You appear to want to keep the command line interface for your program for
the right reasons: Your users are already used to it, your users are more
technical than most, and this is not a mass-market app.
The good news is you can do that. Argc/argv work just fine on a Mac. Mac OS
X is UNIX, on which argc/argv as we know them today were essentially
invented, so of course they work. I'm not sure how you got the impression
that they do not. You do have to fire up a command line interface to make
this possible, and it happens there is not a command line interface launched
by default on the Mac, but it's certainly doable. (Similarly, there isn't a
command line interface launched by default on Windows and many popular Linux
distributions.)
The reason people are so quick to tell you you're coming at this problem
from the wrong direction is that the vast majority of people who appear on
the Carbon list talking about the command line are clinging to it for the
wrong reasons. You are not one of those people, but it's difficult for list
members to see that. Email has limited bandwidth, and the truth has only
come out through many messages in the thread.
I would argue that the approach you've said you've taken -- the
edit-the-quasi-hidden-property-list-file approach -- is actually the worst
of both worlds. It's obscure and arcane and opens your app to the
possibility that users may permanently botch other parts of the property
list that they don't understand but are essential to the operation of your
app, plus it won't work at all in some cases.
I'd much rather see you just use the UNIX command line. If that's not quite
right for all users, then feel free to wrap the command line in a
double-clickable UNIX shell script. It'll work. No worries.
Then, once the first Mac version of your program is finished, your users
will probably lobby you for something more graphical. I would argue that you
should take their requests very seriously, and in a perfect world you would
also offer a graphical interface in the first version of the program, but in
the imperfect world we live in, it would be perfectly reasonable to choose
to worry about that after you've finished the initial Mac version.
-- Pete Gontier <http://www.pete.gontier.org/>
> From: Jay Vaughan <email@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 19:23:49 +0200
> To: Lyndsey Ferguson <email@hidden>, Macintosh Carbon
> <email@hidden>
> Subject: Re: How to pass cmd line arguments to my carbon app?
>
> forgive me for being a total idiot, but so far i've had:
>
> - don't do argc/argv, they're stupid
> - use a text file, its better than info.plist
> - you're an idiot, just do it the apple way
>
> quite tiring when all i wanted to know as -for sure- there wasn't
> already a way to do it..
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