Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

Hidden Leopard treasures in iLife ‘08

One thing that I haven’t seen much comment about regarding iLife ‘08 is that it installs a backported-to-Tiger version of a major new Leopard framework.

Now, I am under NDA regarding Leopard but I’m not under any NDA about iLife and the existence of ImageKit is public knowledge. It’s described in Apple’s own Leopard Technology Series for Developers:

[ImageKit] makes available powerful imaging services that can be easily incorporated into your application. It provides functionality for finding, browsing, and viewing images in a collection.

iLife’s version of ImageKit is hidden away inside a private framework called GraphicAppSupport.framework. iPhoto 7 does not link against this framework, but another interesting component of iLife ‘08, used by most of the apps, does: the iLifeMediaBrowser.framework. This appears to be the Media palette used in several Apple applications. I don’t know if the questions themselves were under NDA during the Aqua Feedback session at WWDC, but Dan Wood should be approaching happier. I don’t think I’ve seen this framework before.

There was a rumour some time ago that iLife ‘08 depended on Leopard and this explained its non-appearance at MacWorld in January. Unless the ImageKit backport was always part of the plan for delivering iLife ‘08 on Tiger, this suggests that those rumours had some credence.

Not the iLife post I had been waiting for, interesting nonetheless.

I expected a post on whether iPhoto API gave you anything new to work with?

The iPhoto SDK is pretty much the same as what I had reverse-engineered myself. Knowing how things were *supposed* to work will simplify FlickrExport a bit though.

Look in more obvious places. On every Save window there is a “Include Preview in Document” option. This is NOT mentioned anywhere in the help. If you check the option a PDF file is generated with a rendered page for each document page in a folder called QuickLook in the document bundle, and a rendering of the first page is generated into Thumbnail.jpg in the same folder.