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New QuickTime Kit Framework

QuickTime 7 introduces Cocoa developers to a new QuickTime Kit framework (QTKit.framework). The QuickTime Kit is a Objective-C framework with a rich API for manipulating time-based media.

At a basic level, QuickTime Kit provides support for displaying and editing QuickTime movies, relying on abstractions and data types that are already familiar to many Cocoa programmers, such as delegation and notification. QuickTime Kit introduces new data types for QuickTime-related operations only when necessary.

Specifically, two QuickTime Kit classes––QTMovie and QTMovieView––are intended to replace the existing Application Kit classes NSMovie and NSMovieView.

The QuickTime Kit framework is new in Mac OS X v10.4 but is also backward-compatible with Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) as well.

The QuickTime Kit framework provides a set of Objective-C classes and methods designed for the basic manipulation of media, including movie playback, editing, import and export to standard media formats, among other capabilities. The QuickTime Kit framework is at once powerful, yet easy to include in your Cocoa application. Figure 2-25 shows the QuickTime Kit framework’s class hierarchy.

Although the QuickTime Kit framework contains only five classes, you can use these classes and their associated methods, notifications, and protocols to accomplish a broad range of tasks, such as displaying, controlling, and editing QuickTime movies in your Cocoa applications.

A QTKit palette is also provided in Interface Builder that lets you simply drag a QuickTime movie object, complete with a controller for playback, into a window, and then set attributes for the movie––all of this without writing a single line of code.

Figure 2-26 shows an animated version of what happens in Interface Builder when you drag the QuickTime object from the QTKit palette to the application window.

After you drag the QuickTime object into the application window, you have a QuickTime movie view object with a control bar in the bottom-left corner of the window, as shown in Figure 2-27. By dragging the QuickTime movie view object by its corner handle to the upper-right corner of the window, the entire window fills up so that the movie view object with its control bar is visible.

The QuickTime Kit framework is documented in the QuickTime Kit Reference in conformance with the standards established for Apple’s Cocoa documentation suite. A tutorial for using the new framework, QuickTime Kit Programming Guide, is also available online and in PDF format. You can learn how to take advantage of the new QuickTime Kit framework classes and methods and build your own QTKitPlayer application, as well as learn how to extend its functionality.

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