Mathieu Tozer's Dev Blog

Conceptually I must understand what I have just created at the push of a button. It's a program in it's own right, s bundle of technologies all poised and ready to be given the customisation that will make it Words.

Cocoa gives an application several ways to exchange information with other applications:

• Pasteboards. Pasteboards are a global facility for sharing information among applications. Applications can use the pasteboards to hold data that the user has cut or copied and may paste into another application. Each pasteboard is similar to OS 9’s Clipboard, but much more versatile, with multiple pasteboards accepting multiple data types.
• Services. Any application can access the services provided by another application, based on the type of selected data (such as text). An application can also provide services to other applications such as encryption, language translation, or record-fetching.
• Drag and Drop. If your application implements the proper protocol, users can drag objects to and from the interfaces of other applications.

Cocoa provides API and tool support for localizing the strings, images, sounds, and nib files that are part of an application. Localizing allows you to easily tailor your application to multiple languages without significant overhead.

With just a simple Interface Builder procedure, Cocoa automates simple printing of views that contain text or graphics. When a user clicks the control, an appropriate dialog helps to configure the print process. The output is WYSIWYG.

Several Application Kit classes give you greater control over the printing of documents and forms, including features such as pagination and page orientation.

You can very easily create context-sensitive help—knows as “tool tips”—for your application using the Info window in Interface Builder. After you’ve entered the tool tip text, the user can then hold the cursor over an object on the application’s interface and a small window will appear containing concise information on the object.

You can design your application so that users can incorporate new modules later on. For example, a drawing program could have a tools palette: pencil, brush, eraser, and so on. You could create a new tool and have users install it. When the application is next started, this tool appears in the palette.

-- from Developing Coca Objective-C Applications: A Tutorial - Developer Documentation 92002, 2003 Apple Computer, Inc)