Introduction to Pasteboard Manager Programming Guide

Pasteboards are the standard data interchange mechanism for applications on Mac OS X, supported in both Carbon and Cocoa. The Pasteboard Manager is the Carbon programming interface for creating and accessing pasteboards.

Who Should Read This Document

This document is for Carbon developers who want to use pasteboards in their applications. The most common uses for the pasteboard are:

• to enable copy-and-paste actions using the Clipboard

• to implement drag-and-drop behavior

• to copy or retrieve text in the standard search field

• to transfer data to and from Mac OS X services (using either the Services menu or Translation Services)

You can also use pasteboards for any other purpose, such as implementing a proprietary clipboard. Pasteboard Manager pasteboards are fully-compatible with Cocoa NSPasteboard objects.

The Pasteboard Manager is available in Mac OS X v10.3 and later.

The Pasteboard Manager replaces both the older Scrap Manager and the Drag Manager’s drag flavor APIs. While the Scrap Manager is still supported, the Pasteboard Manager provides greater flexibility and functionality.

Organization of This Document

This document is organized into the following chapters:

• Pasteboard Manager Concepts describes pasteboard terminology and concepts.

• Pasteboard Manager Tasks describes how to use the Pasteboard Manager in common tasks, such as cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop.

• Scrap Manager Versus the Pasteboard Manager specifies replacement APIs for Scrap Manager functions.