Part 4 of this series is going to introduce the implementation file for our Aperture plugin. If you are new to Xcode, Cocoa, and Objective-C programming you may want to have a look at some of the really great tutorials over at CocoaDevCentral. Here you will find everything you need to get started using Xcode.

An implementation file in Objective-C is labeled with a .m extension. These are the files in Objective-C that tell the program what to do. For our purposes, we need to concern ourselves with the implementation file that was generated for us when we selected the Aperture Plugin Template. This file has been filled with all of the necessary code to get your plugin up and running. The Apple developers have even added in a few placeholders, which we can easily fill in order to get our plugin working.

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Today we are going to cover the Info.plist file. This is one of the first files you will need to edit in order to make your Aperture plugin work properly. Every Cocoa application contains an Info.plist file. This file, written in standard XML, is responsible for holding some basic information about the application, or in our case, the plugin.

Plist files are pretty easy to understand once you take a close look. Since they are written in XML they contain tags between brackets like these < >. Each tag is eventually followed up by a closing tag in the same way HTML is written.

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Setting up an Aperture Plugin is pretty easy. As I have written about in the past, you can, in about 10 minutes or so, have a plugin built and installed and running in Aperture. The plugin wont do much, but it will at least export images.

This is not to say however, that all you need to do is click “Build.” There is a little more to it than that, but not much.
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Back in February I wrote a post about my initial experiences with the Aperture SDK. At that point I had accomplished the basics. I downloaded and installed the SDK, I read through the template, and after editing a few of the template’s place holders I had built a plugin. Of course the plugin did nothing more than send exported images to my desktop, but it worked.
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