apt

Software Update is pretty awesome for Apple software, but have you ever wanted that functionality for the rest of your apps? 19-year-old developer Louka Desroziers created a nifty little menubar app called LogicielMac Update that checks for updates to the applications installed on your machine. There are options to automatically download the updates and install them. You can also create an ignored list of apps that you don't want to update.

The app gets most of its information from LogicielMac (logiciel meaning "software," and Mac meaning "best platform ever"), a Francophonic site similar to VersionTracker and MacUpdate. But fear not, English speakers, as LogicielMac Update is localized for English.

This still doesn't hold a candle to apt.

I've given up on trying to get a MAMP stack on my local Mac Pro. As beefy as machine as it is, it's not Linux. First, apache didn't work out of the box on OS X. Then, while working on image module, I found out that OS X's PHP doesn't come with GD. (I won't even mention my issues with ruby.)

So I'm going to spend more money on proprietary software (VirtualBox didn't work), most likely VMWare's Fusion so I can run a virtualized instance (or three) of Linux locally. It will take less time, behave the way I expect it to and be a breeze to update, thanks to apt.

The iPhone (or iPod Touch) is a 667MHz computer (albeit one that is only running at 412MHz) with 128MB of RAM and between 4 and 32 GB of flash. For software, it is running a pared down Mac OS X with its standard compliment of a FreeBSD-based userland over a Darwin kernel. While some people wonder why anyone would attempt to use it as a Unix workstation, to me and many others it seems ludicrous not to.

...

For distribution, I have chosen Debian's APT, which I have ported to this new platform along with a few custom tweaks to integrate better with Apple's network settings. I have also spent the time to write a UIKit front-end to APT called Cydia, in order to make the transition easier for a larger number of users. (Cydia pomonella is the scientific name for the codling moth, which is what we often think of the as the stereotypical apple worm. I felt the name was fitting.)

Sweet, I love apt.