Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®

Chapter 17. Document-Based Applications

In This Chapter

• Building a document-based project

• Building your interface

• Adding code

Throughout this book, you create simple one-window applications to see how various aspects of Cocoa work. One-window applications are okay for testing your skills as you become familiar with Cocoa. But after you're comfortable working with Cocoa, you'll want to venture out on your own and create an honest-to-goodness application. Creating demo projects is one thing, but creating full-fledged applications is quite another.

When you create an application, you have to worry about much more than managing a single window. Many applications use a document-based approach whereby a user creates a document and adds some kind of content to it. If you've ever used a word processor or a drawing program, you're probably familiar with this kind of application. In document-based applications, a user might also save a document, open it later, or print it. All these features require a lot of work when you implement them on your own. Fortunately, Xcode helps by providing a full-featured, document-based project for you to use as a starting point for your own doc-based application.

This chapter guides you through the steps required to build a document-based application. Along the way, you'll implement many different features without doing much work.

Creating a Document-Based Project

To begin working with document-based applications, create a new project in Xcode as follows:

1. Choose File ...