A pasteboard is a standardized mechanism for exchanging data within applications or between applications. The most familiar use for pasteboards is handling copy and paste operations. A number of operations are supported by pasteboards, including dragging and application Services.
You should read this document to understand how to use pasteboards.
Note: This document describes how to use pasteboards on Mac OS X v10.6 and later. To understand how to use pasteboards on Mac OS X v10.5 and earlier, read Pasteboard Programming Topics for Cocoa.
Important: To use pasteboards effectively, you must have a working knowledge of property lists. If you don’t know what a property list is, or how to use property list items, you should first read Property List Programming Guide.
Pasteboards frequently use archived representations of objects and object graphs. If you don’t understand what a Cocoa archive is and how to create or use one, you should first read Archives and Serializations Programming Guide.
This document contains the following articles:
Last updated: 2009-05-28