Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Putting Polishing Touches on Your Application

In This Chapter

• Implementing an About Panel

• Renaming an application

• Setting an application's version

• Creating and setting an application's icon

• Distributing applications

After you finish building an interface, writing code, and debugging your application, you'll want to prepare it and build it for use as a standalone executable file to distribute. You may think that after you design and write an application, it's ready for the world to see, but you still have a few more steps to complete before it passes muster with Mac users (they can be a demanding bunch!) and before it's truly ready for public consumption.

Mac users expect particular things to be present in a "good" Mac application. In this chapter, I show you some of the most common features that you can add to an application and settings that you need to tweak before releasing it to friends, family, co-workers, or the public.

The bulk of your development tasks take place in Xcode and Interface Builder. Some of the items in this chapter can be completed using features found in Xcode and Interface Builder. However, these aren't the only tools Apple gives you for creating Cocoa applications. Nestled in the Applications folder of your Developer folder, you'll find more than a dozen additional tools and utilities that can help you create great Cocoa software. I show you how to use a couple of them in this chapter: Icon Composer to create icons and icns Browser to manage the icons ...