Learning Carbon

Chapter 6. Carbon Events

Everything a typical Carbon application does, whether interacting with the user or communicating with the system, takes place in response to an event sent to the application by the operating system. Events include any activity that requires a response by the application—user actions, changes in processing status, hardware activity, and other occurrences. The core task of any Carbon application is to respond to events.

Carbon supports two event-handling models, although only one is recommended. The first is the legacy Mac OS Event Manager model, referred to as the classic Event Manager. The second is the Carbon Event Manager model. It’s the one we’ll cover in this chapter, and the event model your Carbon application should use. An application that uses this model tells the Carbon Event Manager what events are of interest. Then the application doesn’t do anything until the Carbon Event Manager detects one of the events the application wants to handle. So, when someone using your application is asleep at the keyboard, your application is simply waiting. No processing cycles are wasted; it’s a very efficient model.

Another big advantage to using the Carbon Event Manager is that it greatly reduces the amount of code needed to write a basic application. It provides standard handlers for most types of user interaction, so you can concentrate on writing code that’s unique to your application.

In this chapter, you’ll look at Carbon events and how to handle them. ...