free).

BTW, I have subscribed to MacTech (nee MacTutor) for 4-5 years, and I think it has definitely taken a turn for the better since you took over. I re-upped last month. [As everyone should! - Ed.]

For my two cents worth of what to stress in the future: The articles that interest me most are those that show how to write the non-obvious code that lets one expand the interface. A good example is an article several months ago on how to write your own lists without the List Manager (thus avoiding the annoying 32000 char limit). I’d never seen that before, although obviously lots of commercial applications do it.

In any case, I like the new MacTech. Thanks again for your help.

- Jon

Teaching Apple a lesson

I just received the March 1993 issue of MacTech. All I can say is thank you very much!!

I must say, however, that reading my first issue also left a bitter feeling. It is extremely sad to look at the state of the Mac market, mainly due to Apple’s utter incompetence and endless greed. With just about everybody flocking to the windows market, I am beginning to wonder about my Mac. But we all know the Mac is much more than ‘just a computer’. It is a revolution and we must keep it alive and must make it grow. But we must realize Apple is not going to help us. Harsh as this might sound, we must face reality: Apple does not care about the Macintosh; it cares only about the salaries of its executives and about Windows development. We must carry on with the revolution instead of waiting for Apple.

For starters, let’s stop buying products from companies that only look at the Mac as a sideline - including Claris and Microsoft. We must also tell Apple that we don’t want to go on paying stratospheric prices for underpowered machines.

Software piracy is a condemnable practice in every platform especially on the Macintosh. We must definitely buy every Macintosh program we use. We must support Mac developers by rewarding their efforts as much as we can. We must especially encourage those developers working to enhance the Operating System. This is the only way to have features Apple seems to be unable to provide. These features include, preemptive multitasking, multi-threading, process communications based on port or sockets (in the Unix manner) and stronger security features. We users must decide the bus which must be supported by hardware developers; let’s stop playing that foolish and expensive PDS. Even with all its flaws, the NuBus is a reasonable upgrade route to improve performance.

In short, it’s very important that we users control the Macintosh market. Let’s keep one thing in mind: It was us, and our money, that made Apple grow the way it did. I will not accept that aberrant lack of gratitude and loyalty toward customers!

- Ignacio Cristerna

OOP can be OOPS?

Jose Aguirre, in Vol. 9 No. 1, points out the lack of speed demonstrated by the latest applications and system software versions, due to the overhead of code concerned with object-oriented languages. He’s absolutely right: for certain purposes OOP is great, but the operating system works very deeply into the machine and it’s a good reason, for me, to write it in assembly.

Being a Pascal programmer, for me would be very useful to see some articles on converting code between C and Pascal: for example, it’s possible to obtain some sort of "register" variables in Pascal? Also, wouldn’t be great a Pascal compiler with "asm" statements?

My compliments for the great level of the magazine. I’ll surely renew my subscription.

- Sebastiano Pilla