Cocoa® Programming

Archived Objects and Nibs

The encoding and decoding of objects is briefly described in Chapter 5, as one of the conventions used by the Cocoa frameworks. Most objects defined in Apple’s frameworks can be encoded and decoded whether they are nongraphical objects from the Foundation framework, or graphical objects like windows and buttons from the Application Kit. Encoding and decoding are frequently used to implement copy-and-paste operations, drag-and-drop operations, and distributed-object messaging. When interconnected objects are encoded as data into a block of memory or a file, the data is called an archive. One key to using the Application Kit effectively is the knowledge that user interface elements and their interconnections can be stored ...