Chapter 1
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iSimplePlug Documentation
In the following tutorial, we will construct a simple iTonamaton plugin from project creation through to final installation. This plugin will be will be as simple as possible, thus only being able to respond to a few simple commands. However, since this is a complete plugin, it contains all the fundamental pieces that any complex plugin should implement.
Of course, I suppose the first thing that you are wondering is "how much about Objective-C do I need to know to make this plugin?"
In writing this tutorial, I have endeavoured to present a tutorial that can be followed by programmers of varying skill. Although the normal level that the text addresses is of someone with a small amount of experience in programming, Obj-C, and Unix, there is information in this tutorial that may be useful to more advanced programmers. Thus, I hope that this document will be useful to everyone.
For those new programmers out there, I have endeavoured to allow you to follow the content of this text while only knowing a minimal amount of Obj-C (if any), as well as the basics of programming flow control. However, there may be some passages of text that are a little over your head. This is okay. Just by reading these passages, you will have exposed yourself to the material. In the future, when you get more proficient at Obj-C programming, you may want to read this tutorial over again to see what new bits of information you can pick-up.
For those programmers out there that are already comfortable with Obj-C, a read through of this tutorial should not take very long. Although most of the information will be below your level, there are bits about how iTonamaton works that should be known by anyone who wishes to develop a plugin. Even if you think you have the iSimplePlug figured out from looking at the existing code, I would suggest a quick read through just to make sure you know everything in it. There are some facets to the plugin API that you probably won't picked up from looking at the code alone.
Conventions
I won't bore you too much with conventions used in this text, as most conventions are obvious to most readers. However I wanted to mention one thing about the source code formatting in this tutorial:
In some places in the tutorial, I have made a single line of code (as read in the source file) into several lines, with the extra lines indented compared to the first. This is okay, as the Obj-C compiler treats all white space equal. That is to say, any place you use a space can be replaced by a tab or a line feed, and the compiler will treat it the same.
With the previous fact in mind, I should mention that if statments with only one line of code, usually omit the curly braces marking off the code block. Therefore a few of the if statments might look like they were one line that was broken into two. However, this is not the case. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it for now. Do the tutorial and then compare your source file to the one I supplied, and see where the are different.
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Last Modified: $Date: 2003/12/16 01:29:33 $ by $Author: paploo $