Sunday March 12, 2006Our Spotlight book is out!Spotlight, introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), is Apple's new desktop search feature. Although it isn't perfect, it's quite a useful addition to other forms of file-system navigation. So, when SpiderWorks asked me to write a book on the topic, I jumped at the chance. Now, after a year of off-and-on effort, the book is available for purchase.As the proprietor of Prime Time Freeware, I was the credited author or editor for a few dozen books and the internal editor for several others. I've also written some 200 articles for trade magazines (e.g., MacTech, SunExpert, SunWorld, Unix Review). In short, I'm reasonably familiar with the writing, editing, and publication process. However, this was my first experience writing a book for another publisher. It was also my first experience at being a (recognized) co-author. I'm pleased to report that the experience was remarkably painless. If you're interested in writing a technical book, especially on an Apple-related topic, SpiderWorks is well worth considering. Collaboration
One of my concerns, when this book was first proposed,
was that I'm not really an Apple developer.
That is, I haven't made extensive use of
Cocoa frameworks, the
Xcode
IDE (Integrated Development Environment), etc.
Most of my programming, in fact, is done in
Perl
and other Fortunately, SpiderWorks had another author on tap. David Hill had already written one book for them, so he was familiar with their procedures. He was also well qualified to research and write the chapters on "Accessing Spotlight Using Core Services", "Accessing Spotlight Using Foundation", and "Writing a Spotlight Importer". This allowed me to concentrate on higher-level topics: "Introduction", "Overview", "Data and Metadata", "Query Strings", and "Saved Searches". I also dug through the relevant files and documentation, generating an annotated appendix of "Spotlight Keys". Finally, I developed some AppleScript and Perl code that allowed Spotlight to index (and Personal Web Sharing to present) assorted "include files", "man pages", etc. I covered this work in an appendix named "Indexing Darwin Files". Although the code is admittedly preliminary, it demonstrates some interesting and useful tricks. Having done a number of long-distance projects, I was comfortable with the fact that David was (only) two time zones away. Calling (say) Australia from California can be awkward, because of the large time difference; calling Texas is comparatively simple. That said, we used email for most of our interaction. PublicationHaving nursed dozens of books through the publication process, it was interesting (and a great relief :-) to have that chore handled by SpiderWorks. I also found it interesting to see my pedestrian formatting efforts turning into artistic and attractive layout. Peculiarly, I don't actually know what tools SpiderWorks uses to generate the downloadable PDF files. I do know that all of us passed Microsoft Word files back and forth, using a set of SpiderWorks templates to define the basic styles. These templates covered all of our basic needs, but couldn't handle those of the "Spotlight Keys" appendix. However, SpiderWorks crafted a special template just for this appendix, resolving that issue. In summary, the tooling was quite adequate to the job. Given that the Spotlight ebook sells for a fraction of the cost of a conventional printed volume, you might expect that my royalty wouldn't be worth mentioning. However, three factors serve to mitigate this:
So, at the risk of repeating myself, I would cheerfully recommend SpiderWorks to any author who is considering writing a technical book, particularly on an Apple-related topic. I would also (all modesty aside :-) recommend this book to any developer who wants to get started using Spotlight. Technorati Tags: Apple, desktop search, Mac OS X, Macintosh, SpiderWorks
Our Spotlight book is out!
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- posted at Sun, 12 Mar, 17:21 Pacific
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