Learning Cocoa

Chapter 14. To Do: Finishing Touches

In Chapter 12, you created the basic infrastructure of the To Do application, and in Chapter 13, you built on the basic framework to implement more advanced functionality. In this chapter, you’ll polish up the To Do application and add some finishing touches. You’ll:

• Configure final application settings in Project Builder

• Add an application icon

• Add document type information (and a document icon)

• Improve application performance using compiler optimizations

This chapter uses the To Do application as an example, but everything covered applies equally to all Cocoa applications (with the exception of the document type information, which is relevant only to multidocument applications).

Configure Application Settings

There are many application specific settings in Project Builder that allow you to control various aspects of an application’s behavior. This section doesn’t exhaustively cover every option (see Project Builder’s online help for more information) but shows you what to do for the settings that are critical to correct application behavior.

Specify a Bundle Identifier

Bundle identifiers are the method Mac OS X uses to uniquely identify applications (and, in fact, any bundle). In one sense, a bundle identifier is very much like the creator code used by Mac OS 9 to identify applications. In Mac OS X, applications (including the Finder) use a framework called Launch Services to find out about registered apps, the documents and the URL schemes ...