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The Mac OS X Bluetooth API Overview—Two Frameworks

The Mac OS X Bluetooth API consists of two frameworks that provide all the methods and functions you need to access Bluetooth-specific functionality in your application:

• IOBluetooth.framework

• IOBluetoothUI.framework

Both frameworks are in /System/Library/Frameworks and each has a specific target.

In this section:

The Bluetooth Framework
The Bluetooth UI Framework

The Bluetooth Framework

The Bluetooth framework contains the API you use to perform Bluetooth-specific tasks. With the methods and functions in the Bluetooth framework, you can:

• Create and destroy connections to remote devices

• Discover services on a remote device

• Perform data transfers over various channels

• Receive Bluetooth-specific status codes or messages

The Bluetooth UI Framework

The Bluetooth UI framework contains the API you use to provide a consistent user interface in your applications. This API provides Aqua-compliant panels your application can present to the user. These panels help the user to perform tasks such as creating connections, pairing with remote devices, and discovering services.

For maximum flexibility, the Bluetooth and Bluetooth UI framework APIs are available in both C and Objective-C. To emphasize the parity between the two versions, the APIs follow a naming convention that makes it easy to see the correspondence between entities. For example, methods in the Objective-C API refer to the object representing a Bluetooth device as IOBluetoothDevice. Functions in the C API refer to the same entity with an IOBluetoothDeviceRef variable.

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