Chapter 14

Introduction
to the AppKit

So far in this book, all our programs have used the Foundation Kit and have communicated with us through the time-honored method of sending text output to the console. That's fine for getting your feet wet, but the real fun begins when you see a Mac-like interface that includes things you can click and play with. We'll take a detour in this chapter to show you some highlights of the Application Kit (or AppKit), Cocoa's user-interface treasure trove.

The program we'll construct in this chapter is called CaseTool, and you can find it in the 14.01 CaseTool project folder. CaseTool puts up a window that looks like the screenshot shown in Figure 14-1. The window has a text field, a label, and a couple of buttons. When you type some text into the field and click a button, the text you entered is converted to uppercase or lowercase. Although that's very cool indeed, you'll no doubt want to add additional useful features before you post your application on VersionTracker with a $5 shareware fee.