Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

The Cocoa Difference

Here are some of the advantages offered by Cocoa programs. It’s worth reading—not to make you drool about a future when all Mac programs will fall into this category, but to help clear up any confusion you may have about why certain features seem to be only occasionally present.

Note

The following features appear in almost all Cocoa programs. That’s not to say that you’ll never see these features in Carbonized programs; the occasional Carbon program may offer one of these features or another. That’s because programmers have to do quite a bit of work to bring them into Carbon applications—and almost none to include them in Cocoa ones.

The Fonts Panel

The Mac has always been the designer’s preferred computer, and Mac OS X only strengthens its position. For one thing, Mac OS X comes with about 100 absolutely beautiful fonts that Apple licensed from commercial type companies—about $1,000 worth, according to Apple.

When you use a Carbon program, you usually access these fonts the same way as always: using a Font menu. But when you use a Cocoa program, you get the Fonts panel, which makes it far easier to organize, search, and use your font collection (see Figure 4-14).

Figure 4-14. You’ll find the Fonts panel only in Cocoa programs. As you adjust your font selections, you see the highlighted text in your program updated instantly.

See Chapter 13 for much more on fonts—and ...