Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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CHAPTER 24 MAC OS X DEVELOPMENT: THE APPLICATION FRAMEWORKS
Even if your application does not produce video in the traditional sense, the frame-by-frame
access afforded by the Core Video framework, discussed later, makes it easy for you to provide
static images to the video feed. iChat Theater and the Instant Message framework make it easy
to turn your single-user experience into a collaborative multiuser masterpiece.
PDF Kit
Mac users have long been able to take advantage of Adobe’s Portable Document Format. While
other systems have required special tools for dealing with this universal format, Mac OS X has
PDF support built in. Not only can users view PDFs with the bundled Preview application, they
can create PDFs from any application via the Print panel.
The PDF Kit framework gives developers the ability to incorporate Preview’s high-performance
PDF rendering engine in their own applications. If you’ve ever used Preview, you know this goes
far beyond simply displaying PDFs.
Interface Builder includes a PDF view, as shown in Figure 24-10. It has specialized behaviors,
like crop, zoom, and rotate. PDF Kit also provides for document navigation, letting users
jump to the next or previous page, the first or last page, or to an arbitrary page.
Figure 24-10. PDF Kit’s view in Interface Builder is literally self-documenting.
Here are some other features PDF Kit handles:
• Annotations, which are additions to the page that are not part of the page itself, like sticky
notes and editable text fields
• Encryption, including ownership, and permissions, such as limiting the ability to copy or
print
• Outlining, which is an interactive table of contents showing the structure of a PDF
document
• Pagination, which gives PDFs a familiar, book-like appearance
• Searching a PDF’s content, as with Spotlight
• Selection, including the ability to highlight and copy text to the pasteboard
NOTE For more about Preview and Mac OS X’s PDF capabilities, see Chapter 14.