Volume Number: 25 (2009)
Issue Number: 01
Column Tag: Editorial

From the editor, January 2009

Happy New Year! It's a great time to be involved with the universe of Apple products. More first-time Mac users are created every day; long-timers stay with the platform. The iPhone is nearly the best-selling smart phone. Safari continues to gain web-share. Businesses increasingly choose OS X as their client and server platform. All of this drives developer interest and opportunity. MacTech Magazine remains dedicated to helping you understand all of this.

January 2009 - Macworld is in full swing, and you're reading one of our most tightly packed issues. We'll cover the main announcements from the show in an upcoming issues, but for now, revel in the knowledge here and now.

Our cover story brings you all the details that you'd need to know about location-based metadata, and how to use it to organize photos with GPS data. Learn the concepts, acronyms and tools to deal with this useful location information.

We continue our introduction to Python, and learning Python on the Mac in the month's Mac in the Shell. Python is certainly one of the most important languages available today for developers, aspiring developers and system administrators. Get in on the ground floor and follow along!

Greg Neagle teaches the many options and methods for creating and delivering installer packages. If you're a system administrator, there's no better way to deliver applications and scripts to a multitude of machines. If you're a developer, it's important to know how to package your final product in a way that makes it flexible and easy for users and administrators to install.

In The Road to Code, Dave Dribin brings a review of the journey thus far. If you've been following along, you've covered a lot of ground. If you're looking jump in, now's the time!

Think version control is just for developers? Think again! System Administrators should be familiar with version control to store the multitude of text-based configuration files that control OS X and OS X Server systems. We've covered several version control systems in the past, and this month, Ryan Wilcox covers Subversion tips for avoiding trouble.

Frequent contributor Mihalis Tsoukalos introduces us to Graphviz, an incredible, open source graphing package. Using the dot language, Graphviz can dynamically build graphs of just about any data you can supply, from code statistics to system performance

Noah Gift presents part 2 of the series, "Integrating OS X with OpenLDAP." You'll often find OS X systems that need to exist without OS X Server and Open Directory. Well, a Linux machine running OpenLDAP can easily serve as a central directory for OS X machines.

This month's Geek Guide teaches you everything you need to know when shopping for a printer. Finally, this month's MacTech Spotlight features Rich Siegel from Bare Bones Software. Bare Bones has been a staple of the Macintosh tech experience since before OS X was on the scene. Check out the advice from one of the longest on the scene.

If you're reading this at the Macworld show, please don't forget to stop by the MacTech booth! Enjoy, and we'll see you next month!

Ed Marczak,

Executive Editor