A trip to the moon may still be a way off for you, but your Carbon application development foray is well under way. Throughout the course of this book, you’ve created a fairly substantial Carbon application—the Moon Travel Planner—with which you should be pleased.
The application has most of the features users expect from a Mac OS X application:
Its own icon
The slick new Aqua interface
Printing
File handling
Help using Apple’s two help facilities: the Carbon Help Manager for help tags and the Apple Help Manager for help books
An application-specific menu (the Moon menu)
An About window
Moon Travel Planner is ready for localization because Project
Builder provided a language-specific folder to which you added a
localizable strings file. You also put user-readable properties
into the InfoPlist.strings file
so they can be translated and added to the appropriate language-specific
folders.
In this chapter, we’ve tempted you with a few advanced topics. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve done so far, you might try to expand the Moon Travel Planner application by using some of the ideas we covered. Revise the application so it uses tabs and user panes instead of windows. Make the application scriptable. Add some computationally intensive functions (such as computing travel time by taking into account earth and moon gravitational effects and other physical phenomena) that benefit from adding multiprocessing capabilities to the application.
To start creating your own application, you can supplement the basic knowledge you’ve gained with information available in Carbon Help and from the resources in Appendix A. Don’t forget the overview of Carbon programming interfaces in Chapter 1. The overview is a great place to start if you know what you want your application to do, but you are not sure which Carbon technology or service supports the functionality you want.