When I reboot my mac, if an application that I'm developing was running during reboot, macos starts that application right after restart with "-psn_0_65552" argument. I assume that this is related to "Reopen windows when logging back in" checkbox enabled on restart prompt. I tried to find any documentation about this argument, but failed. So, my questions:
Is this behavior documented somewhere?
Any other weird command-line arguments my application should be able to handle?
Can I avoid my application reopening after mac restart?
Nobody else has offered you anything yet so maybe this will help:
Is this behavior documented somewhere?
The state preservation and restoration mechanism is at least partially documented through the methods you can call to participate in it, e.g. NSWindow's restorable & encodeRestorableStateWithCoder:, NSWindowDelegate's window:willEncodeRestorableState:, NSApplication's restoreWindowWithIdentifier:state:completionHandler: etc. However how the various AppKit classes preserve and restore all the information is not publicly documented (there is a statement to that effect in the docs somewhere).
Any other weird command-line arguments my application should be able to handle?
Anybody's guess.
Can I avoid my application reopening after mac restart?
Maybe. Some apps don't restart on relaunch, whether their authors control this or its happenstance I've no idea.
Here's a suggestion: write yourself a very basic GUI app which just saves the arguments and environment (you can use NSProcessInfo to get them all) at launch time to user defaults. Lunch your app from Xcode, Finder and Terminal. Reboot while its open. Look at the user defaults (look in its sandbox and open the .plist in Xcode). Notice anything? Want to rely on it? Your call.
Can you think of others way to track your app launches and user-initiated quits? Maybe setting and removing a flag in user defaults? Have fun!
HTH
Related
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!)
Many applications start at startup, however, some of them do not appear on the task manager startup tab. What is that due to?
Is there any way to do this with a program, for example, spotify?
What do I need to do in order for a program to start at startup, but not showing in the startup applications tab?
Setting it in HKCU/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run doesn't seem to work, as it starts, but still shows on the mentioned tab.
Thank you in advance.
Its mostly a factor of how the program itself is written. If its written to run as a service, or as a System Tray application, or otherwise.
I know there are wrappers for running any exe as a service NSSM being the main one I have experience with (but this is mostly for when there is going to be NO user interaction)
I do not know if there is anything that can allow an application to run in the system tray only, not in the taskbar, if it doesn't support it.
But since Spotify does support running minimized to the tray, it does seem like there are some ways to "start spotify minimized", Spotify or other applications might have command line options or other settings to tell them to start "hidden"
I'm working on a new OS-X Daemon process (run from launchd) and would like to get popup window every time it crashes with all relevant information (pid, path to crash file, etc...). This will sure help my debugging effort in this early stage of the development.
Basically, i want to have the same behavior as a UI application. For example :
I've made some research and found out about the CrashReporter, but i don't know how to register my app to this service. But it seem like there's no way to trigger popup windows from this service, since crashes are system level events and apps have zero interaction with those.
Maybe there's a way to do so by setting up some parameters in app bundle or via Info.plist ?
EDIT: looking at the crash report manual, it looks like the unexpected dialog works only on GUI user mode, and not on daemon that runs from launchd. perhaps i'm missing something ?
In addition, if the program that crashed is running as a logged in GUI user, CrashReporter will present the user with a dialog asking them whether they want to submit a bug report to Apple (see Figure 1). If the user clicks the Report button, CrashReporter displays another dialog that shows the details of the report (see Figure 2) and allows them to comment it before submission.
I've read that Developer option enable in addition to application crashes, crashes are also displayed for background and system processes. but unfortunately i doesn't work for me.
thanks
Seems like the problem occurs since my background process runs under root privilege, and root privilage process (not just daemons) cannot initiate any UI widget on the screen.
I guess that the only way to deal with it, is by catching the signal that trigger the crash, and send details for a proxy process that run on non-root mode and can initiate the UI dialog box with crash details.
I would be happy to hear for better proposals.
Since CrashReporterPrefs, which allowed you to enable this behavior for daemons, no longer comes with developer tools, you can change the behavior to show the dialog for daemons by running this command in the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType Developer
Ok. It is 2015. A lot of things have changed. And I would like to ask...
Does anyone know the way to detect how the application was launched on OSX ?
Because I still don't have the answer...
I am talking about these cases that are important to me:
Regular launch by user (via selecting app from Finder, Launchpad, etc.)
Launch at login (automatic launch by myHelperApp on startup)
Launch by user selecting item in services menu ("Do something in MyApp") assuming my app wasn't launched before.
Right now I am detecting the launch-at-login with outdated GetCurrentProcess function, obtaining current process id and then looking up for a parent process info. In case parent process info is obtained (!) and bundleId is not equal to some list of strings (myHelperApp bundleId, com.apple.loginwindow, com.apple.coreservices.uiagent) (!) - then this is not launch-at-login case.
Yes, it works for now, but c'mon people, this is a completely outdated, not stable way to solve the problem!
And what is important - there seems to be no way to tell that my app was launched via Services menu!
Has anyone found something new on this topic?
I'm dealing with Hotkey registration, i can't found a way to make user able to register its hotkey.
I tried ShortcutRecorder but it seems impossible to make it works, for me it crash with some error messages related to CG.
I'd like to know if there is a way to make ShortcutRecorder works with a ARC environment and Xcode 4.0 or if you use other control to grab user Hotkeys.
You should check out this fork of ShortCut Recorder:
https://github.com/youknowone/shortcutrecorder
The original appears to have not been updated in some time but I was able to get this fork running on 10.7 without any changes.