CocoaDevCentral.com A website dedicated to the Cocoa development on the Mac OS X
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Cocoa Dev Central
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Every good application should have an "about box" that displays the application version number, gives credit to the company and individual(s) that authored the software, and provides contact information so that the user may get in touch with the author if the need arises. Many times, especially in shareware, the application may change hands without being accompanied by any readme files or documentation, so the about box becomes a useful bit of information for both the end user and for the author who gains recognition from each impression.
In Apple's history, numerous terms have been used for what most users have come to know as an "about box." Throughout Apple's docs, you'll find references to "about boxes," "about windows" and "about panels," and it's good for a programmer to be familiar with them all so that it's possible to find documentation when needed. The term "about box" comes from the pre-Carbon days of the old dialog manager when the "About" command in the Apple Menu would bring up a dialog box. The term "about window" is a more recent term that is used in the Human Interface Guidelines. And the newest term, "about panel," is used in Cocoa because the window is implemented as a panel and instantiated with the NSApplication method orderFrontStandardAboutPanel: which we will talk about shortly.
In Cocoa, a standard about panel is very easy to implement and is more than sufficient for most applications' needs. And best of all, Cocoa does nearly all of the work for you.
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