Re: Best approach: Hotkey and Pasteboard application
Re: Best approach: Hotkey and Pasteboard application
- Subject: Re: Best approach: Hotkey and Pasteboard application
- From: daniel <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2005 17:59:41 -0700
I haven't used Snapz Pro, but I provide a similar behavior to what
you're describing in my script menu utility, and the way it's done in
general is to live the world "between background and foreground"
applications. These apps are recognized by the OS as being capable of
and allowed to displaying UI elements, but they don't have a visible
bar. Search google or this list for "LSUIElement" and you should find
some more information.
There are some caveats to being an LSUIElement application, but in
general you can take control of the UI just as any other app can, with
the exception that you don't get a dock icon or a menu bar.
Daniel
On Apr 8, 2005, at 4:00 AM, Adam Holt wrote:
I'm trying to figure out the best approach to take with this...
I want my application to run in the background (undocked) and when a
certain
global key combination is pressed, including a modifier key (e.g.
CMD-Escape) I want the GUI to appear and for the contents of the
Pasteboard
to be pasted into a NSTextView instance.
I'm considering two general approaches to this:
1. Split this into two apps. Make the first one a background app that
can
be put in startup items. This is the app that listens for the hot key
event
and either launches, or brings to the front (if already running) my
second
app... similar to the application posted here: (
http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=2920 ). Whilst from this
example
I can see how to launch my second app I'm not sure of the best
approach to
take with the interapplication comms part, i.e. How do I send the
trigger to
my app2 to tell it to copy the pasteboard contents into the TextView?
ALTERNATIVELY...
2. I put all of this inside one application. The closest example I can
think of is Snapz Pro ( http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/
)
which runs as a background app when you launch it, until you hit the
hotkey
combination which then brings it to the foreground. I tried
recreating this
behaviour but failed. Does anybody have any examples of how this can
be
done?
I would certainly welcome your views on approach 1 vs approach 2 and
any
tips that anybody has about making either of these approaches work.
Many thanks!
Adam.
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