Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 24 MAC OS X DEVELOPMENT: THE APPLICATION FRAMEWORKS
Unfortunately, like much that is old, QuickTime had long been a holdout against the paradigm
shift offered by Cocoa. This isn’t a technical problem, as Cocoa programmers are able to
access other frameworks, just as non-Cocoa programmers are able to access Cocoa.
However, having to leave the comfort of Cocoa for the dark recesses of old-fashioned procedural
API is so much trouble, even for otherwise brilliant resources like QuickTime. Tiger
finally corrected this with a brand new Cocoa interface to QuickTime, known by the euphonious
nickname QTKit.
Here are some of the features of QTKit:
• Access to raw media data from local, remote, and streaming sources
• Object-oriented representations of media, tracks, and time ranges
• View subclass for displaying and controlling media
• Interface Builder object, which makes adding a full-featured media player to your
applications a zero-code drag-and-drop operation
In addition, Leopard introduces QTCapture, which adds similar functionality to recording
media. This includes the ability to control recording devices, such as the iSight camera now built
into most Macs. For anyone interested in tapping the power of the iSight, I can attest firsthand:
QTCapture will save you thousands of lines of code.
NOTE For more information on QuickTime, check out Chapter 14.
Integration
Much of what makes the Mac such a compelling experience can be summed up in one word:
iLife. This suite of full-featured applications, included free with every new Mac (and the subject
of Chapter 16) is not simply the sum of its parts. Rather, it’s the integration between those parts.
Make some music in GarageBand. Use it as a soundtrack in iMovie. Burn your movie to disc
with iDVD. Then, tell the world with iWeb. This kind of integration, which is a concept from the
very core of UNIX, extends throughout the operating system.
Your own applications can and should take advantage of this. Not only does this provide an
excellent “Mac-like” experience to your customers, it saves you the time and trouble of implementing
features that are already served quite well by existing applications.
In order to help you leverage these applications, Apple provides a great number frameworks,
including several new to Leopard. Here is a quick tour of some of the most useful.
Address Book
As strange as it might seem to those of us who spend all our time with machines, many of our
users maintain a network of an entirely different sort: friends, family, coworkers, and businesses.
To manage this pantheon of people, Apple provides an application called Address Book.
Rather than maintain separate lists for the people you get and receive mail from, call or text
via your iPhone, and communicate with via iChat, everything is simply kept in Address Book.
Your applications can participate via the framework known, appropriate enough, as Address
Book.
In addition to being able to access the contact information stored in Address Book, the
framework provides the ability to search, edit, and add contacts. For any social aspects of your
application requiring human interaction, the work is already done for you. Leopard provides a
prebuilt People Picker, as shown in Figure 24-6.