Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Finishing Touches

Over the last 16 chapters, we’ve covered quite a bit of material and laid a decent foundation on which you can build your Cocoa programming abilities. Before we leave you at the end of the book, let’s take a look at the various finishing touches that you should put on your application before sending it out into the world. In this chapter, we explore the following topics:

• Tidying up the user interface

• Providing an icon

• Providing help

• Customizing the About box

• Tweaking compiler settings

• Packaging for distribution

Tidying Up the User Interface

You’ve no doubt noticed that when running the applications we’ve built throughout the book, the menu items refer to a “NewApplication” instead of the name of the application you created. An example of this is shown in Figure 17-1, where we see the application menu of Dot View.

Figure 17-1. Dot View’s application menu

Thankfully, this is easy to fix. Instead of creating a new application, as we’ve done to introduce most of the topics in the book, we’ll add all of these finishing touches to the Dot View application we built in Chapter 8.

1. Open the Dot View project from your ~/LearningCocoa/DotView folder.

2. Open the MainMenu.nib file in Interface Builder.

3. Click on the NewApplication menu, as shown in Figure 17-2, and change the menu text “NewApplication” in the various menu items to read “Dot View”. You can do this either ...