Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Figure 24-2. Cocoa components in Interface Builder
AppKit’s components are not just tangible UI widgets like menus, windows, and buttons.
Some of the other things AppKit provides are the following:
• Data visualization objects like tables, browsers, and matrices.
• Abstract objects like controllers, timers, and formatters.
• Document creation, management, and persistence.
• Text handling, including editing, spell checking, and typesetting.
• Graphics handling for images, multimedia, and animation.
• Functionality such as event handling, undo management, and threading.
• System interaction such as printing, pasteboard (clipboard) operations, and scripting.
Most of AppKit’s features can be had with little or no code. Customization can be accomplished
with simple configuration, either as needed by the developer, or at runtime in accordance
with user preferences.
Despite all this simplicity, AppKit is also quite flexible. Because AppKit is object-oriented,
anything it offers can be subclassed, letting developers customize as much, or as little, as they need.
Foundation
CHAPTER 24 MAC OS X DEVELOPMENT: THE APPLICATION FRAMEWORKS 423
High-level application toolkits are all well and good, but even with all the basics and some of the
not-so-basics done for you, you’re still going to have to sit down and write some code. When
that inevitability occurs, you need AppKit’s fraternal twin, Foundation.
The Foundation classes are so legion as to be beyond the scope of this book. (Literally!
Apple’s Foundation documentation is over 2,200 pages long.) However, as you might expect,
from 60,000 feet it looks a lot like a bulleted list:
• Basic data types such as strings, numbers, and raw data
• Specialized data types like dates, URLs, and time zones
• Basic collections like arrays, sets, and dictionaries