---

OpenGL on the Mac Platform

You can tell that Apple has an implementation of OpenGL on its platform just by looking at the user interface for many of the applications that are installed with Mac OS X. The reflections built into iChat (Figure 1-1) provide one of the more notable examples. The responsiveness of the windows, the instant results of applying an effect in iPhoto, and many, many other operations in Mac OS X v10.4 are due to the use of OpenGL. OpenGL isn't restricted to just the operating system and Apple applications. Any Mac developer can use OpenGL. In fact, Apple's implementation is available to every Macintosh user as part of Mac OS X.

OpenGL for Mac OS X is implemented as a set of frameworks that contain the OpenGL runtime engine and its drawing software. These frameworks use platform-neutral virtual resources to free your programming as much as possible from hardware considerations. Mac OS X provides a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that Cocoa and Carbon applications can use to support OpenGL drawing.

This chapter describes the OpenGL frameworks and the associated APIs, defines the terminology that is Apple-specific, describes how data flows through OpenGL, and provides an overview of the tasks necessary for a Cocoa or Carbon application to tap into that pipeline.

Contents:

Structure of OpenGL in Mac OS X
Programming Interfaces
Terminology
Running an OpenGL Program in Mac OS X
See Also

---