ImageKit

ImageKit provides four image capture classes:

• IKDeviceBrowserView—A browser that displays a list of available cameras and scanners. The browser shows both USB and network devices. It displays their names, types, and icons. The list is updated dynamically as devices are plugged in, removed, or renamed. The camera device type includes camera-phones (including the iPhone) and memory card readers. The scanner device type includes multifunction devices such as printer-scanner-FAX machines.

• IKCameraDeviceView—A camera viewer that displays the camera’s name and icon, a list of the images available, metadata such as image name, date, exposure, and color depth, and a set of controls to rotate, delete, or download the images. The viewer supports a list view and a matrix view of the image thumbnails.

• IKScannerDeviceView—A viewer that displays the scanner’s name and icon and allows you to scan and capture images. Controls are provided to get a preview, to identify and create multiple discrete images from a single scan, to rotate or crop images, and to control aspects of the scan such as pixels per inch and color depth.

• IKImageView—A view for displaying images obtained from a camera or scanner.

These four classes are available as drag-and-drop objects in the ImageKit library for Interface Builder, so it’s possible to create an application that browses for and controls cameras and scanners literally without writing a line of code. For an example, see Creating an Application Using ImageKit.

Adding scanning and image capture to an existing application with these classes requires only the few lines of "glue" code to integrate the window constructed in Interface Builder into your application.

ImageCaptureCore

The ImageCaptureCore framework contains classes that allow you to browse for image capture devices and control them programatically. These classes are strongly analogous to the ImageKit classes, but they provide no UI. Instead, they have methods for which you create delegates, allowing you to take whatever action you choose in response to the events these objects respond to.

For example, ImageCaptureCore contains a device browser class, ICDeviceBrowser. This performs the same functions as ImageKit’s IKDeviceBrowserView—it dynamically detects available image capture devices. But instead of displaying a list of devices, it has methods such as didAddDevice and didRemoveDevice whose delegates are called when the device browser detects a device or sees a device removed.

Your application defines these delegate methods. For example, when a device is detected, your version of didAddDevice is called. It might get the device and store it in a mutable array, then go on to display the array of devices using a table view.

Similarly, ImageCaptureCore contains a camera device class and a scanner device class, analogous to ImageKit’s camera view and scanner view.

All the ImageCaptureCore classes support Cocoa bindings, so you can, for example, use Interface Builder to assign your own custom view as the delegate for an ImageCaptureCore device browser object, obviating the need to construct the entire UI programatically.

You can mix and match ImageKit and ImageCaptureCore objects in your code. For example, you might use an ImageKit device browser to allow users to find and select a scanner, but use your own UI to control the scanner using ImageCaptureCore.

You can write an ImageCaptureCore application in as little as a few dozen lines of code. For an example, see Creating an Application Using ImageCaptureCore.