# About Cocoas This is a small toolkit library to help deal with Apple's CoreFoundation, Cocoa, and Objective C interfaces. ## How To The library exposes the additional cffi types ``nsstring``, ``cfstring``, ``cfnumber``, ``cfset``, ``cfarray``, and ``cfdictionary`` to allow convenient translation between the respective Lisp representation of these types and the ObjC/CoreFoundation representation. You can use them like you would any other CFFI type. You can also define convenient Lisp function wrappers for static methods and instance methods, using ``define-objcfun`` and ``define-objcmethod`` respectively, using similar syntax to ``cffi:defcfun``: :: common lisp (cocoas:define-objcfun "NSAlert" alloc :pointer) ; [NSAlert alloc] => (nsalert-alloc) (cocoas:define-objcmethod init :pointer) ; [obj init] => (init obj) (cocoas:define-objcmethod run-modal :uint) ; [obj runModal] => (run-modal obj) (cocas:define-objcmethod ((setf informative-text) "setInformativeText:") NIL (text cocoas:nsstring)) ; [obj setInformativeText: [NSString stringWithUTF8String: text]] => (setf (informative-text obj) text) :: To handle object cleanup and initialisation, there's ``with-main-loop``, ``with-objects``, and ``with-foundation-objects``. :: common lisp (cocas:with-main-loop () (cocoas:with-objects ((window (init (nsalert-alloc)))) (setf (informative-text window) "Hello!") (prog1 (run-modal window) (loop while (cocoas:process-event))))) :: The library also installs a standard uncaught exception handler that translates and re-signals any ``NSException`` as a ``foundation-error`` so the errors can be dealt with Lisp-side.