Articles

This page is the home of articles on Mac OS X development, software development, and math. Because my book Mac Game Programming is out of print, the first articles I'm going to post here will be about the material I covered in the book. I don't have the copyright to the book so I can't post electronic versions of the book chapters here. But I can update and improve the material.

Most of the articles (the major exception is the AGL tutorial) are available in HTML and PDF format. Use the PDF version for printing. Some articles have source code available to download.

You can find more articles on my blog.

OpenGL and Game Programming Articles

• SDL and OpenGL
• Drawing Tiles with OpenGL
• Mac Game Programming Roadmap
• Loading Textures with QuickTime
• Vectors
• Fullscreen AGL, which teaches you how to use AGL to write fullscreen OpenGL programs. The tutorial covers using AGL alone and using AGL with DrawSprocket. I wrote the tutorial in 2002, and Apple has since deprecated DrawSprocket in Mac OS X. I recommend not using AGL with DrawSprocket for Mac OS X programs.

Mac Programming Articles

Some of these articles may also help if you are developing a Mac game.

• Bundles
• Using Bindings with Pop-Up Menus
• Playing Audio Files with QTKit
• Playing Audio Files with QuickTime
• Reading the Keyboard with Carbon Events
• Timing
• Carbon Event Timers

Xcode Articles

These articles are in PDF format only. You can find more Xcode material at the Xcode Tools Sensei site under Free Stuff.

• Using Subversion with Xcode. This article shows you how to create a local repository, add a Xcode project to the repository, and use Xcode to perform the most common version control tasks.
• An article introducing Xcode 4. This article walks you through the creation of your first Xcode 4 project. You'll learn how to edit source code and build your project into a working program.
• Introduction to Xcode. This article walks you through the creation of your first Xcode project using Xcode 2 and 3. You'll learn how to edit source code and build your project into a working program.
• Using Xcode to write programs in unsupported languages. The article walks you through the creation of a simple Ruby program. But the material applies to using Xcode with any language it doesn't directly support, such as Python, PHP, Eiffel, Lua, and Smalltalk.