Nice TidBITS for Valentine's Day

I got an email yesterday from O'Reilly's PR folks that O'Reilly is now distributing the "Take Control" series from TidBITS. If you check out the list ( http://tidbits.oreilly.com?CMP=EMC-newpr0d&ATT=8931434383button ) you'll see a lot of tempting titles. It's an interesting way for O'Reilly to build out their Mac and iPhone list in addition to the books they publish themselves ( http://www.oreilly.com/pub/topic/mac ).

When I joined O'Reilly Chuck Toporek was the Mac book editor and O'Reilly was publishing their own Mac books as well as books branded as "ADC". Derrick Story launched the Mac Devcenter and chaired a short-lived but really great conference in Santa Clara.

Much has changed - and Derrick has changed along with it. I've been gone from O'Reilly for nearly a year now but am happy to still get the chance to help out with some projects. One of them is Derrick's Inside Aperture podcast. The content has been consistently strong and the subjects Derrick interviews informed and well-placed. This week, Derrick was able to get an interview with the Aperture product manager that was posted within an hour of Apple's launch of Aperture 2.

This says good things about Apple (that they were willing to trust a third party prior to launch) and great things about Derrick. He's just been consistently dependable and easy going for years and years - earning the trust and respect of folks. Tuesday morning brought a big smile to my face.

I'm also happy to be part of the changes in a different way. Just as O'Reilly distributes TiDBITS, they also distribute titles from The Pragmatic Programmers ( http://pragprog.com ). We've been quietly working on a bunch of Mac titles and have launched the first on Core Animation ( http://pragprog.com/titles/bdcora ). One thing I love about this book is how quickly it gets you to the point where you can add animation to your Cocoa apps. Here's how simple the first animation is: you just change the line

[mover setFrame:targetFramePosition];

to this line

[[mover animator] setFrame:targetFramePosition];

In other words, instead of explicitly passing in the new position for the rectangle that defines an image's position, you send the new position to the animator and let it smoothly move the image. Of course, things get more complicated and - once layer backed animation is introduced - a lot sexier. Sexy enough that this book might be the perfect Valentine's day present that you could buy for yourself.