Volume Number: 23 (2007)
Issue Number: 12
Column Tag: Editorial

From the editor

December is an exciting time for many reasons: the holidays are upon us, holiday sales are upon us, and we're just one month away from Macworld. Such an interesting event, Macworld is. We get to meet colleagues old and new, learn about new technology and technology that is simply new to us. As always, MacTech will be present in several forms at Macworld in January. Naturally, there will be the MacTech booth, so please, pay us a visit! Also, many MacTech authors will be involved in events during the week, such as speaking, hosting gatherings or running other meetings. We hope to see you there!

But what about December, right? We're here, now. We're really happy to have our annual Product Guide once again. The product guide is a listing of products, companies and their services that help you navigate the Apple technology landscape with a bit more ease.

This month's Road to Code by Dave Dribin gets us to the Objective-C milestone. Dave has been a spectacular guide on the road, and this month is no exception: if OOP and Objective-C have scared you off in the past, it's time to take a second look.

For all of you shell scripters out there, this month's Mac In The Shell column revisits an old topic: scripting for a GUI audience. This has been touched on in the past, but this time, we check out a different utility called Pashua.

MacEnterprise and Philip Rinehart bring us deeper into Leopard's applications for system administrators. They're new! They're improved! Sysadmins are going to love the changes to Leopard in this space.

Returning author Ben Greisler guides us through taking an ordinary OS X client machine, and turning it into a VPN server using OpenVPN - a perfect project for that G4 that doesn't meet the requirements for Leopard.

Doug Hanley, a certified Apple trainer himself, talks about Apple Certification. What is it? Why do you want it? What's the path you have to trod to get it? If you've ever wondered, or, require certification for some reason, Doug has your answers in this first part on certification.

Ever feel like you have too much data? As if it's literally spilling out all over the place? Mike Cobb brings us an insider's perspective on hard drive data recovery. You'll see why it's crucial to think about backup before your data begins to overflow.

Last, but not least, the MacTech Spotlight shines on an employee at one of my favorite Mac developers: Freeverse. Michael Watson shares what it's like to work there, and, if the company's quirky image is anything to judge by, they hire accordingly. This is our second ever multi-page Spotlight feature. Anytime we get to mention Marathon, we'll give in to some extra pages!

Hope to see you in January. Until then, Enjoy!

Edward Marczak,

Executive Editor