---

Introduction to Design Concepts

Contents:

Organization of This Document

Core Foundation supports the transition from earlier Mac OS to Mac OS X systems. The evolution of the Mac OS into Mac OS X requires the participation of application developers. By slightly modifying your current code to use new programming interfaces and techniques, your applications can run smoothly on a radically different operating system, one with features such as protected memory and preemptive multitasking.

Organization of This Document

The programming interfaces of Core Foundation objects have been designed for ease of use and reuse. Before you can reach any level of comfortable competency with these programming interfaces, however, you should understand a few concepts on which Core Foundation is based. If you are new to Core Foundation then read this topic as well as “Memory Management” before using Core Foundation objects in your code.

This concept discusses the Core Foundation architecture and its benefits:

• “About Core Foundation”

These concepts and tasks discuss the object model used in Core Foundation:

• “Opaque Types”

• “Object References”

• “Polymorphic Functions”

• “Varieties of Objects”

• “Comparing Objects”

• “Inspecting Objects”

In addition, there are other non-object types, and API conventions that you want to be familiar with before using Core Foundation:

• “Naming Conventions”

• “Other Types”

---