Apple provides award-winning applications with every Macintosh, including Safari, Address Book, and Spotlight. The iLife suite includes personal productivity applications such as iPhoto and GarageBand. .Mac allows users to share photos and movies over the web, plus stay in sync. Developers can add functionality or content to these, and to commercial Apple applications such as Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Soundtrack Pro. Your own applications as well can embed many of the underlying technologies; Apple publishes SDKs, file format specifications, documentation, and other resources to get you started.

There are so many things you can do to enhance the user experience in Apple Applications. Use the iPhoto '08 Plug-in SDK to write iPhoto Export plug-ins. Create new audio effects in GarageBand with the AudioUnits API. Add support for .Mac in your application using APIs for Internet-based collaboration, workflow and security—all without any network programming.

Embed Web Content

The Web Kit framework, which forms the basis of the Safari web browser, provides a powerful HTML engine for use in your applications. The Web Kit framework provides a set of classes to support a variety of web content. You use the Web Kit to display web content in a window of your application, as well as edit web content within a WebView.

It's Who You Know

The Address Book is a centralized database for contact and other personal information for people. Applications that support the Address Book framework share this contact information with other applications, including Mail and iChat. Both Carbon and Cocoa applications can access users' address books.

Create Stunning Visual and Audio Effects

The Final Cut Pro XML Interchange Format provides extensive access to the contents of Final Cut Pro projects, including edits and transitions, effects, layer compositing information, and organizational structures. You can also share Final Cut Pro information with other applications or systems that support XML. Final Cut Pro's built-in scripting language, FXScript, lets you build, connect, modify and combine custom video effects such as filters, text generators, and transitions.

The FxPlug SDK is a compact yet powerful set of protocols that lets you create new filters and generators using the same GPU hardware acceleration or CPU-based technologies that Motion uses for its own native filters and generators. With the FxPlug SDK, you can leverage technologies such as OpenGL, Quartz, QuickTime, and Core Image to create unique effects, including on-screen controls and custom UI elements—all running seamlessly in Motion, the first host application.

Shake delivers all the tools artists require to create sophisticated visual effects for film and television. The Shake SDK consists of a powerful toolset of C/C++ APIs that allows developers to customize and extend the Shake experience by creating both compiled plug-ins for the application as well as new applications based upon the Shake engine.

Aperture 2.1 provides an open plug-in architecture for seamless integration of image editing software directly within a user's own library, providing access to an entire industry’s worth of imaging expertise without ever leaving Aperture. Installed plug-ins automatically appear in Aperture's Images menu, and a user simply selects one or more images to apply virtually any type of specialized imaging operations to either TIFF or RAW images. The Aperture 2.1 SDK also expands workflows through export plug-ins, which opens up new opportunities for users to share, store, print, publish, and sell photographs by exporting them directly from Aperture to 3rd-party service providers.

The Mac OS X Core Audio framework presents a multi-tiered set of API services that range from low-level access to particular audio devices to sequencing and software-synthesis. The MIDI services allow an application to interface to a device and manage and manipulate MIDI data flow. Core Audio services also provide an Audio Units plug-in architecture for DSP. Developers can create and deploy Audio Unit modules for use in Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, or Logic Audio.

Audio files tagged as Apple Loops include both file tags and transient markers, and are formatted for use within Apple applications such as Soundtrack Pro. Soundtrack Pro uses some file tags to help locate files using Search, and uses other file tags in conjunction with the file's transient markers to optimize audio playback through tempo stretching and transposition.

Enhance and Extend

Apple applications are useful standalone tools that also showcase many of the advanced features of Mac OS X. The underlying APIs—including the Web Kit, Address Book, FXScript, and Audio Units—make it easier than ever to include contact information, visual effects, audio plug-ins, web page rendering, and other technologies, in your own applications, or add your own functionality to the existing Apple applications.

For news, updates and links to other ADC content related to Apple Applications on Mac OS X, return to the Apple Applications topic page.

Updated: 2008-04-21