I have been trying to find the "official" names of my browser apps (Chrome, Brave, Safari, etc.) as I was experimenting with opening different browsers from the command line.
I was able to figure out the name for Brave (brave\ browser) by perusing the internet but wanted to find a better way to list out ALL of my browsers by name in the command line. I found out how to find application by cd-ing into /System/Applications/ and then typing out ls like any other directory. It shows the below.
App Store.app Launchpad.app Reminders.app
Automator.app Mail.app Shortcuts.app
Books.app Maps.app Siri.app
Calculator.app Messages.app Stickies.app
Calendar.app Mission Control.app Stocks.app
Chess.app Music.app System Preferences.app
Contacts.app News.app TV.app
Dictionary.app Notes.app TextEdit.app
FaceTime.app Photo Booth.app Time Machine.app
FindMy.app Photos.app Utilities
Font Book.app Podcasts.app VoiceMemos.app
Home.app Preview.app
Image Capture.app QuickTime Player.app
I am curious how I can see other apps, such as Google Chrome.app, Brave Browser.app, etc. I can see them when I go to Applications via finder but I wanted to see how I can list in the terminal.
Thanks to #LMC and #Gordon Davisson I was able to find an elegant solution. It turns out since Catalina 10.15, Mac split up applications into two volumes:
/System/Applications
/System/Volumes/Data/Applications/
The first one basically houses all "system" applications; applications that are built in with the Mac OS. The second one houses user installed applications. It is in the second one where you can find your browsers.
Related
System specs: mac OS Monterrey V12.5, Apple M1 chip 2020
I am making an application which will take a screenshot of a video, and take the timestamp of the current point in this video, after which both the timestamp and screenshot will be send to a numbers file (mac OS excel like program).
I could not find an application to do this and I tried to get it working using python as shown here but was unable to. Now because I am on Mac I have decided to use Automator instead. I am currently on the screenshot part and Automator has a build in screenshot functionality.
Unfortunately, this screenshot does not detect browser or application windows, it will only take a screenshot of my background.
I have no idea why this is but I suspect it might have to do with permissions related to the M1 chip.
I tried different monitors and simplyfying the automation to just taking a screenshot, but so far nothing has helped, I could not find others online who had a similar problem.
If there is any information missing from this post I will be happy to provide it.
Edit: It seems to be some kind of permission issue, automator CAN take screenshots within Safari, now I just need to find a way to do so in firefox.
I have solved the issue, it turns out that the M1 chip has a special permission for screen recording, adding my Automator application to this permission list will allow it to take screenshots of all windows.
I have a cross platform need to open a gui application programmatically, but keep it hidden from the user. Effectively, I want a command line driven interface to act as a wrapper over this gui app, and insulate the end user from seeing or interacting with it. The program is from a third party, I did not write it, and I can't edit it.
I can do this one way or another on Windows, on Linux, and (in theory) on older versions of Mac, but not the most recent ones. On Windows, I can use the native api ShellEx with a hide window parameter. It's very easy and straight forward. In Linux, I can can render a gui app to a virtual frame buffer (using xvfb).
On macOS, the open command has a --hide and --background option, but they don't have any effect (at least on this app...)
I tried changing the plist file and found that LSUIElement will hide the app from the docker, but it still shows up on the screen. LSUIPresentationMode=4 or 3 OUGHT to work for exactly this, but apparently that doesn't do anything anymore as of a few os versions ago...
I tried the approach of moving the .app off of the screen with AppleScript. That works, but you have to manually grant permissions for such a thing to occur via System Preferences. In prior versions of Mac, those permissions could be twiddled on the fly via sqlLite (so long as you had sudo rights), but now they blocked that too. You can only pull that off apparently through a process of disabling "SIP" and forcing a reboot. That is totally outside the realm of what I want.
I've tried using the xvfb approach on Mac (jumping through hoops to acquire the binary they use to include stock, and now dropped), but I'm not having luck with that. I don't think it's possible to direct a mac .app to another display is it? A .app does not render on X11 by it's nature right?
What other clever ways might there be to hide a third party app on a mac? (and that still works in most recent os versions!)
I want to stuff remote debugging and other esoteric dev-only only parameters to the Chrome application when it starts but I want it to be always there, including when I click on the app icon.
E.g.:
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --remote-debugging-port=9222
How do I pass these command line parameters to the app directly?
I ended up creating an automator application with as shell task. Customized the icon and replaced Chrome.app with the new app in the dock.
I am still looking for a way to change the settings in Chrome so it can connect with remote debugger "on-demand" for specific tasks (not everything as it is set now) but that doesn't seem to be possible at this time. The VSCode folks have apparently solicited the Chrome team to provide this functionality. Stay tuned...
I have found this site: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Debugging/HTTP_logging
My problem is: The settings for about:networking only work for the current session. And I have no interest to always start Firefox from the console. Is there a way to launch Firefox (under Mac OS X) via Finder and to permanently enable those logging features?
BG
I'm not a Mac user, so this might be not the best way. However, you might try using an approach similar to running Firefox with multiple profiles, as documented here on MDN. It suggests creating an Automator application that runs a shell script. You can follow this guide, which tells you to:
Open Automator
Go to File->New->Application
Choose Utilities group under Library
Drag Run Shell Script to the workflow pane on the right
Paste the script used to run Firefox with logging enabled
Choose Save As and store it somewhere
You should be good to go.
Apps in OS X that can open files to launch their respective applications often let the user choose the app that'll open the file. An example is the Finder.
I am still unclear about what's the best solution to implement this. The challenges are performance and showing the app's icon.
First, to get the list of apps, I found only LSCopyApplicationURLsForURL().
The major difficulty for me now is to get the app icons. All I have is the URLs (paths) to the apps. The only way I know of to get the icons would be to create a CFBundle object and then read the app's plist to get the icon data. But that appears to invole lots of disk access, and I could imagine it'll be quite inefficient if the app is located on a remote file server.
I believe that there's also a cached database about the apps, which includes icons and display names (without extension), and such. But where is the API for that?
Note: The app is Carbon based, but I can make use of Cocoa (NS...) functions if necessary. Also, Support for 10.5, even 10.4, would be appreciated.
Alright. I solved it eventually.
I now use the Carbon function GetIconRefFromFileInfo(), which still works in Lion, though it's marked deprecated/obsolete.
I had also tried to use QLThumbnailImageCreate(), but that didn't get me any results, oddly. No idea what I did wrong.
For Cocoa apps, [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] iconForFile:path] can be used (thanks to C. Grunenberg of DevonTechnologies for this tip, where it's used with EasyFind).