Reverse Engineering OS X
So you are an unwealthy programming hobbiest who cannot afford the
exorbitant fees of becoming a full blown Apple Developer Connection
Member complete with access to pre-release seeds of the forth-coming
OS, and you also don't like the idea of stealing pre-releases off of
the underground internet and risking legal persecution from Apple.
Nevertheless, you have an OS X product that you are proud of and would
like to continue to support for years to come. What do you
do? Get yourself a blog and harness the power of good people and
the internet to help you reverse engineer OS X. That's what Rich
Wareham, the coder behind Desktop Manager, did. If you're interested in doing the same, you should read his tutorial.This type of news is why I love OS X. It's about the community working together.
[via MacSlash]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
anthony said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I don't know if I quite understand what this developer is trying to accomplish, but he might wanna check out You Control: Desktop http://www.yousoftware.com/desktops/ Its a virtual desktop switching app that seems to do exactly what he is trying to do - like, to a T. Might wanna watch out for the legal team.
Reply
Bagel said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
You Control does indeed do the same thing that Desktop Manager does except Desktop Manager does one thing that You Control doesn't: come free under the GNU GPL.
As far as I know, You Control also doesn't have a patent on desktop paging or screen transitions, so I don't think the Desktop Manager folks are in any legal trouble.
Now what is this developer trying to accomplish? I think making something like DM seems pretty admirable and making it free is also pretty admirable. That the Mac OS programming community supports him is also very admirable. Kudos to them.
Reply
anthony said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
yup - good point about being free!
Reply
Simon X said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Don't forget that Desktop Manager has been around since before You Control Desktop was even available as a public beta. There are other desktop mangers that are even older.
If you think that the switching desktop effects are a copy then that is incorrect. They are in fact part of the OS and available to all developers. (I know you didn't mention this but I've seen others think they were a copy so though I better mention it)
Reply
Chris K said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Maybe if Apple was a little more developer-friendly, this guy wouldn't have to hunt out API changes himself. Apple SHOULD be documenting these things so programmers can modify their apps ahead of time.
Microsoft does this...
Reply
Pete M said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Mac OS is about the community working together??
er...
http://channel9.msdn.com
Reply
shane said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
If you like Desktop Manager, Try Virtue. It takes the code from Desktop Manager and does some very interesting things with it, like giving you a pager that mirrors the command-tab app switcher, much much more visual customization, the ability to have applications show on all desktops or have apps show on ony one desktop but switch you to that desktop when the app activates.
Check it out at http://virtuedesktops.sourceforge.net/
Reply