Apple/MAC/touch programming

It is a lot different nowadays

I too learnt in old IBM environments and those lessons remind me every day how remarkable it is that our fancy digital toys work at all.

Then inspired by the 1984 Apple Developer Conference in Sydney, I decided to develop a graphical interface to online information, only to discover that we were underestimating development costs by a factor of at least ten due to the unfamiliarity and immaturity of the development paradigm which relied almost totally on calls to a vast toolbox of functions provided with the system. (There were people around in specialist areas who had been already on this path, but for application developers it was such a quantum leap that it left me the only person other that Apple's then Australian CEO to attend both their 1984 and 1989 Australian developer conferences.)

Since then much work has been done to lower the cost of the new developer paradigm in parallel with an explosion of scripting languages that took over where BASIC left off to facilitate rapid development within, but not of, an interactive graphical environment.

In many ways the Touch feels to me like 1984 all over again and I'm now old enough and slow enough that I'll be happy if I ever manage to implement just one little personal project via the SDK.

 

What you are looking for is basic Unix commands.
http://www.ss64.com/osx/

This gives a short list of commonly used commands and their usage. Think of the terminal in OS X or the iPod Touch as the DOS box in Windows... instead of "dir" you type in "ls" etc... It is not programming as much as it is just... using the computer.

Also, MAC = Media Access Control, (internet stuff... Google it...)
Mac or Macintosh = Apple Computers

CHMOD: This changes the permissions of a particular file... in Unix, and even Linux machines... it is sometimes necessary to change the permissions of a file to make it an executable or change the way it is accessed. On the Touch, people use it for installed Apps that need to be modified to actually be recognized as Apps and run on the iPod.

SSH: Secure Shell: Basically an easy and secure way to access your iPod or other computer from another machine. It needs an IP or local address, a username, and a password. Data sent through this medium is secure. (Most days... )

Cyberduck: A GUI client for SSHing or SFTPing... (A drag and drop interface to add or modify files on the touch...)
Hope this helps!

 

To try to put things in perspective...

vt100 is just a command line window, much like the dos window under windows.

In the old days the dominant protocol was telnet. Essentially, your just sending commands to the remote machine. Then someone discovered it wasn't secure, meaning that if you looked at the packets on the network, you could pretty easily see someones password crossing the network to the remote machine, along with pretty much everything that got sent back and forth.

So they came up with ssh - secure shell. It's pretty much the same thing, only the packets are encrypted so you can't read what comes across the line. There are other protocols that can talk over ssh, sftp (secure file transfer protocol), scp (secure copy), etc.

Things like Cyberduck and others just put a pretty face on the protocol so you can do things like drag and drop to get a file from point a to point b.

Hope that helps...