Cocoa Is My Girlfriend

In this continuing series on my own transition from a Mac application hacker to microISV (Independent Software Vendor), I am going to demonstrate how to create your own file format for your application. You’ve probably seen these types of files in popular applications such as iMovie HD (06′) or GarageBand or even xcode in which the actual files used are, behind the scenes, folders that the operating system treats as regular files. These folders/files have a special bit set on them that tell OS X how to deal with them. The goal of this post is to demonstrate how you can do the following:

• Create your own file format with your own file extension
• Register your file format with the operating system
• Provide application loading of your file that’s been double clicked in the Finder
• Write data and preferences back out to your application file
• Add resources such as media files to your application file

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In this post I continue to address topics of relevance to Macintosh programmers who are, like me, moving from being hackers to becoming independent software vendors (micro ISV). Today I am going to address adding copyright and version information to your about dialog and show you how you can update these dynamically. I also cover a few tips on formatting the text in your about dialog. There is more than one way to achieve these things, but my hope is to help others out there who need to accomplish these things and have no prior experience doing them on the Mac.
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For the past five or six months, I have been developing an application for the Mac that I intend to release for sale in the near future. Though you could probably call me a switcher, to my credit I was a Mac user all through college and would have remained so had the job market been a bit more supportive of that desire when I finished school, but all along I’ve wanted to become a Macintosh developer. That time has finally come.
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