Technical Notes provide you with the latest technical documentation on Apple technologies and system updates, fixes and errata to Inside Macintosh, as well as programming tips and techniques to advance your development efforts. New Technical Notes are published on a regular basis and are reviewed by Apple engineers for technical accuracy and robustness.

Technical Notes by Category
Alphabetical categories for Apple Technical Notes are listed below.

Mac OS

• Color
• Communications
• Cross-Platform
• Devices
• Documentation
• Files
• Hardware
• Help Systems
• Human Interface Toolbox
• Inside Macintosh
  • Addenda
  • Errata
• Interapplication Communication
• Memory
• Networking
• OS Utilities
• Overviews
• Platforms & Tools
• Printing
• Processes
• QuickDraw
• QuickDraw 3D
• QuickTime Technologies
  • QuickTime
  • QuickTime VR
  • QuickTime for Windows
• Runtime Architecture
• Sound
• System Releases
• Text
  

• AOCE: Apple Open Collaboration Environment
• Apple Media Tool
• QuickDraw GX
• QuickTime Conferencing

In addition to our recent Technotes, other technical resources are available on Apple's Developer site:

Q&As
Technical Q&As provide you with the latest information and programming tips from Apple's developer technical support engineers.

Technical Publications
Apple's Technical Publications group produces information resources for programmers and innovators who are developing with Apple technology. Inside Macintosh volumes can be found on the Technical Publications site. An archive of develop magazine is also available.

Sample Code
Sample code provides you with coding samples for Apple Technologies from Apple's technical support engineers.

Japanese Technotes
For the convenience of our Japanese developers, many of our Technical Notes have been translated into Japanese.

Mac OS TN 1150: HFS Plus Volume Format By Apple Worldwide Developer Technical Support This Technote describes the on-disk format for an HFS Plus volume. It does not describe any programming interfaces for HFS Plus volumes. It is directed at developers who need to work with HFS Plus at a very low level, below the abstraction provided by the File Manager programming interface. This includes developers of disk recovery utilities and programmers implementing HFS Plus support on other platforms. TN 1041: Inside Macintosh: Files Errata By Jim Luther Updated by Jim Luther & Pete Gontier This Technote discusses known errors and omissions in Inside Macintosh: Files. This Technote has been updated to include additional HFS+ information. TN 1149: Smoothing Fonts By Joseph Maurer This Technote explains the current implementation of the "Smooth all fonts on screen" checkbox in the Appearance control panel of Mac OS 8.5, and discusses its limitations and the possible compatibility problems with existing applications. It then documents the new APIs that allow applications to take control over anti-aliased text rendering. Finally, it explains why anti-aliased text looks so bad when highlighted (in particular with dark highlight colors), and what you can do to solve the problem. TN1148: Dialog Manager Helper Functions By C.K. Haun Revised by Mark Cookson This Technote discusses Dialog Manager calls available since System 7.0 which can ease the work of managing dialogs. They allow you to call on the services of the System to track the mouse cursor (i.e., change to and from the I-beam cursor) and handle the standard keystrokes for accept and cancel in your dialog. TN1147: Pending Update Perils By C.K. Haun Revised by Mark Cookson This Technote discusses potential problems when pending update events for windows behind modal dialogs are not serviced.

In addition to our recent Technical Notes, all previous Technical Notes are also available. A quick, easy-to-scan Table of Contents includes all of these Technical Notes in an itemized list sorted by date published on the Web. A more robust Table of Contents, which includes a descriptive passage on each Technical Note, is also available.