Re: "hooking" into another app
Re: "hooking" into another app
- Subject: Re: "hooking" into another app
- From: Don Arnel <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:07:37 -0400
Actually, after playing around with the Accessibility API I've found
that changing the layout of UI elements won't adversely affect the
external app's code at all.
On Apr 15, 2008, at 5:37 PM, Jens Alfke wrote:
I'm not so enthusiastic about it … it's basically the GUI equivalent
of Application Enhancer, or of HTML screen-scraping. Just as
searching through the raw HTML of a website isn't a reliable way to
get information from the server, groping through the views of
another app isn't a reliable way to interact with it. In both cases,
there's nothing to keep the layout of the user interface from
changing in the future, and even minor changes that don't have a
visual effect could break anything that's groping inside them. (For
example, if the order of two buttons gets changed around for some
reason in a nib, something using the accessibility API to drive
those buttons is going to end up pressing the wrong one.)
I understand that sometimes there isn't any other way to get
something done, but IMHO using accessibility to do such things is in
the "skanky hack that just happens to work" category. In the case of
iChat it would be a lot better to use its existing AppleScript
support to add handlers for when messages are received.
—Jens_______________________________________________
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