(What is PSIG? | PSIG 104 announcement)

Items of Interest

• The meeting began with a session of forced pre-WWDC iPhone speculation ^^;
• Dave announced he'll be writing a column on beginning Mac programming for MacTech!
• Definitive guide to SQLite: SQLite is great for read-heavy apps, like blogs, but it's limited when comes to writing, as you can only write when no other accesses are occurring.
• Learn F-script in 20 Minutes, The Wizard of Menlo Park
• Tom: iden.tify.us was featured on Mashable!
• Paul: Building windows machines "a royal pain in the tush" -- alas no combo updates.
• Wolf on backups: Rsync works well except for resource forks; however, if you really care about maintaining absolute data integrity, use SuperDuper. (This reminds me, I totally had a dream the other night that my only-partially-backed-up MacBook fell apart into tiny irreparable pieces. Oh, and that random thunderstorm last week completely toasted one of our WinXP boxes. Heh...)
• Hacking MacOSX Tiger
• Paul got into true old-fashioned Show and Tell mode and presented to us some random, interestingly-designed objects: Voss water bottles, weird tape dispenser, an impact stapler.
• Gorman's been busy with wedding preparations. "Does it involve writing software?!?" "Yeah..." He's doing an WebObjects app for his wedding registry.
• Dan quotes his Roosevelt professor on the Unix lab which is actually comprised solely of Emacs: "Why Macs? I start the semester with 16 working machines, and I end the semester with 16 working machines."
• Wolf: The Accidental Mind
• Wolf on the relative lack of interest in HOPL III: "This is why software's doomed."
• WebKit open source web browser engine -- looks like a neat project. The new Web Inspector sounds especially interesting.

JS <3 ObjC

Introduced in OS X 10.4, the JavaScript-ObjC bridge is currently the only officially-supported bridge. The bridge makes it easier to work with AJAX libraries, JavaScript plugins, JSON and DOM (jquery). It also gives you access to regexes (which aren't built into Cocoa) and helps you build WebKit UIs. It's somewhat limited compared to other bridges as it was created specifically for the development of dashboard widgets (which, essentially, are just webpages made with HTML, CSS, and JS). The bridge automatically morphs over numbers, strings, and arrays, but not dictionaries.

Running JS from Objc is simple:
- [WebView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:]

With a WebView (which can be hidden), you can call any JS from ObjC.

For security reasons, there is more resistance when calling ObjC from JS. By default, all ObjC selectors and keys are excluded from JavaScript access. You override the boolean methods isSelectorExcludedFromWebScript and isKeyExcludedFromWebScript to allow access.

Security note -- anyone can open up your package and view the JS and HTML, so it's a good idea to put the more sensitive stuff in the compiled ObjC. (However, says Wolf, f-script would get you through that, too :).)

Last weekend I was at BARCamp Chicago! Perhaps a post on that at some point...