Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide

Building MathPaper’s Front End

The next step is to create MathPaper’s front end — the user interface and the program module that starts up the Evaluator subprocesses and sends them mathematical expressions to evaluate.

The MathPaper program will consist of two nibs:

MainMenu.nib

The main nib that will control the menu, application initialization, and launching of new windows.

PaperWindow.nib

The nib that will control a single MathPaper window. If we have several MathPaper windows, one copy of PaperWindow.nib will be loaded for each window.

Because every MathPaper window has a separate nib, we can create new instances of a window simply by loading the same nib multiple times. We’ll see how this works later in this chapter.

Setting Up the MathPaper Project

1. Launch Project Builder and choose its File → New Project menu command.

2. Select “Cocoa Document-based Application” in the New Project Assistant, as shown in Figure 10-3, and then click the Next button.

Figure 10-3. Creating a new Cocoa document-based application in PB

1. Give your new project the name “MathPaper” and click the Finish button.

Project Builder will create a folder called MathPaper in your Home folder and will populate it with files and folders, as shown in Figure 10-4.

Figure 10-4. Files and folders created by PB for a new ...