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.
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!)
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
I am developing a macOS app which takes control of the cursor. I am using a CGEvent Tap and I am adding some arithmetic to the CGEvents in order to offset the final mouse position. Although the app is in principle working as expected, in some cases - more specifically: when running the app with certain popular illustration software and using a stylus pen - the app is producing some flickering 'ghost' positions for the mouse at its original location. The good thing is, this problem can be resolved when running the app while being logged in as root user. I have read quite some SO posts but this particular post addresses the issue best:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/9899901/5066660
As described in this post the issue is probably:
Unfortunately, the CGEventTapCreate() doc says:
Only processes running as the root user may locate an event tap at the point where HID events enter the window server; for other users, this function returns NULL.
Well the function is definitely not returning null because the tap is in effect. Also I tried all possible combinations of arguments for that function, but they all act the same. Further down in that post it is proposed to tackle the problem as follows:
Perhaps you can spin this functionality off into a separate process that has super-user permissions, leaving the rest of your app in normal user mode? I believe there's also a way to request root permissions for just a specific action taken by your program.
Now if this is a possible solution I would love to implement it! So my question is: how? I've stumbled upon running scripts with elevated permissions, but not just CoreGraphics code as for example an CGEventTap. Is this possible? Could anybody give me an example of how this could be accomplished, or any other solution to the problem?
All help is welcome, thank you very very much.
From Apple documentation:
Event taps receive key up and key down events if one of the following conditions is true:
- The current process is running as the root user.
- Access for assistive devices is enabled. In OS X v10.4, you can enable this feature using System Preferences, Universal Access panel, Keyboard view.
So giving the the application Accessibility rights solved it for me (no need to run as admin). This can be achieved System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Accessibility and add you program there.
I have a user who reports that a particular keystroke isn't working (control-apostrophe) in my app on OS X. This does work for him on other machines.
I added some logging and my app never receives the NSEvent for the keyDown. Disabling universal access for assistive devices didn't fix it either. Nothing in keyboard shortcuts in system preferences uses that shortcut. Is there any way to trace a keystroke's path through the OS to find out why my app doesn't get it? Is this something dtrace can do?
This is an old question, but for anyone needing to do this I'll give an answer. I'm not going to go through the usual ways of tracking down a kb shortcut that is going bad, but you will have to make sure you do not have it set in system services, keyboard maestro, quicksilver and all of those apps that allow kb customization. Check this first. If you don't have a lot of kb shortcuts set through sys preferences, you might want to consider just deleting your plist file and letting the system default back to a fresh state. search for com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist and delete this. If this doesn't solve your issue or you don't want to delete the plist then run dtrace's iosnoop command from terminal. This will just dump everything going on. Hit the key and ⌃ c to stop the output and inspect the output. You could output this to a text file and do some grep magic on it, but this should be enough to head in the right direction.
I want to get Keyboard Input on OSX using c++ without using Cocoa, deprecated Carbon UPP handlers and if possible without using IOHID since that's alot of extra work.
I allready implemented a simple mouse class using quartz event taps and it works like a charm and now I'd like to use them to implement a keyboard class. Anyways as the reference states under CGEventTapCreate:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Carbon/Reference/QuartzEventServicesRef/Reference/reference.html
you can only access key events if one of the following is true:
The current process is running as the root user.
Access for assistive devices is enabled. In Mac OS X v10.4, you can
enable this feature using System Preferences, Universal Access
panel, Keyboard view.
that is a very serious limitation since I also want my application to work without any weird settings. Is there any way to work around this? If not, is there any alternative to using Taps in Carbon?
Thanks!
The easiest way is to use the semi-deprecated Carbon function RegisterEventHotKey, see this SO Q&A, for example.
If not, you need to live with that restriction. The restriction is there to prevent a bad person to install keylogger behind the scenes. You need to ask the user to open the preferences, type the admin password etc.
You could try to use AXMakeProcessTrusted. This is supposed to be the same as Access for assistive devices on a per process basis.