Learning Carbon

Chapter 14. Beyond Moon Travel: Advanced Topics

There are many more technologies in Carbon, and features in Apple’s programming tools, than what we’ve covered in this book. You’ve learned about the core technologies and features that most applications need, and have had an opportunity to put into practice what you’ve learned by creating the Moon Travel Planner application. But what if you want to write a more advanced application?

You’ll get a taste of three advanced topics that many developers have found useful:

• Scriptable applications. An application that is scriptable is capable of responding to high-level events sent by scripts, other applications, or the Mac OS itself.

• Threads and multiprocessing. These are useful technologies for applications that need to do more than one task at a time.

• Tab controls. A tab control used along with a user pane provides a compact way to present information to the user.

We’ll provide an overview of each topic and give you enough information to get you started implementing each of these features.

Scriptable Applications

AppleScript is a scripting system that lets users control applications in the Mac OS without using a keyboard, mouse, or other input device. Think of it as plotting your course to the moon, then sitting back while the computer does all the work. An application is scriptable if it can perform actions in response to commands it receives. The biggest advantage of making your application scriptable is the flexibility it provides ...