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MacOS X Developer Preview 4 Release Notes Copyright © 2000 by Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Mac OS X Developer Preview 4 Release Notes:
Developer Documentation

New Content

Mac OS X Developer Preview 4 ships with a number of important new documents. The following list calls out some of the highlights, but there have been changes to much of the documentation. Look in /System/Developer/Documentation for the complete set of files.

System Overview

This book provides essential conceptual material for any developer planning to work on Mac OS X. The version included on DP4 is a preliminary release. While Apple has made every effort to ensure its accuracy, until the final software has shipped its contents are subject to change. Please check back on the public website for updates.

Kernel Environment

This book orients developers to the possibilities and pitfalls of doing development inside the kernel. This is important background material for developers interested in developing device drivers, network extensions, or new filesystems.

Carbon

This CD introduces the Carbon Developer Documentation suite. This suite introduces several new documents including

• Inside Carbon: Plug-In Services
• Inside Carbon: Utility Services
• Inside Carbon: Matching Fonts With FontSync
• Introduction to the Carbon Event Manager
• Carbon Event Manager Preliminary API Reference

Several documents receiving substantial revision are published here for the first time, including

• Inside Carbon: Carbon Printing Manager Reference
• Inside Carbon: NSL Manager Reference
• Inside Carbon: Apple Event Manager Reference
• Aqua Application Layout Guidelines
• Carbon Porting Guide

All of the Carbon API reference material contains information never before published in Inside Macintosh documentation. This new information includes

• Carbon compatibility overviews for all technologies
• Carbon inclusion status for every function: whether the function is fully supported in Carbon, is supported but is not recommended, is supported but has changed in some manner, or is unsupported
• Carbon Porting Notes to assist you in replacing functions that are not entirely supported in Carbon
• Availability information, indicating the earliest software releases that support particular functions
• Carbon declarations in the C language, replacing older Pascal declarations
• Alphabetical lists of API elements for each manager, to complement usage groupings of these elements

This reference material has also been tagged for easier searching by Apple Help. In all, reference material for the following technologies is available on this release of the Carbon Developer Documentation suite:

• Alias Manager
• Appearance Manager
• Apple Event Manager
• Base Services
• Bundle Services
• Carbon Printing Manager
• Code Fragment Manager
• Collection Services
• Component Manager
• Date, Time, and Measurement Utilities
• Debugger Services
• Dialog Manager
• Display Manager
• Finder Interface
• Folder Manager
• Font Manager
• FontSync
• Game Sprockets
• Icon Utilities and Services
• Keychain Manager
• List Manager
• Mathematical and Logical Utilities
• Memory Management Utilities
• Memory Manager
• Menu Manager
• Mixed Mode Manager
• Multiprocessing Services
• Navigation Services
• Notification Manager
• NSL Manager
• Picture Utilities
• Plugin Services
• Process Manager
• Property List Services
• QuickDraw
• QuickDraw Text
• Scrap Manager
• Script Manager
• Sound Manager
• Speech Synthesis Manager
• String Services
• Text Utilities
• TextEdit
• Thread Manager
• Time Manager
• Translation Manager
• Utility Services
• Window Manager

Note that this documentation suite is a work-in-progress and will be continually updated with the latest publicly available information about Carbon. Future updates will include

• API reference material for all Carbon-compliant technologies additional conceptual and tutorial information to further assist you in revising your classic Mac OS applications for Carbon and creating new ones
• corrections to documentation errors
• additional information to expand upon and clarify existing documentation
• Technical Notes that provide up-to-the-minute information about Carbon updates, fixes and workarounds, and programming tips and techniques
• Technical Q & As offering answers to frequently asked questions about programming with Carbon

Important

To most quickly assist you in adopting Carbon in your software, Apple is supplying much of this information in preliminary form. Supplemental information and changes to documentation are posted to Apple's web site as soon as they become available. Hence, all of the information contained on this CD is subject to change, and software implemented according to any of the documentation on this CD should be tested with final operating system software.

Project Builder

Project Builder for Mac OS X has been completely revised. To support this new release, there is online help available from within the application, as well as a number of tutorials in /System/Developer/Documentation/DeveloperTools.

New Access Mechanism

Mac OS X includes developer tools such as Project Builder, and it also includes developer documentation. In order to best serve developers, Apple is providing Apple Help indexes with most of its developer documentation, and optimizing that documentation for display in Apple Help. To support developer documentation, Apple Help has two major new features: the Developer Center, and anchor searching.

Developer Center

Apple Help on Mac OS X supports not only a user Help Center, but also a separate Developer Center. The Developer Center's table of contents is built dynamically just like the user Help Center. For DP4, Apple provides Carbon, Cocoa, and Core Foundation documentation in the Developer Center. Future releases will incorporate additional content. For details on the developer center, see the Help Viewer release notes.

Anchor Search

Apple's reference documentation is indexed using a special markup specification. Apple Help indexes these markups and can perform searches on them. In addition, Apple Help supports special URL's that allow another application, such as an IDE, to request documentation for specific reference documentation. This allows a high degree of integration between IDE's and Apple's reference documentation. See the Help Viewer release notes for details on the supported URL's.

Known Problems

• Project Builder in DP4 does not yet support reference documentation lookup in Apple Help.
• The Printing Architecture section of the System Overview book describes printer discovery as going through the Queue Manager; the implementation will have Print Center do printer discovery directly.
• Viewing and printing PDF files with Preview has a number of problems. A workaround is to use Acrobat Reader running in Classic.
• See the Help Viewer release note for known issues with it in DP4. Specific problems with developer help include the fact that you can't copy code examples out of displayed documentation, and the fact that links to PDF files cause the PDF file to be displayed in binary form inside of Help Viewer instead of opening the file in a PDF viewer.