All the people are very nice and helpful and everybody seems to love what he/she is doing. So do I. The projects I got are highly interesting and - what I really appreciate - they are of real use, not just to keep the intern busy. I also really like the freedom which I have in realizing the projects.

The next important thing: the food at Apple. I think Cafe Macs is one of the best known cafeterias, at least in the Macintosh world. The food is delicious and multifaceted. From salads, pizzas, burgers over sushi, burritos and pasta, they have anything you need (ok, sometimes I’d like to have a some swabian food like Spätzle but hey, I can eat that, when I’m back in Germany).
What I really like at Cafe Macs is that you can also have dinner there, so you don’t have to drive around to get some food in the evening.
A fellow student who interns in Palo Alto drives down to Cupertino once a week just to have lunch in Cafe Macs.
And yes, once I saw Steve having lunch there, too.

The next thing I really like here in the Silicon Valley is the nice weather. During the time I’ve been living here we had only two rainy days and the temperatures are usually between 66 and 78 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve never been a guy who cared a lot about the weather, but now, since I have to ride 3 miles to work with the bike every day I really appreciate it.

Currently there are about 30 interns at Apple, but there will be like 350 interns in the summer. Apple really cares a lot about their interns. It seems like that interns are normal employees with 3 or 6 month contract and that’s what I really like. As an intern you get most of the benefits a normal employee would get: discounts, massages, access to the Apple gym, and internal events. There also will be trips in the summer and a lots of events just for the interns. Not to forget to mention the Executive Talks where Interns will have to opportunity to talk to Apple executives (Steve will be there, too). I’m really thrilled about that and what happens the next few months.

All in all, I think getting the Internship at Apple is one of the best things that could have happened to me and I’m really afraid of the day I have to leave one of the best companies in the world.

Unfortunately Apples ADC website seems to be overstrained at the moment with all the developers trying to download the SDK.

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In less than two weeks I’ll be leaving Germany and heading for sunny Cupertino for half a year to work at the Build & Integration department at Apple. Oh, you cannot imagine how excited I am.

On the search for an easy way to implement a syntax highlighting mechanism for NSTextView I found an easy and fast (regarding runtime) way to do this. By using flex (a tool with its roots in the 1970’s) defining the rules of what should be highlighted makes it a lot more easier and structured.

flex is the GNU version of lex, the lexical analyzer generator (Buzzword jackpot!) developed by Eric Schmidt and Mike Lesk in 1975. By defining some rules (mainly regular expressions) it generates a C program which allows us to scan through a text and do something with the text, e.g. divide it into tokens. Tokens are chunks of characters with a special meaning (as defined in our rules). Confused? Read on, this concept will become very clear soon.

In this article I want to show you how we can use this ancient but very powerful tool to implement a basic syntax highlighting within a NSTextView.

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Sorry folks, but an update of ecto killed the article I was writing. Thanks to Time Machine I could restore the article but the work of two days is lost.

I’ve been using GTD for a couple of months now, and I can tell you that it works. But it only works if you have the discipline to use it for all of your stuff. As soon as you start disregarding the usage of your trusted system the whole system may get out of control.

Also, today OmniFocus 1.0 (a GTD trusted system) was released. With over 13,000 pre-orders this is a huge success for the guys at the Omni Group. Congratulations! It’s a really great product!