MikeTrent

Mike Trent used to lurk CocoaDev and the VersionTracker user reviews. He tended to complain a lot and otherwise be a nuisance. He was also is an on-again-off-again technical reviewer for computer books, including:

• BookMacOSXADT
• BookProgInObjC
• Learning Emacs 3rd Edition

Mike spent much of 2004 and 2005 working with Drew McCormack and others on a book on Beginning Mac OS X programming: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764573993/104-9419933-4839133 . Unlike other books in the space right now, this book doesn't focus its attention exclusively on Cocoa (or carbon). It should be a useful tutorial for someone who wants to learn more about the developer tools, languages, and so on provided with Mac OS X.

Since then Mike quietly worked on other projects, and hasn't really been around here much.

Mike's last non-commercial Mac OS X freeware endeavor is Old Glory, available on VersionTracker: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/11935 . Mike made a lot of people very angry when he said he would not give permission for them to hack up Old Glory and re-post it with other graphics files. He regrets the situation but there it is. Another screen saver project is FadeFromBlack, available from his .mac account.

Prior to this his last major open-source contribution to the Cocoa community was FreeSpace, a screen saver engine for Mac OS X Server 1.1. Though FreeSpace does not work on Mac OS X 10.0, it's still a good source example for a program that wants to use NSBundles to load plug-ins. FreeSpace totally rocked on Rhapsody for Intel DR2 ... but now it is just a memory. And anyway, Mac OS X's built-in ScreenSaver is much better.

You can contact Mike Trent in the following ways:

• email 1: user=mtrent, host=abunai.org
• email 2: user=mtrent, host=mac.com
• AIM: user=exorre
• iChat: see email 2
• GPG Key: ID=7581CAB9, Fingerprint=20B9 9C37 FF3A 1926 584B 206F F69D FE55 7581 CAB9

Feel free to contact Mike via iChat or AIM but identify yourself with your real name and other relevant details immediately. Mike will happily chat with you but hates talking to anonymous people. Take some responsibility! Geez ...

He doesn't have any CopiousFreeTime anymore (damn ... what the hell am I doing with my life?!?), but he'll make time to answer questions about just about anything.