Attractive Appearance
One feature that draws users to the Macintosh platform, and to Mac OS X in particular, is the stylish design and attractive appearance of the hardware and software. Although creating attractive hardware and system software is Apple’s job, you should take advantage of the strengths of Mac OS X to give your own programs an attractive appearance.
The Finder and other programs that come with Mac OS X use high-resolution, high-quality graphics and icons that include 32-bit color and transparency. You should make sure that your programs also use high-quality graphics both for the sake of appearance and to better convey relevant information to users. For example, the system uses pulsing buttons to identify the most likely choice and transparency effects to add a dimensional quality to windows.
Table 7-3 lists several Mac OS X technologies you can use to ensure that your software has an attractive appearance.
Technology | Description |
|---|---|
Aqua defines the guidelines all developers should follow when crafting their application’s user interface. Following these guidelines ensures that your application looks and feels like a Mac OS X application. For more information, see “Aqua.” | |
Screen resolutions continue to increase with most screens now supporting over 100 pixels per inch. In order to prevent content from shrinking too much, Mac OS X will soon apply a scaling factor to drawing operations to keep them at an appropriate size. Your software needs to be ready for this scaling factor by being able to draw more detailed content in the same “logical” drawing area. For more information, see “Resolution-Independent User Interface.” | |
In Mac OS X v10.5 and later, you can use Core Animation to add advanced graphics behaviors to your software. Core Animation a lightweight mechanism for performing advanced animations in your Cocoa views. For more information, see “Core Animation.” | |
Quartz is the native (and preferred) 2D rendering API for Mac OS X. It provides primitives for rendering text, images, and vector shapes and includes integrated color management and transparency support. For more information, see “Quartz.” | |
In Mac OS X v10.5 and later, Core Text replaces the ATSUI and MLTE technologies as the way to high quality rendering and layout of Unicode text for Carbon and Cocoa applications. The Cocoa text system uses Core Text for its implementation. For more information, see “Core Text.” | |
In Mac OS X v10.4 and later, Core Image provides advanced image processing effects for your application. Core Image makes it possible to manipulate image data in real time using the available hardware rendering and to perform complex manipulations that make your application look stunning. For more information, see “Core Image.” | |
OpenGL is the preferred 3D rendering API for Mac OS X. The Mac OS X implementation of OpenGL is hardware accelerated on many systems and has all of the standard OpenGL support for shading and textures. See OpenGL Programming Guide for Mac OS X for an overview of OpenGL and guidelines on how to use it. For information about using OpenGL with Cocoa, see Cocoa OpenGL. |
Last updated: 2007-10-31
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