Inside Macintosh: Operating System Utilities /

Preface - About This Book

This book, Inside Macintosh: Operating System Utilities describes the parts of the Macintosh Operating System that allow you to manage various low-level aspects of the system software. The chapters in this book and the information they contain are summarized here.

• "Gestalt Manager" describes how the Gestalt Manager works. This chapter also describes how you can make information about your own hardware or software available to other applications.
• "System Error Handler" explains what the Macintosh Operating System does when a system error is encountered. This chapter also describes how you can provide code that can help your application recover from a system error.
• "Mathematical and Logical Utilities" discusses how you can perform low-level logical manipulation of bits and bytes, save disk space by using simple compression and decompression routines, obtain a pseudorandom number, perform mathematical operations with two fixed-point data types supported directly by the Macintosh Operating System, and convert numeric variables of different types.
• "Date, Time, and Measurement Utilities" describes a set of utility routines that you can use to operate on dates and times. You can use these routines to get and change information about the current date, time, geographic location, time zone, and units of measurement.
• "Control Panel Extensions" describes how you can create a control panel extension to add a panel to an existing control panel.
• "Queue Utilities" describes how your application can directly add elements to and remove them from operating-system queues managed by the Macintosh Operating System. This chapter also describes how you can use the Queue Utilities to operate on queues that you create.
• "Parameter RAM" describes how your application can access and modify the information used by the system software at system startup time.
• "Trap Manager" describes how the Trap Manager works and then shows how you can use the Trap Manger to check for the availability of a system software routine. This chapter also describes how you can alter the behavior of a system software routine.
• "Start Manager" describes the system initialization and system startup process performed by the Macintosh computer. This chapter also describes how you can create a system extension.
• "Package Manager" lists all the standard Macintosh packages and it describes the routines that loads the packages into memory.

Additional information about the Macintosh Operating System can be found in other Inside Macintosh books. For information about processes and tasks, see Inside Macintosh: Processes. For information on how to allocate, release, or otherwise manipulate memory, see Inside Macintosh: Memory. For information about managing files and other objects in the file system, see Inside Macintosh: Files.

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Preface Contents

Format of a Typical Chapter

Conventions Used in This Book

Special Fonts

Types of Notes

Assembly-Language Information

The Development Environment