Mac Os X: a developer OS.

Sometimes you spend years doing things, and these become part of everyday’s routine.
You never notice things that are part of it… they’re just there.
Sometimes you don’t even spend time getting to see things better.

I’ve been a Mac Os X user for more than 3 years, and this has been my Os of choice for development of Flash, Director, Perl, PHP, HTML, JavaScript and others I’m trying to learn.
Os X is to me a great OS for developing, but how much do I know about the things it can offer me?

I’m fully J2ME and Java at the moment, as I’d love to learn these languages, and I’m forced to do J2ME for an installation we’re working on now.
The time is too short to learn C++ and Symbian programming, that’s it.

Not having ever programmed C or other similar languages, I had no idea what a SHORT (int) was, so I called Saver and he told me that it’s a 4 bytes number, and that cleared everything (well… sort of).

0×0 to 0xF (0 to 15)

WOW!
was it that easy?

Childhood memories of when I tried to learn assembly on c64 came back.
At the time I had fun trying to convert numbers from DEC to BIN to HEX and back, just to see if I was doing it right.
That was way more fun than school.

Not wanting to get paper as I needed to quickly convert a few numbers, I decided to run Os X’s own calculator application and see the options I had to convert number.
I was amazed when I clicked the “View” menu and found 3 main options:

• Basic
• Scientific
• Programmer

Obviously I selected option 3 and found myself looking at exactly what I needed

then I was able to easily write numbers in DEC and convert back to HEX, but the most amazing feature is the bit shifting (more than useful to extract color values from ARGB numbers)

last thing I notice is the binary area, where you can just click on bits to set them HIGH or LOW to see the result number on the display in whatever format you need.

I’ve probably just invented the wheel, and others may have been using this tool for years, but I’m just excited I can have something like this in the standard Os.
If you’re not comfortable converting numbers in your mind this is a great tool.
It’ll definitely be a useful tool in my everyday developer experience.

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