If you want to do vision experiments on your Mac II, and haven’t programmed a Macintosh before, there are various things you should get for yourself. I’ve listed what I consider essential. The stuff I use. There are lots of baby books that hold your hand while you learn, but the ones that I’ve looked at weren’t helpful for setting up vision experiments. They’re oriented towards producing Mac-like applications with the right look and feel, which is unimportant when the experimenter is the only person that will ever run the program. Be warned that the bible, Inside Macintosh, is intimidating at first. The classic comment about Inside Mac is that you have to have read the rest to understand any part. Fortunately, the new edition, called the New Inside Macintosh--of which only part has been published--is much more readily assimilable. Mac programming is tough going at first, but I’ve come to like it, as the Apple routines are generally intelligent solutions to complicated problems. Anyway, by looking at the sources for the various demos in the VideoToolbox you should be able to get going much more quickly than I did. Good luck.
- Denis Pelli
If you like this file, you may also want to read Mike Kelly's help file “csmp-faq-1.txt”, which answers some frequently asked questions for the Mac programming section of UseNet. It’s in the Info-Mac archives in /tech.
ESSENTIAL BOOKS AND SOFTWARE:
The C Programming Language, Second Edition
Kernighan and Ritchie
Prentice Hall, 1988
This book describes the new ANSI C. Most new C compilers are 99% compliant.
THINK C 5.04
from:
Symantec Corp.
THINK Technologies
135 South Rd.
Bedford, MA 01730
(617)-275-4800
(800) 441-7234
(408) 252-3570.
This is a C compiler and programming environment (combined editor, linker, librarian, loader). It’s best that I’ve ever used on any computer. The update from 5.0 to version 5.04 is available from CompuServe, and by mail directly from Symantec. (The main alternative to THINK C is Apple’s MPW C, which is slow, and clumsy, at least in comparison to THINK C. The only thing I use MPW for is to compare and merge files and folders, which it does very well.)
THINK Reference 2
Also from Symantec. This program acts as an online reference manual to the information in the Inside Mac books, volumes I-VI. Very useful. $129
Numerical Recipes C Diskette for Macintosh $32.50 (software)
Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing $47.50 (book)
Useful book and mathematical library in source form, so you can read the code, understand what’s going on, and modify it if necessary. (They have a combined price for the book with source and examples diskettes.) From:
Cambridge University Press
Orders Department
110 Midland Avenue
Port Chester, NY 10573
(800)-227-0247
Inside Macintosh: Volumes I to VI, and X-reference
New Inside Macintosh: Files, Memory, Processes, Imaging, ...
Designing Cards and Drivers, 3rd edition
from:
Addison-Wesley
(800)-447-2226
You’ll need these books. Apple is in the process of issuing the new edition of Inside Mac. So far they’ve only issued a few volumes. The old edition had numbered volumes: I to VI; the new edition has named volumes, e.g. Files. The new edition is significantly easier to use than the original and includes examples in C, not just Pascal.
MAGAZINES AND CATALOGS:
MacWEEK
Customer Service Department
P.O. Box 5821
Cherry Hill, NJ 08034
(609)-428-5000
Get a free subscription.
TidBITS
A free weekly email newsletter about Macintosh software and hardware published by Adam and Tonya Engst. To subscribe send email to info@tidbits.com
APDA
Apple Programmers and Developers Association
Apple Computer, Inc.
20525 Mariani Avenue, M/S 33G
Cupertino, CA 95014-6299
1-800-282-2732
(408)-562-3971 fax
APDA@applelink.apple.com
Get an APDA catalog, since some Apple software and documentation is ONLY available from them.
develop: The Apple Technical Journal (with the Developer Essentials CD-ROM), about $30/year.
Apple Computer, Inc.
PO Box 531
Mt. Morris, IL 61054
U.S.A.
800-545-9364 (U.S.A. only)
815-734-6309 (anywhere)
815-734-4205 fax
DEV.SUBS@applelink.apple.com
The develop magazine has four issues per year. It has lots of examples. Each issue includes the latest Developer Essentials CD-ROM disk. Useful.
Essential Tools and Objects CD-ROM (also called “ETO”)
APDA
I don’t subscribe to this--it's too expensive--but you may want to. It’s updated several times a year and has the latest versions of Apple’s development tools, MPW, C, etc.
ONLINE SERVICES:
UseNet
The comp.sys.mac.programming UseNet news group has knowledgeable active discussion. Experts at Apple often jump in with helpful answers to thorny questions. You can participate in UseNet from your your Mac using telnet (NCSA Telnet and MacIP are both free) to log into a local unix system. Or you might use Nuntius (available by ftp from the Info-Mac archive) if you can get tcp/ip access to a net news server. Alternatively, you can ask Mike Kelly, mkelly@cs.uoregon.edu, to add your name to the email mailing list to receive his digest of the discussions.
CompuServe Information Service
P.O. Box 20212
Columbus, OH 43220
(800)-848-8199
If you can't join UseNet, then you may want to join CompuServe, to follow the discussions and post your seemingly insoluble Macintosh problems on the bulletin boards, MacPro, MacDev, or Symantec:THINK C, to get free advice from experts. Buy the program Navigator from CompuServe, as it makes CompuServe much easier to use. You’ll need a modem.
AppleLink
(408) 974-3309
ALINK.MGMT@applelink.apple.com
AppleLink is Apple’s bulletin board and email system. It provides some system software updates and technical information. Most companies that make Macintosh products have AppleLink accounts, and you can use the online directory to get their email addresses. You’ll need a modem.
Anyone can submit a bug report to APPLE.BUGS@Applelink.Apple.com. They prefer, but don't require, a certain format that is produced automatically by a hypercard stack called Apple Bug Reporter, which is available on Apple's Developer CD's or can be downloaded from ftp.apple.com in /dts/mac/bugs.
SOFTWARE ARCHIVES ACCESSIBLE THROUGH THE INTERNET:
FTP is a file transfer protocol used to transfer files across the Internet. FTP programs typically have very rudimentary user interfaces. Some of the bigger ftp servers are now also Gopher servers. Gopher is sort of a superset, developed at University of Minnesota, originally for a campus-wide information server, that provides a quite good user interface and allows access to a wide variety of Internet resources. Public ftp servers require that you log in as “anonymous” and will accept any password, but it is considered a courtesy to supply your electronic address as the password. If for some reason you can't use ftp or gopher, some of the sites will help you out by allowing you to request transmission of files to you by email.
There are two ways to use ftp from your Mac. The traditional, indirect, approach is to remotely log into a mainframe (preferably one running unix), use its ftp facilities to move the file to it, and then download the file from it. The modern, direct, approach requires that your AppleTalk network have a gateway to the Internet, so that you can run an ftp program on your Mac (provided you have Apple's MacTCP init, available from APDA for $100; many universities have site licenses). I recommend TurboGopher for anonymous ftp downloading and Fetch 2.1 for general ftp uploading and downloading. Both are free from the Info-Mac archive.
Info-Mac archives (VideoToolbox is in info-mac/source/c)
ftp: sumex-aim.stanford.edu [36.44.0.6]
gopher: Info-Mac Archives
email: send a query to Info-Mac-Request@sumex-aim.stanford.edu
This is the largest collection of Mac software. You can buy an August '92 snapshot of it in a CD-ROM from Pacific HiTech, Inc., Salt Lake City, Utah, 800-765-8369. Info-Mac CD-ROM $39.95
MacPsych archives
ftp: ftp.stolaf.edu [130.71.128.9] (look in the pub/macpsych directory).
gopher: St. Olaf University/Network Resources/St. Olaf Mailing Lists/MacPsych
email: send a query to macpsych-request@stolaf.edu
Apple archives
ftp: ftp.apple.com [130.43.2.3] look in the /dts/mac directory.
(ftp.apple.com is an alias for bric-a-brac.apple.com.)
EMAIL:
Your email service ought to have a gateway to Internet; complain if it doesn’t. Here’s how to send Internet mail to various commercial services when you only know the person’s service-specific address:
In my experience a plain old (now obsolete) Mac II is fast enough for most things, but faster Macs can show bigger movies. If you're going to synthesize images then make sure your computer has a floating point chip. So far we've never needed more than 8-bit color, making the obsolete Apple Toby and TFB video cards our favorites, because they work perfectly (unlike Apple's new video cards--see Video synch), and they're available for $90 each from Shreve Systems (800-227-3971). We also like the built-in video on Apple's new crop of computers because you can load images into them at extremely high speeds (try the demo TimeVideo). We use the mouse or keyboard to collect observer responses. We've bought a few Data Translation A/D boards to automate our photometry, moving the cards from machine to machine as needed, but they are probably not the best brand.
We've done nearly all our research using Apple's High Resolution Monochrome monitors, which are fine, though one could wish for better high voltage regulation and dc coupling instead of dc restoration. I suspect that a color monitor might be better regulated and might be excellent used as a monochrome monitor. Use with the ISR Video Attenuator would require: 1. use only the green channel, or 2. build a video amplifier to drive all three channels from the single output of the video attenuator, or 3. snip two of the 75 ohm termination resistors inside the monitor and tie all three channels together.
You'll want a fast CD-ROM drive, mainly to read Apple’s Developer Essentials CD-ROM disk.
You’ll need a modem to talk to CompuServe or AppleLink. You'll probably also want to dial in from home and elsewhere using AppleTalk Remote Access. You can now buy v32bis (i.e. 14,400 baud) modems for several hundred dollars. Phone lines are still expensive though, so you may want to cost-share by using a shared modem and a single phone line.
My department uses a single DAT tape drive (with compression, from APS) and the Retrospect Remote program to backup dozens of Macs every night automatically. We’re very happy with it. Retrospect maintains a historical backup so you can go back to older versions of a program, many backups ago. If at all possible get a sufficiently large-capacity tape drive so that you can do unattended incremental backups without having to change the tape.
Moustrak Pad (large 9”x11”, blue or gray). One for each Mac. You really need this. $9
Chip Merchant
9285 Chesapeake Drive
San Diego, CA 92123
(619)-268-4774
(619)-268-0874 fax
At $30 per megabyte it’s worth buying enough memory to take your computer up to at least 8 MB. This outfit has good prices.
RECOMMENDED:
(The free stuff is available from Info-Mac or CompuServe or both. You can use TurboGopher to do an "Archie" search of most ftp sites in the world for a file name. To search Compuserve use their "GO MACFF" command.)
After Dark - cute screen saver.
ATM 3.0 - Adobe Type Manager, $7.50 from Adobe at 800-521-1976 x4400.
