Introduction to Setting Up Your Carbon Application to Use the Services Menu

Application services give applications an open-ended way to extend each other’s functionality by allowing them to:

An application that provides a service advertises the operation it can perform on a particular type of data—for example, encryption of text, optical character recognition of a bitmapped image, or generating text such as a message of the day. Any application that signs up to use services automatically accesses the advertised functionality through its Services menu. An application doesn’t need to know in advance what operations are available; it merely needs to indicate the types of data it uses, and the Services menu makes available the operations that apply to those types of data.

Who Should Read This Document?

This document describes how application services work, shows some typical Services menus, and provides instructions on how you can use services in your application. You should read this document if you are an application developer and want to provide your application’s services to other applications or make services from other applications available to your application.

Before you read this document, you should be familiar with information property lists. You need to know what they are and how to add properties to a list. Carbon developers should also know how to write and install Carbon event handlers.

Organization of This Document

This document is organized as follows:

See Also