Mac OS X in a Nutshell

Project Builder

The Project Builder application is your center for all Cocoa and Carbon application development. It lets you construct and manage projects, which it defines as collections of files—source code, libraries, and resource files—that go into an application. Included in Project Builder are context-aware text editors (featuring syntax highlighting and “smart” indentation), and frontends to the GNU project’s gcc compiler^[21] and gdb debugger.

Figure 15-1 shows a typical Project Builder window. The window has two sections: a list on the left and a detail view on the right. The nature of each is determined by which tab you have currently selected. Describing these views also gives us a brief tour of Project Builder’s abilities:

Figure 15-1. The main Project Builder window

Files

This view displays, in the left frame, a list of all the files that a project uses. They are arranged logically, not necessarily adhering to the reality of the filesystem; you can create folders—through Project → New Group (or Option-

-N) and arrange the list’s files within them however you like, without affecting their true filesystem locations. Furthermore, while many of the files (especially source code specific to this project alone) will reside in the project’s real folder, others (such as shared frameworks) ...