Volume Number: 25
Issue Number: 12
Column Tag: Editorial

From the Editor, December 2009

We're drawing 2009 to a close and opening 2010. The "00's" are over! What an interesting decade it has been far Apple. Watching OS X go from birth to...well, "maturity" may be a bit of a stretch. 'Responsible young adult' could fit, though. It's certainly still changing and malleable.

Another interesting thing is Apple's history and timeline. We're running the first of our "25th Anniversary Stories" this month, featuring Dave Mark. There's enough history at this point that not everyone involved in the Mac landscape now remembers what it was like then. That fascinates me a bit. Some people have been drawn in from other platforms and some have started with the Mac and have known little else. Some are not very computer-savvy but bought a Mac thanks to the iPhone. Whatever the reason, there's a diverse mix of developers and end-users, and that can be even more demanding for developers and support staff. This base is more knowledgeable about technology in general and has seen what most platforms have to offer. They want the best parts of everything they see. 25 years ago, though? Check out Dave Mark's musings.

Before we do close out the decade, though, this issue has plenty of up-to-date information for you. The cover story by new author David Garcea is a tour-de-force on tracking down crashes from crash logs. Awesome reading for everyone.

This month's Mac in the Shell presents a little more about Vim. It's one thing to learn the basic commands, but to really start to tailor vim for your environment and liking is to just bring the experience to a new level.

Greg Neagle, writing for MacEnterprise details the changes to packages and receipts in Snow Leopard. There's a lot of detail here - anyone that packages up software for distribution should be paying attention to this.

William Smith is back with a non-Microsoft Microsoft article. Exchange has become popular enough that several alternatives present themselves as an Exchange server just to interact with the many clients that take advantage of Exchange protocols. William takes you through these non-Exchange servers and how they stack up.

Dave Dribin continues his Road to Code column and introduces concurrency. What good is multi-processing if you can't take full advantage of it? Dave gets you into the basics

Speaking of Vim, I was thrilled to have Björn Winckler in our MacTech Spotlight. Björn is the maintainer of MacVim - an OS X-specific build of Vim that takes advantage of OS X features, integrating it into the Mac GUI smoothly.

Rounding out the issue is our 2010 Buyer's Guide - companies you can look to for products and services in the '10's.

Enjoy the holiday season and the New Year, and I hope to see everyone at Macworld in February!

Ed Marczak,

Executive Editor