Glossary

• application bundle  

  The executable code and related resources as they are packaged into a prescribed directory hierarchy.



• Apple menu  

  A menu that provides items that are available to users at all times, regardless of which application is active. It is the leftmost menu in the menu bar.



• application menu  

  A menu that contains items that apply to the application as a whole, rather than to a specific document or other window. The application menu is immediately to the right of the Apple menu.



• Apple Developer Connection  

  The primary source for technical and business resources and information for anyone developing for Apple's software and hardware platforms anywhere in the world. It includes programs, products, and services and a website filled with up-to-date technical documentation for existing and emerging Apple technologies. The Apple Developer Connection is at http://www.apple.com/developer/.



• AppleScript  

  A scripting language used to control the actions of the computer and the applications that run on it.



• Aqua  

  The graphical user interface for Mac OS X.



• bundle  

  A directory in the file system that stores executable code and the software resources related to that code. Applications, plug-ins, and frameworks are types of bundles. Except for frameworks, bundles are file packages, presented by the Finder as a single file.



• BSD  

  Berkeley Software Distribution. Formerly known as the Berkeley version of UNIX, BSD is now simply called the BSD operating system. The BSD portion of Mac OS X is based on 4 FreeBSD 4.4, a “flavor” of 4.4 BSD.



• Carbon  

  An application environment for Mac OS X that features a set of programming interfaces derived from earlier versions of the Mac OS. The Carbon API has been modified to work properly with Mac OS X, especially with the foundation of the operating system, the kernel environment. Carbon applications can run in Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and all versions of Mac OS 8 later than Mac OS 8.1.



• Cocoa  

  An advanced object-oriented development platform for Mac OS X. Cocoa is a set of frameworks with programming interfaces in both Java and Objective-C. It is based on the integration of OPENSTEP, Apple technologies, and Java.



• Classic  

  An application environment for Mac OS X that lets you run non-Carbon legacy Mac OS software. It supports programs built for both Power PC and 68K chip architectures and is fully integrated with the Finder and the other application environments.



• Darwin  

  Another name for the Mac OS X core operating system. The Darwin kernel is equivalent to the Mac OS X kernel plus the BSD libraries and commands essential to the BSD Commands environment. Darwin is Open Source technology.



• dmg  

  A Mac OS X disk image file.



• dock  

  An area on the edge of the screen that holds applications, documents, minimized windows, folders, storage devices, and links to websites. It is customizable by users to allow them to easily organize and quickly access their most used resources.



• Finder  

  The system application that acts as the primary interface for file-system interaction.



• HFS (Hierarchical File System)  

  The Mac OS Standard file-system format, used to represent a collection of files as a hierarchy of directories (folders), each of which may contain either files or folders themselves. HFS is a two-fork volume format.



• HFS+  

  The Mac OS Extended file-system format. This file-system format was introduced as part of Mac OS 8.1, adding support for filenames longer than 31 characters, Unicode representation of file and directory names, and efficient operation on very large disks. HFS+ is a multiple-fork volume format.



• JDirect  

  A Mac OS–specific technology that allows you to access native code without building Java Native Interface libraries.



• Mach  

  The lowest level of the Mac OS X kernel. Mach provides such basic services and abstractions as threads, tasks, ports, interprocess communication (IPC), scheduling, physical and virtual address space management, virtual memory, and timers.



• Mach-O  

  The executable format of Mach object files. This is the default executable format in Mac OS X.



• MRJAppBuilder  

  An application used to bundle cross platform Java applications into native Mac OS X Java applications. It is included with the Mac OS X Developer Tools in /Developer/Applications.



• .pkg file  

  A Mac OS X Installer file. May be grouped together into a meta package (.mpkg).



• Objective-C  

  An object-oriented programming language based on standard C and a runtime system that implements the dynamic functions of the language. Objective-C's few extensions to the C language are mostly based on Smalltalk, one of the first object-oriented programming languages. Objective-C is available in the Cocoa application environment.



• OpenGL  

  An industry-wide standard for developing portable 3D graphics applications.



• plist  

  See property list.



• Project Builder  

  Apple’s graphical integrated development environment. It is available free with the Mac OS X Developer Tools package.



• property list  

  A structured, textual representation of data that uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the structuring medium. Elements of a property list represent data of certain types, such as arrays, dictionaries, and strings.



• Quartz  

  Quartz is a powerful graphics system that delivers a rich imaging model, on-the-fly rendering, anti-aliasing, and compositing of PostScript graphics. Quartz also implements the windowing system for Mac OS X and provides low-level services such as event handling and cursor management. It also offers facilities for rendering and printing that use PDF as an internal model for graphics representation.



• QuickTime  

  QuickTime is a powerful, cross-platform, multimedia technology for manipulating, enhancing, and storing video, sound, animation, graphics, text, music, and even 360-degree virtual reality. It also allows you to stream digital video where the data stream can be either live or stored.



• window menu  

  A menu that contains commands for managing document windows. The menu lists an application's open document windows, including minimized windows, in the order in which they were opened.



• XNU  

  The Mac OS X kernel. It combines functionality of Mach and BSD as well as the driver model, the I/O Kit.