The Mac OS X graphical user interface (GUI) is called Aqua. Aqua’s advanced use of color, animation, and transparency and its plethora of powerful user-oriented features make it a true delight to use for both novices and power users. To write applications that function well in this environment, a developer should first become proficient at using Aqua as a power user. This means knowing Aqua’s GUI guidelines and how applications are structured well enough to accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently. You can then use this knowledge to write applications that provide better interfaces for others.
This chapter contains an introduction to the Aqua GUI and its guidelines. The references at the end of this chapter contain the web addresses for Apple’s guidelines. No previous experience with Mac OS X is assumed. All screen shots were taken from Mac OS X Version 10.1.
Mac OS X is special for two important reasons. First, it brings the popular Macintosh operating system interface into the 21st century with a new, object-oriented environment that is almost as easy to program as it is to use. Second, Mac OS X brings the world’s easiest-to-use interface (Aqua) to the venerable Unix operating system, which is the underlying basis of Mac OS X. This has allowed Apple almost overnight to claim the largest installation of Unix operating systems on the planet: tens of millions! There are now more installed copies of Mac OS X than of all other desktop Unix variants combined, including Sun, Linux, HP, IBM, and more. Unix lovers, take note!
Aqua is the interface to all of the next-generation Mac OS X applications, including the Finder, the Dock, Mail, TextEdit, and many other applications that are bundled with Mac OS X. The most important of these applications is the Finder, which is an improved reimplementation of the traditional Finder for the Macintosh.
The Mac OS X Finder lets you start up programs and manage the filesystem primarily through point-and-click activities that are natural to the user. With the Finder, you can copy 10 MB of files from one disk to another, launch (run) several programs, open and print an 80-page document, recursively change the permissions on files, and view a graphics file in a panel all at the same time! That would not be possible with previous versions of Mac OS.
Mac OS X is also special because of its embedded imaging model, Quartz. (An imaging model does the actual drawing on the screen or on a printer.) Based on Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF), the next-generation version of Adobe’s PostScript page-description language, Quartz provides a true WYSIWYG (“wizzy-wig,” or what-you-see-is-what-you-get) capability because the imaging model for printing is the same as that for the screen. This is a marvelous asset for any application that uses text or graphics (and what application doesn’t?).
Where Mac OS X shines brightest, however, is in its development environment, Cocoa . As you’ll discover by working through this book, the object-oriented Cocoa environment makes it surprisingly easy to design new applications and then turn them into working applications. Our main design tool is Interface Builder (IB), perhaps the world’s most powerful tool for building application interfaces. With IB, you can create menus, windows, controls, etc. and make connections between them graphically. IB allows easy access to Cocoa’s Application Kit , a set of more than 120 powerful classes that define and create objects for use by your applications. We’ll discuss these powerful tools in the next chapter.
Get Building Cocoa Applications: A Step by Step Guide now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
