Opening Web Content or Streaming Media in the Default Application

To open a webpage or streaming URL in the user’s default browser or media viewer:

• In iOS, use the openURL: method of the UIApplication class.

  For a real-world example, see QA1629: Launching the App Store from an iOS application.

• In OS X, use the LSOpenCFURLRef or LSOpenFromURLSpec functions in the Launch Services API.

  For details, see Launch Services Tasks in Launch Services Programming Guide.

Displaying Web Content in Your Application

OS X and iOS provide an easy way to load and display a webpage with the WebKit engine, the same rendering engine used by Safari.

• In OS X, you load web content with the WebView class. You can add a web view by including it in your application’s nib file or by programmatically constructing a WebView object and calling the initWithFrame:frameName:groupName: method. Load content by calling the loadRequest: method on the web view’s main frame (which you can obtain with the mainFrame method).

• In iOS, you load web content with the loadRequest: method of the UIWebView class. You can add a web view by including it in your application’s nib file or by programmatically creating a UIWebView object and initializing it with the initWithFrame: method.

For more information, see Simple Browsing in WebKit Objective-C Programming Guide (OS X) and UIWebView Class Reference (iOS).

Displaying Streaming Multimedia Content in Your Application

There are several frameworks available for displaying streaming multimedia content in OS X and iOS:

• In OS X, use the QTKit Framework for basic playback or the AV Foundation framework for more complex functionality.

• In iOS, use the Media Player Framework for basic playback or the AV Foundation framework for more complex functionality.

For more information, read Getting Started with Audio & Video, Multimedia Programming Guide (iOS), QTKit Application Programming Guide (OS X), and AVFoundation Programming Guide.