Matt Neuburg’s Home Page

Superlatives

Elected to the MacTech Top 25, 2007: “The MacTech 25 honors the most influential people in the Macintosh community. How do we know who these people are? You tell us! Once a year, we open up voting to you, the Macintosh community.”
Best technical writer: John Gruber: “I consider [Matt Neuburg] the best technical writer in the business…”; “[The online help for Affrus] is quite simply the finest software documentation I have every encountered. It’s not just that it’s well-written, detailed, accurate, and complete. It’s that it truly takes advantage of the nature of hypertext. It is cross-referenced and cross-linked out the ying-yang. If you have a specific question, it is easy to find the answer and jump to it directly. (And every question I’ve ever had about Affrus is answered in the help documentation.) But if you want to read the documentation linearly, from beginning to end, it’s easy to do that too. Affrus’s help isn’t just good when compared against the deplorable state of your average help book - it’s just plain great by any standard.”
iOS Programming book:: Cary Champlin, on Amazon.com: “I don’t know how Matt Neuburg does it differently from other authors, but when I read his books on programming, I just understand the topics at a whole new level of comprehension.”
AppleScript book: “Truth.” “Scholarly.”: David Cortesi, on Amazon.com: “The first AppleScript book that tells the deep truth… [Matt Neuburg] has taken the time to test out every corner case and exception of the language, and he lays them all bare. He looks into AppleScript’s baroque scoping rules and its inconsistent rules for implicit coercion of types. All of Part II is meat and drink to a fan of programming languages, and I read it through like a good novel. More to the point, it’s a deep and thorough job of documenting the actuality of AppleScript: what syntax works, what the tricks and traps are, and what to avoid… To sum up: this book is a deep, thorough exploration of all the quirks, dusty corners, and skeleton-filled closets of AppleScript. Reading it will make you far better prepared to use AppleScript productively.”; Reader email: “Your book is the only one I have come across that really explains precisely the basics linguistic concepts of the language. It is a scholarly work.”
One of the Macworld top maintenance and troubleshooting tools: Dan Frakes: “MemoryStick 1.5 (free; Matt Neuburg) lets you know if you’re running short on RAM or if you’ve got too many apps open, by displaying your Mac’s memory allocation.”
“Rocks.”: Email from a satisfied downloader: “I love stuff that just works. Caught the latest MacWorld tip about your stuff and it doesn’t just work, it rocks.”
“Better than any software manual I have ever read.”: From an email sent to MacSpeech: “Initially, the PDF instruction manual [for MacSpeech Dictate] appeared intimidating. But, I very quickly realized that it had been written so much better than any software manual I have ever read. It was simple, easy to understand, with a minimum of jargon, and a surprising sense of humor. Whoever the author is, Adobe Photoshop really needs them to write their manuals.” (That author would be me.)
Helpful.: Seen on Macintouch.com: “I’ve gotten much more help from Matt Neuburg than I could ever return.”

I Do Not Tweet

I am constitutionally opposed to tweeting, blogging, etc. My thoughts are private! Besides, I’m not about to commit a half-baked fleeting thought to print, not even ephemeral Web print. I have a Twitter account but I don’t post anything much except for notices about my books. I also do use Google Plus occasionally, particularly when I’m working on a book, so that readers can follow my progress.

Recently, I’ve started posting miscellaneous thoughts and technical musings through a sort of non-blog, just as a way of remembering things and blowing off a little steam.

Photo Album

I’ve taken a lot of photographs that I like, almost exclusively nature images, but have only recently thought of putting a few on the Web.

I’ve now digitised all my negatives from the past 20 years and have put all my favorite photos, drawn from both the scanned negatives and my more recent digital photos, on a photo album site. The photos are mostly dated, the place is given, and they are consistently tagged with keywords. Please let me know if you are able to identify a species that eluded me.

Motorcycling

I’ve ridden motorcycles since just after college, and have taken many motorcycle camping trips. I’ve had a Honda 90, Yamaha RD250, Honda CB400T, Honda CX500, BMW K100RT, and (currently) a BMW R1100RT, and have been back and forth across the US several times, in addition to various uni-coastal grand tours of one sort or another. I’m working on maps of some of my routes, but they are not ready yet. Some of my trips are recorded in photos (though you won’t automatically know which ones are from motorcycle trips).

A few years ago, my old riding buddy John decided that the street was no fun any more. After getting the racing bug out of his system, he decided that we needed to learn dirt biking. So we took it up, and though we are just a couple of old duffers, we improve all the time, and most important, we have lots of fun and see lots of back country we’d never have seen otherwise.

Here is a map of various nearby places we like to go; if you are looking for dirt biking locations near Santa Barbara and Ojai, this might prove useful!

I’m also creating a list of KML files, generated using GPS, showing some of the routes we like to take. You can view these using Google Maps just by clicking a link! Here we go (more to follow, as time permits):

We also have lots of great photos of ourselves and the scenery! See my photo album site.

Things Having To Do With Cocoa

Cocoa is an application framework. It’s part of Mac OS X and iOS (the iPhone system). Apple also provides free tools for programming Cocoa. This means it’s easy to write your own Mac OS X-native applications and iOS apps! So naturally I’ve written some.

My books about iOS programming: iOS 13 Programming Fundamentals with Swift and Programming iOS 13

iOS (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad) programming is Cocoa programming; in many ways it’s a better Cocoa than Mac OS X Cocoa. I’ve written some iOS apps (see below). So now I’ve got these books about how to program iOS! The first one teaches Swift 5.1, Xcode 11 usage, and Cocoa basics. The second one dives deep into Cocoa Touch and related frameworks, thoroughly revised for iOS 13.

The books are also available both electronically (PDF etc.) from ebooks.com and in good old-fashioned dead-tree paper via print-on-demand from Amazon. Each book also has an official errata page at O’Reilly’s site; and note that the code examples are available for download.

Here’s a little history about these books. In May 2010 I started working on a book about programming iOS; the book was completed in May 2011, a year after I started: Programming iOS 4, covering iOS 4 and Xcode 4. Little did I know that this was only the beginning, and that I would rewrite the book again and again every year: for iOS 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and now iOS 13.

Moreover, the book kept growing, so that when we came to the iOS 7 edition we split it into two books, iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals (comprising chapters 1–13 of the previous editions) and Programming iOS 7 (comprising all the rest). This makes the book more tractable, literally and figuratively, plus if you are a Cocoa/Xcode expert who doesn’t need what’s in the first book, you can get just the second book.

Another little revolution came with the iOS 8 book, when Apple revealed the existence of their new programming language, Swift. I had to rewrite all the code in both books in this new language. The move from Objective-C to Swift was a gamble, but I was convinced that it was better for new iOS programmers. So Swift has been the language of the books ever since, and since Swift itself is a moving target, I’ve had to revise the code every year, sometimes quite heavily.

I have put the full text of the 3rd edition of the book here. You can also read the Swift chapters of the iOS 10 edition here.

I’d like to thank my readers for their faith in me, and for their helpful feedback and reviews. These reviews have been so splendid that I can’t resist quoting some of them:

“This is the book to buy. Even though this is an incomplete prerelease edition, it is absolutely the best ios programming book I own. The author goes into not only the mechanics of ios programming, but the why of the programming methods and program structure. Extremely complete.”

“Eloquence and Clarity. I have been learning iPhone Programming for about a year now and I have read several different books and searched far and wide on the Internet for clarity. I am a web developer transitioning into iOS Programming and have needed to learn many of the fundamentals of programming and specifically needed to understand Objective-C. This book is what I have been looking for. Matt Neuburg knows the subject and he also has a gift for explaining it and describing it in a witty down-to-earth manner that is comprehensible and not even close to condescending. He gives expression to the questions I couldn’t even formulate and then proceeds to dispel the mystery with concise and meaningful answers. O’Reilly was wise to make this available in its pre-release form. I have a hard time putting this book down.”

“Best iOS book. There is a huge amount of material in this book. It provides the soup-to-nuts view you need to get real code doing real things. Lots of good examples. Very well written.”

“Your manual is amazing. I find the practical usage a very nice add-on to reading Apple’s manuals, which seem to tell you what you need until you go to do it, and realize you have no idea how everything fits. Your book fits everything together.”

“The best iOS book I’ve ever read. Clear, precise and to the point.”

“For anyone, from novice to experts, this 800-page book has everything, from the basic concepts down to talking about Grand Central Dispatch and Blocks, and forms what is my absolute favourite iOS book. The detail, the effort the author puts to show complete code, makes this book very clear and your ‘one-stop-shop’ to being an iOS developer.”

“I have been developing software for over fifteen years. In that time, I have read more ‘Learn’ books than I can remember. Many of them were good but precious few were really great. And, for what it’s worth, I have found your book to be the best book in this category bar none.”

“A programmer should be able to appreciate the narrative that stands behind the API. Thank you for taking the time to bring that narrative to life.”

“I like Matt Neuburg’s book, and I recommend it to iOS classes I teach. Its first person style suits me, and I turn to it for answers and often find something extra. Neuburg explicitly avoids ‘Hello World’ stuff. His attitude is, let’s saddle up and get moving, there is ground to cover.”

“What I love most about your technical writing is that you have chosen an ‘unorthodox’ ordering of your material, that actually would be ‘orthodox’ (or more common) if more people thought more about how they presented technical information before they started writing their books.”

“Thanks for literally the best programming books on the planet.”

“I’m a super fan of your work because you are so good at teaching the subject matter at hand.”

Here are some excerpts from reviews on various Web sites:

“Neuburg is my favorite programming book writer, period.” — John Gruber, Daring Fireball.

“The best iOS programming book I’ve read - by far.” — Bill Cunningham, I Programmer.

I wouldn’t have been willing to write this book if O’Reilly hadn’t allowed me to use some really cool tools. These are the tools that allowed me to keep my readers updated with the latest electronic version of the book as I wrote and revised it, and which let me edit nimbly and quickly. I like these tools so much that I’ve written a discussion explaining my workflow on this book.

Here are some iOS Cocoa Touch apps I’ve written.

99 Bottles! (originally written November, 2009): My very first iPhone app! It’s a total waste of time, and is actually quite annoying and pointless. A perfect recipe for a successful iPhone app, wouldn’t you say? And it’s free, so download it at the iTunes store and annoy your friends, your pets, and yourself. What does it do, you ask? It sings the song “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” in its entirety, in a rather crude computer-generated voice. Mild animation as bottles are taken down and passed around, but basically that’s about it.
LinkSame (originally written August, 2010): A free iPad app. Download it at the iTunes store. A simple game, which reconstructs MacLinkSame, a popular PPC Mac OS X application by Zheng Xiaoping, released in 2004 and no longer supported, nor even, as far as I can tell, available.
All you have to do is spot a pair of tiles bearing the same picture, such that the centers of the tiles can be connected by a path consisting of one, two, or three straight line segments, where (1) all line segments in the path are horizontal or vertical, and (2) no segment of the path crosses any other tile. Select both tiles to remove them from the board. Keep doing that until you clear the board!
Albumen (originally written November, 2011): A free utility, and you can download it at the iTunes store. The first thing I noticed when I first got an iPhone was that, to my great annoyance, the Apple Music app was lousy. In particular, I couldn’t read the long names of my albums and songs in my music library. (Even a tiny iPod could display the names better, thanks to scrolling text.) So I wrote a simple utility whose job is to display the name and artist information of every song in full, within its album. You can also tap to play a song, of course.
Zotz (originally written January, 2012): An iOS adaptation of my desktop Zotz game. The goal is simply to spot groups of three “cards” that are the same or different in all four of their “attributes”. No stopwatch, no scoring. A really good way to train your brain and keep it sharp. Get it from the App Store.
Diabelli’s Theme (originally written March, 2013): A free app for iPhone and iPad. Download it at the iTunes store. An easy puzzle game with a musical twist. You are shown a photo that has been broken into 24 shuffled pieces: your job is to rearrange the pieces to reconstruct the original photo. But, to help you, each piece of the puzzle is accompanied by a piece of music, a part of Diabelli’s theme; the music tells you where the puzzle piece goes, and when you get the pieces arranged correctly, the music plays in the correct order as well.
TapTapFreeCell (originally written March, 2019): A free app for iPhone and iPad; power features are an in-app purchase. Download it at the iTunes store. A FreeCell implementation for power players. You tap, never drag, to move. Tap where you want to move from, tap where you want to move to. Game play is fast and simple. Power features include: card sequences are outlined; legal moves are highlighted; sequence moves and supermoves work automatically; intelligent automove-to-foundations and endgame. Other features: numbered Microsoft deals; game export and import; statistics listing played games, times, number of moves; replay lost games. I couldn’t find a FreeCell implementation that I really liked, so I wrote my own! You can read the Help manual here to get an idea of what it’s like.

Here are some Mac (desktop) Cocoa applications I’ve written.

SyncMe3 (originally written June, 2002): Yet another folder synchronizer utility. A folder synchronizer examines two folders and copies contents from each one to the other in such a way that both folders have the same contents; where an item exists in both places, it makes sure that both folders have the most recent version of that item. This is good for keeping two computers synchronized with one another, for example. Why should you use SyncMe3 rather than any other folder synchronizer? Well, there’s no particular reason, except that it’s free, and that I’ve been using it for many, many years. I wrote it because nothing else existed that worked the way I wanted, and I used it for years before releasing it, so clearly I like it; thus there’s a chance that someone else might like it too. Requires El Capitan or later. Download it here. (Older version, for Leopard or later, called SyncMe2, here.)
MothersHelper (originally written January, 2006): Helps my mother (and others) keep track of what application is frontmost. Hard as it may be to believe, there are people who have trouble with this (such as my mother (and others)). On Mac OS X, you can see one application through another, windows of different applications can become interleaved, the active window is not strongly distinguished and doesn’t say what application it comes from, you can close all windows and still be in an application, and so forth. The menu bar does say what application is frontmost, but that isn’t a strong enough cue for some people. So this little utility provides a stronger cue: it tiles the desktop with huge icons corresponding to the frontmost application. Rewritten for El Capitan and later. Download it here. An earlier version, for Tiger or later, is here.
Diary (originally written December, 2005): A simple daily journal application. Start it up, type what you did today, quit. Next day, same thing. Searchable, but no bells and whistles; I use it every day so I thought I’d share it. Good demonstration of simple Core Data / Cocoa bindings programming. Here’s the current version (El Capitan or later). An older version (Tiger or later) is here.
NotLight (originally written October, 2007): A simple Spotlight front-end substitute. I wrote this because I got sick and tired of Tiger’s lousy Spotlight interface. (Apple now provides a much better Spotlight interface, especially if you search from a Finder window.) So I wrote this substitute, in order to access the real Spotlight. You can do any kind of Spotlight search; eight search keys are built in, and you can add more, and you can even view and edit a search as text if you like. You can use wildcards or not, specify word-based, case-insensitive, and diacritic-insensitive searches, and construct complex searches with AND, OR, and NOT. A Date Assistant translates dates into Spotlight’s query language for you. Results are a simple list of filenames and paths. Download it here (Yosemite and later; the earlier version, for Tiger and later, is here.). [Reviewed in Macworld.]
Zotz (originally written July, 2004): The original desktop application from which the iOS app was later derived (see above). Zotz 2.1, compiled for El Capitan and later, is here. Earlier version for Leopard and Snow Leopard here. An even earlier version, for Panther/Tiger/Leopard only, with source code included, is still available; download it here.

Here are some older Mac (desktop) Cocoa applications I’ve written. These applications should be considered outdated. I list them here mostly for historical purposes (also known as pure nostalgia). In general, the problems that these applications were written to solve are no longer problems, or they have not been maintained for other reasons.

MemoryStick (originally written December, 2001): Provides a graphical display of your RAM usage under Mac OS X. You can instantly see how full your RAM is getting. [Outdated because Apple’s Activity Monitor now displays the same information.] Optionally uses sound to signal pageouts and/or an increase in your swapfile count; these can be a sign that you need more RAM. Inspired by John Siracusa’s article on Mac OS X 10.1 in Ars Technica. MemoryStick 1.5 (Tiger or later), is here. (The previous version, for Panther, is here; the very early Jaguar version is here.)
Thucydides (originally written August, 2004): Presents your Safari history file as a sortable, searchable table. I wrote this because I got tired of Safari’s crappy, unusable history and lousy auto-completion. [Outdated because Safari history display and searchability is now excellent.] This app is tiny; it has no bells and whistles, such as caching your history information or searching the contents of the web pages. It just makes your actual Safari history URLs a lot easier to use. Tiger or later. Source code included. Download it here.
PacManOnMarsX (originally written July, 2007): A really simple game. So simple that it isn’t even a game, really. Nevertheless it might be fun for children and, uh, other people with childlike minds (okay, I have to admit that I’ve spent a lot of time playing it!). All that happens is that some ghosts are flying around on Mars and you use the arrow keys to make PacMan eat them. It takes about 30 seconds to play. Its real purpose was to port to Cocoa the PacManOnMars example from my REALbasic book. In other words, for you technically minded people, I wanted to make a Cocoa version of the REALbasic SpriteSurface / Sprite classes so that I could do an elementary animation easily. [Outdated because SpriteKit now exists, making the whole exercise pointless.] Probably Tiger/Leopard-only. Here it is.

Also, here are some Cocoa-related tutorials.

Apple Help: How to add Apple Help (the online help that appears in the Help Viewer) to your Cocoa Xcode project. For some reason, people still have trouble with this, even though Apple’s documentation is crystal clear on what you have to do. So here’s a screencast that makes it even clearer.
Scriptability: First steps in making your Cocoa application scriptable with AppleScript. There’s an expanded version in my AppleScript book, but this tutorial will get you started.

Things Having To Do With Ruby

What is Ruby?: Ruby is a programming language that incorporates the best features of every other language that I like (such as UserTalk, JavaScript, and LISP). I’ve been using it for quite a while now.; I can’t resist writing about great stuff that I use, so here is a Ruby tutorial introduction that I’ve written. Oh, yeah, like the world needs yet another Ruby tutorial introduction! Well, but my approach to explaining Ruby is rather different than most. I describe Ruby from the top down, starting with modules and classes, and I don’t tell you more than you need to know in order to get started, since you can always pick up the details later on. Try it, you’ll like it!
Replacing AppleScript With Ruby: When I want to drive a scriptable Mac application, I’m now much more likely to reach for Ruby than for AppleScript. What makes it possible, as this online article explains, is rb-appscript, which lets the Ruby language express and send Apple events as easily as AppleScript does (the syntax is quite reminiscent of how Frontier’s UserTalk does the same thing). The reason for choosing Ruby over AppleScript is that Ruby is so much richer as a language than AppleScript is; Ruby has real arrays and hashes, great string handling, and true object-orientation. Since moving my scripts over to Ruby, they’ve become much more efficient and maintainable.
Replacing AppleScript With Ruby, The Book!: I’m so enthusiastic about rb-appscript that I’ve written an online book about rb-appscript. Please look it over if you’re curious about rb-appscript! It is a complete introduction to scripting Mac applications with Ruby, with plenty of examples (how to script iTunes, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe InDesign).
The RubyFrontier Project: The most significant and by the far the largest Ruby project I’ve ever created is RubyFrontier. One of the coolest features of UserLand Frontier is that it provides a framework for building Web sites that are easy to write and maintain. Frontier takes care of the navigation between pages for you, and turns your text into HTML, allowing you to concentrate on content instead of form (in fact, Frontier was really an early “content management system,” though that term hadn’t been invented at the time). But Frontier is getting long in the tooth, especially on Leopard, plus its Web framework is kind of a pain to work with — it was never very consciously or efficiently designed — and UserTalk isn’t object-oriented and its string-handling abilities were never all that great; and the Frontier open source effort, though well-intentioned, is not making much headway (for example, Apple events still don’t work properly in the universal-binary build on Intel). So I’ve essentially ported the whole Web framework over from Frontier to Ruby, making improvements in the framework at the same time.; All my Web pages are now maintained and built with RubyFrontier. Also, the entire online help for Script Debugger is written with RubyFrontier, and so is the RubyFrontier documentation itself, and so is my online book about rb-appscript. You can read the documentation here or just watch a really great movie about it. To download RubyFrontier as a TextMate bundle, see the GitHub page.

Things Having To Do With AppleScript

AppleScript: The Definitive Guide!

Well, here’s a how-de-do! I’ve gone and written a book about AppleScript — not just a book, but the book. This really is the definitive guide to AppleScript. Endorsed by Apple Computer, Inc. as an Apple Developer Connection title, covering Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and beyond, this book explains the language completely, including many aspects of it that I’ve never seen explained before. Even if I do say so myself, this is the first really good book on AppleScript - the book I wish I’d had years ago.

News flash: This book is now (January, 2006) in its second edition. Completely rewritten, and updated for Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). (Leopard and Snow Leopard users, don’t worry; there are very few changes in AppleScript for Leopard and Snow Leopard, so the Tiger edition of the book is still good. See the errata page for information about the Leopard and Snow Leopard differences.)

Warning: I do not use AppleScript very much these days. I am much more interested in rb-appscript, which does the same thing AppleScript does (lets you talk to scriptable applications on Mac OS X, by sending the Apple events), but you use Ruby instead. In fact, I’ve written a draft of a book about rb-appscript, which you are welcome to read online.

Stuff related to my AppleScript book:

You can order it through amazon.com.
You can read O’Reilly’s blurb.
Want to read some of the book? You can download a sample chapter in PDF format. This is a really meaty chapter and explains stuff like how scoping of variables works in AppleScript, stuff I had to work really hard to figure out all by my little old self because it’s not explained properly anywhere else, not even in Apple’s own manual or in any previous book. So why are those O’Reilly folks giving away this chapter for free??? Are they crazy? Please, don’t read the free chapter; just buy the book, okay?
Want to read something else from the book? Here’s an article about cool things you can do with AppleScript handlers, extracted from two passages of the book. (This article was originally published in the ill-conceived and now mercifully defunct Mac Developer Journal.)
You can read or download the code examples (and URLs) from the book, as a textfile. That way, if you want to try out an example, you don’t have to type it; you can just copy and paste. (NOTE: Be sure to adjust your browser or text processor to see this file as MacRoman, or some characters will be wrong.)
You can download the AppleScript Studio example developed in Chapter 27, as an Xcode project. This is a good example of a basic AppleScript Studio project, with some nice bells and whistles: it shows how to integrate AppleScript Studio with Perl (and curl), and it shows how to add custom AppleScript scriptability to your AppleScript Studio application - something that it took me a long time to figure out how to do (in fact, I sort of stumbled on the secret accidentally, to the extent that I have been able to get it working at all). In this case, three application properties and a command are implemented.
Update to the above; I have rewritten that AppleScript Studio example using the new (in Snow Leopard) AppleScriptObjC bridge (AppleScriptObjectiveC, or ASOC). You can download the code here. I’ve also rewritten the much simpler example from p. 27 of my book using ASOC, and you can download it too. If you are just discovering ASOC and you’re wondering what it would take to learn to write a Cocoa application using AppleScript with the AppleScriptObjC bridge, these examples might help give you a sense of what’s involved.

You can download the Lame Encode Automator action example developed in Chapter 27, as an Xcode project. (Actually, I’ve added some features to the example since the book was published.) To try this out, you will also need to have installed LAME on your machine.
You can download the Cocoa scripting example developed in Chapter 27, as an Xcode project. This shows how to get started adding AppleScript scriptability to your Cocoa application (in Tiger). You can also read that section of the book, as a separate tutorial.
You can read an errata page where I’ve compiled a few additions and corrections.
You can read reviews of the book on SlashDot, in BookBytes, and at amazon.com.
Here’s a supplementary online article about how to use FaceSpan 4 (and AppleScript) to build the example applications described in my book. (Please note: that was FaceSpan 4. FaceSpan 5 will be a whole different ball of wax!)
Starting in Tiger, AppleScript scripts can easily be distributed as Automator actions. Here’s an online article I wrote showing how easy it is to write your own Automator actions.

Things Having To Do With Learning Ancient Greek

JACT Vocabulary: To accompany use of the textbook Reading Greek, by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers (JACT), Cambridge University Press. Includes all the learned vocabulary from the textbook and presents the vocabulary items as flashcards, to be sorted and consulted in ways likely to be useful to students and teachers. Good for students learning the vocabulary; good for teachers writing quizzes. Available as a free iOS App (get it at the App Store). Now updated for the second edition of “Reading Greek.” Descends from a desktop application for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or higher. Click here to download it.; You can also obtain the earlier, first edition version. This requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Click here to download it.; Based on my HyperCard stack, which you can also still obtain here.

JACT Greek Stacks: To accompany use of the JACT Cambridge textbook for beginners in Ancient Greek, Reading Greek. These stacks let students drill and test themselves on most of the exercises, and all of the forms and vocabulary, from the textbook; includes an authoring system to permit the modification of the exercise stacks and the creation of new ones. Requires Mac System 7+ and HyperCard 2.1+. (And, optionally, Apple’s Speech Manager and voices, if you want it to read Greek aloud rather badly!) Click here to download Part One. Click here to download Part Two.

Greek Verb Help: An application (Mac Classic only) which presents a full paradigm of the Ancient Greek -o-verb in hypertext format. This means you can navigate in ways impossible with 2-dimensional book pages, which helps you visualize and memorize better. Example: if you’re looking at the Aorist Optative Active and you type “middle”, you’re looking at the Aorist Optative Middle. Includes many notes warning about ambiguous or misleading forms. Looks best in color. Written with Storyspace, in case you were wondering. Click here to download it.

JACT Plato Reader: An application (Mac Classic only) which provides a hypertext grammatical commentary on the Plato selections from the JACT (Cambridge) second- or third-year Ancient Greek textbook, The Intellectual Revolution. The Plato text is in it, and so is a reference grammar, and when you click on a word in the Plato text, you are taken instantly to the relevant passage in the reference grammar. Personally, I think the grammar alone is the real point; it’s written from a somewhat revolutionary point of view (active rather than passive, i.e. how to say things in Greek), and disagrees with Smyth on many points. Based on years of research that didn’t do me a bit of good. Click here to download it.

Translation of Aristophanes, Lysistrata: Literal, including an exact reproduction of the original lyric metres; scholarly, yet intended for (and tried and tested in) actual performance. Sorry, you can’t download a copy; this is a published book. You can learn more about how to order it, here.

Translation of Euripides, Bacchae: Like the Aristophanes translation: Literal, including an exact reproduction of the original lyric metres; scholarly, yet intended for (and tried and tested in) actual performance. This one is available as a PDF, for download.; You can also listen to recordings that demonstrate how to read the lyric metres in their original Ancient Greek verse rhythm (notated in the translation by macrons).

Things Having To Do With Learning Latin

J&SLatVocab (Jones and Sidwell Latin Vocabulary): To accompany use of the Cambridge University Press textbook for beginners in Latin, Reading Latin, by Peter Jones and Keith Sidwell. A free iOS app consisting of flashcard for the complete vocabulary to be learned in the course of using the textbook. The iPhone is a great way to carry around virtual flashcards. You can also use it as a mini-dictionary for looking up any word that appears in the learning vocabulary. Get it at the iTunes app store.

CambridgeLatin (Jones and Sidwell Latin Exercises): To accompany use of the Cambridge University Press textbook for beginners in Latin, Reading Latin, by Peter Jones and Keith Sidwell. Includes a healthy proportion of the exercises from the Grammar, Vocabulary and Exercises volume, letting students drill and test themselves. Requires Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later. (Based on a set of HyperCard stacks written for and used with students about 10 years ago.) Click here to download.

Online Latin Lexicon: A file for use with Peter N Lewis’ ObiWan. Gives you a Latin lexicon (Latin-English dictionary) on your computer, with instant lookup, and pop-up access from any application. The dictionary is over 1 MB in size, has 15600 entries; yet the whole thing runs in just 200K of RAM. Can be used for English-Latin lookup too, by searching the entries; that’s not instant, but it’s still very fast. You can read more about it, or just go ahead and download it.

Latin Vocabulary Trainer [not by me]: Okay, I didn’t write this one! But I wish I had. It’s got two features I like: it trains you in Latin vocabulary and verb forms, and it’s written (very nicely) in REALbasic! Here’s a link.

Some Technical Online Articles

(A few technical online articles of mine, some of which are also pointed at elsewhere on these pages… For articles in TidBITS, scroll further down.)

Translating your Objective-C project to Swift: A step-by-step approach to switching an existing app project from the old language to the new.

Transcending UIAlertView on iOS 7: How to roll your own floating alert view, thanks to iOS 7 custom transitions.

Making the Leap to iOS 7: What to do when you recompile your iOS 6 app for iOS 7 and everything breaks.

Where iOS View Controllers and their Views Come From: A YouTube video taken from a live webcast I did.

Replacing AppleScript with Ruby: About rb-appscript, which has complete changed my life by letting me use Ruby instead of AppleScript as a base for sending Apple events to scriptable Mac applications.

AppleScript Power Handlers: Some weird power-user features of the AppleScript language.

Creating Online Help with Tinderbox: How I wrote the Affrus help using Tinderbox.

Write Your Own Automator Actions: Why Automator is a great way to package up your AppleScript.

With REALbasic, Object-Oriented Programming is Easy: An introduction to object-oriented programming.

Some Podcast and Video Interviews

These are various online podcasts and videos where I appear.

MacVoices: Swift and iOS 8

MacVoices: iOS 7 programming and state of iOS 7 generally

MacJury: What iOS 7 needs

Tips for Starting iOS Developers

Selected Writings from TidBITS

(For a complete list, go to the TidBITS home page and do a search on “Neuburg”…)

TidBITS Technical and Rants

OS X 10.8.3 Checkbox Restores Snow Leopard Document Saving	Show, Don’t Tell, Where You Went With Google Maps
Mysterious iOS 6 Cellular Data Usage	TidBITS News 1.5: A Revolution in a Nutshell
How iOS 6 Will Affect Developers — and You	Mountain Lion 10.8.2 Fixes Save As
The Very Model of a Modern Mountain Lion Document	Mountain Lion is (Still) a Quitter
Lion Zombie Document Mystery Solved	Where to Speak on Your iPhone 4
Hey, iBooks, Where Did All My Books Go?	How I Dared to Try iTunes Match and Actually Enjoyed It
How iOS 5 Will Affect Developers — and You	Lion Is a Quitter
Apps and Docs in IOS	Preparing for Lion: Find Your PowerPC Applications
iPad and Developers	Fast App Switching (iOS 4)
Snow Leopard Finder-Copying Bug	A Vinyl LP to Digital Workflow
Snow Leopard Apple Events Bug	Snow Leopard and Creator Codes
Snow Leopard New Features	The Font Cache Bug
How to Reformat a New External Hard Disk
How I Downloaded an Audio Book from My Library
Time Machine for Power Users: 1 2 3
Six Things I Hate About Leopard	Leopard 10.5.2
The Decline of WWDC	Of Files, Forks, and FUD
Input Managers	Unicode
iMac G5 Up In Smoke	Apple’s Dirty Little Secret
Long Day’s Journey Into Night Of the Living Dead Software
Of Macs and Macros	Malign Neglect
Apple vs. the little guy	The New Technologies Treadmill

TidBITS Reviews of Software (and Hardware)

TouchFire		iPod Shuffle
CloudMate iOS	CloudMate	TinkerTool	Appalicious
Witch 3.5	Fake	Outlook 2011	Panorama Sheets
Clipperz	EagleFiler	Things	MacSpeech Scribe
SheepShaver	LaunchBar 5	Path Finder 5	ClickToFlash
10 Surprising Uses of BBEdit		Greatest Computer Keyboard of All Time
Klicko	Script Debugger 4.5	ScreenFlow	OmniFocus
Dialectic	Quay	iMovie 08	Spotlight (Leopard)
LaunchBar	KeyClick	Flying Logic	Default Folder X
PTHPasteBoard 4.0	Color It! 4.5	MindManager	Amadeus Pro
SlipBox	Thinking Rock	NovaMind	Pacifist 2.0
OmniGraffle	Path Finder 4	DropCopy	Yojimbo
Marten	Smasher	Typinator	Dashboard
Automator	Intaglio	Curio	DEVONAgent
Audio Hijack Pro	SonicMood	Pyramid	FontAgent Pro
Webstractor	Word 2004	DEVONthink	Hog Bay Notebook
Mailsmith 2.0	NoteTaker	iData Pro	Scripting the Unscriptable
Multiple Clipboard Utilities	Tinderbox	StuffIt Deluxe 7	WorkStrip X
Sciral Consistency	PopChar X	URL Manager Pro	Desktop Rover
Layout Master	Extensis Suitcase	IBM ViaVoice for Mac OS X
AppleScript Studio	ProVue Panorama	QuicKeys X	DiskSurveyor
StickyBrain, EZNote, and Z-Write	Storyspace 2.0	Boswell	iListen 1.0
TypeTamer 2	Microsoft Excel 2001	ConceptDraw	Microsoft Word 2001
Microsoft Entourage	PlainTalk	ViaVoice Enhanced	Starry Night Backyard
Inspiration 6	Idea Keeper	OneClick 2.0	DiskTop and DiskTracker
Font Reserve 2.5	Helix	Canvas 7	Papyrus 8.0.7
Style Master	QuicKeys 4	Canvas 6	RichLink
Stagecast 1.0	CorelDRAW 8	Conflict Catcher 8	REALbasic 1.0
Microsoft Excel 98	Microsoft Word 98	Eudora 4.0	Everything Scripting CD
Inspiration 5.0	Text Machine 1.0	Font Reserve 1.0.1	Spreadsheet 2000
SuperCard 3.0	Canvas 5.0.1	CopyPaste 3.2.2	Palimpsest 1.1
Eudora 3.0	KeyQuencer 2.0	QuicKeys 3.5: 1 2	Now Utilities 6.0
WebArranger 1.0	Prograph Classic	Now Utilities 5.0	In Control 3.0
Hypercard 2.2	MORE 3.1	In Control 2.0	Inspiration 4.0
MacEuclid	Nisus 3.06: 1 2 3	SuperPaint 3.0	Storyspace

Take Control Ebooks

Take Control is a publishing arm of TidBITS. It involves rapid publication of timely electronic books (PDFs optimized for on-screen reading) which are kept up to date by periodic revisions. Because the books are electronic, overhead is low, so the books are inexpensive and can easily be updated; once you have bought one, the updates are free. This is a good model for computer-related subjects, because the subject matter changes so quickly (plus it sure saves paper).

When Panther came out in October 2003, we were ready with Take Control of Customizing Panther. (This has subsequently been collected in a print book as well.)
Shortly after Microsoft Word 2004 came out, we published two volumes, Take Control of What’s New in Word 2004 and Advanced Editing & Formatting.
When Tiger came out in April 2005, we were ready with Take Control of Customizing Tiger (now also collected in print).
And then there was Leopard! Gasping and panting, we somehow managed to be on time in October 2007 with Take Control of Customizing Leopard.
Wait, wait! It’s Snow Leopard! The book is completely revised; this is the best edition ever: Take Control of Exploring & Customizing Snow Leopard.
Oh, no, it’s Lion! The book is so completely rewritten for Lion you could just plotz. This is the one guide to Lion that you need. People keep “discovering” things that are already fully explained and described in this book. Take Control of Using Lion.
By incredibly clever guesswork we figured out when Mountain Lion would probably come out, and we were ready with Take Control of Using Mountain Lion.