Is there any way to make resource forks uncopyable? In particular I'm setting a custom badge icon to the files contained in a specific directory through NSWorkspace via – setIcon:forFile:options: and I'd like those badges to be lost as soon as the files gets copied outside the folder.
AFAIK there is no easy/standard way to make that happen...
IF the filesystems we are talking about are based locally on the the Mac itself then you can achieve what you want by implementing a daemon (running with high priviliges). This daemon basically integrates itself into the OS (via both FSEvent and kqueue) - this way it can monitor any file activity and act accordingly (remove the badge or similar).
For some source on how to build such a mechanism you can check this and this and this too.
IF you want to achieve this server-side there are several mechanisms - but they solely depend on the server technology (an notification and/or hooking mechanism).
Related
Currently I am working on the development of CATIA by C++ and Automation Interface. Everything is based on local environment of every client machine. After updating our program, clients have to deploy it manually after receiving the updated one.
We are considering if there is a way we could put our program on the server, and we assign the authorizations to the specific clients to access it. They still need install CATIA in their local machine, but our customization programs are on the website.
Our program is based on COM component, so this is a priority.
Any feasible idea?
Thanks in advance.
I'm developing programs for Catia too (VB .NET) and there might be a solution to use webbrowser to manage the programs but I'm unable to help with that :)
Instead what I use is selfdeveloped feature which updates the tools exe files on client from network storage or FTP.
Think of it as algorithm which searches certain folders or storage and decides if the program should update itself and lets the user know. Then you run the updater which is not part of the tool (separate program) and he make the changes on the main exe (copy files, config, remove add etc.)
This way you don't have to take care of the deployment and the user only clicks the update. That's it :)
I am creating a plug-in in Objective-C to a third-party macOS app. I want to register and handle url scheme (like myscheme://somedatahere) and file types - for example, when a user double click on a file our plug-in should be notified.
As my product is just a plug-in to a third-party app, the code has no access to the app's NSApplication instance nor to its events. As such, I need to create a helper app and bundle it inside the plug-in bundle/package to register and handle that. Please let me know if these presumptions are incorrect.
The plug-in bundle is being installed inside the Library/Application Support (the user typically downloads the plug-in into the Downloads folder, double click it and then the host app's handler copies the plug-in into the Application Support folder). The app handling urls and file types will be placed inside the plug-in bundle. The location was chosen by the host app.
I have several uncertainties I failed to find answers for:
How does the macOS finds apps capable of handling a particular url scheme and file types?
Does macOS finds it somewhat automatically or should I call something?
If it is found automatically, will it work even if the app is located inside a plug-in package outside of the Applications directory?
You can find the answers you are looking for the in the Launch Services documentation.
If you check the section "Application Registration", you will see that:
A built-in background tool, run whenever the system is booted or a new user logs in, automatically searches the Applications folders in the system, network, local, and user domains and registers any new applications it finds there.
The Finder automatically registers all applications as it becomes aware of them, such as when they are dragged onto the user’s disk or when the user navigates to a folder containing them.
So, if your helper app is installed into /Library/Application Support by the user manually dragging-and-dropping, it looks like Launch Services will see it and register the URL scheme.
Otherwise, the documentation continues to cover the manual case:
In spite of these automatic registration utilities, it may sometimes be necessary to register an application explicitly with Launch Services. For example, although developers are encouraged to package their applications so that they can be installed by simply dragging them onto the user’s disk, some applications may require more elaborate custom installer software. In such cases, the installer should call one of the Launch Services registration functions LSRegisterFSRef or LSRegisterURL to register the application explicitly.
I have created an application that exposes a OSX service for certain file by adding an NSService entry into my applications info.plist (as in http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/learn/), but I find that upon installing my application on a new machine the service doesn't show up quickly in the finder right click context menu.
I know that this is because pasteboard services hasn't re-indexed the /Applications folder and "discovered" the newly installed service.
I also know that I can force a re-index and discovery by manually running /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs.
The question here is what is the best way to ensure that my service shows up as quickly as possible for users who are installing my application for the first time.
I could execute a system call to "/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs" when my application starts up --If the user immediately starts my application--, but that only partly solves the problem (in addition I wonder if there is a better Cocoa API based way of doing this).
If my application is generally only accessed via the context menu, a user will never think to go out and start the application in the first place. They will only think it is broken when the context menu isn't there.
I am not distributing my application with an installer. I am simply providing a bundle that can be dragged and dropped into /Applications (as I believe Apple usually suggests).
Is there a way to expedite the process of service discovery when doing an installation in this fashion, so that there isn't any period of time where the user is without the newly installed service?
As a side note, it appears that the problem may not exist in 10.8 (or at least be as pronounced). Apple may have made this indexing happen more quickly in their most recent release.
I've actually ended up using
system("killall pbs;/System/Library/CoreServices/pbs -flush");
in one of my apps, just as you describe, though it's a long time ago, when 10.5 was in question as well.
You might want to try this function, however:
void NSUpdateDynamicServices(void)
which according to the documentation acts just like flushing pbs, but is a cleaner solution.
Also, if (according to your description), the app is nothing but a service, consider making it a really just a service - see (Installing the Service)
To build a standalone service, use the extension .service and store it in Library/Services.
I set up my old laptop as a media server and created a mac application in AppleScript that would remotely restart or shutdown the mac depending on which button was pressed, using this code:
tell application "Finder" of machine "eppc://USERNAME:PASSWORD#MYSERVER"
shut down
end tell
It's super simple, and was easy to write, but now I want to create an iPad app that can accompany the mac one. Ideally, I'd like to use AppleScript as, like I said, it's very simple, but I feel like that's not an option.
What are some other ways to do this? Where I would click a button, then it would connect to my mac and either shutdown or restart.
I feel like the best way would be to use SSH, and right now I'm looking at https://github.com/x2on/libssh2-for-iOS. Any other ideas?
Okay, just to brainstorm.... Dropbox is a great way to share content among machines, but it's also a pretty darn decent communication mechanism.
I use Dropbox to fire up (legal only!) bittorrent downloads on my home machine by setting up my torrent client to watch a dropbox folder for incoming .torrent files. I can then save .torrents into that directory on any machine I have Dropbox on, or in principle from a browser on my iOS devices that could share to Dropbox, and ta-da, instant remote kickoff. I can sit on another machine, save a .torrent to that directory, watch its file extension change to .torrent.imported, and know that when I get back to my main machine, that thing will be downloaded.
You could use folder actions or a cron job to watch a certain Dropbox folder for commands, and then put files into that folder that trigger those scripts to perform certain behaviors. Dropbox has a very nice iOS client library, making it totally possible to store stuff to Dropbox from a custom app.
Okay so I want to make an application that launches other applications. However, the goal here is to make the app "portable" in that I can go from one windows desktop to another while using the same application from a usb drive. So here is a different rundown of what I mean:
I have aplication X. I use it on machine 1 and I want to use it on machine 2. However, machine 2 is my buddy's and he does not want me installing things on it. So, I take all the files that the installer made on my system, and put them into folders. App X put files in the windows folder that it expects when it is launched. If I merely run the the app and it looks in the windows dir it will not find the files. I do not have/want the ability to put files in the windows dir. I want to tell the app to look in folder a for files in folder b instead of where it would normally look. I could then use this program on any machine without having to modify the machine in any way.
Is this doable? If so what is it called so I can look it up?
EDIT: the win dir was an example. I would like the app to be self contained in a folder on the thumb drive. I want to redirect the where the app looks for files to a folder I specify.
This can be done, but how easily depends entirely on the program that you are launching.
The sorts of things that applications will do are:
Just run happily being executed anywhere (no dependencies). These are very easy!
Require some environment variables to be set up. This is easy to do - you can launch a new process with a modified environment if you wish.
Read files from disk. Usually when loading things like .dlls, applications will search on the PATH for the dlls, so they can be copied into the application folder (next to the .exe) and it will run happily on any system. However, in some cases applications will use fixed (or at least, less flexible) paths so that they will be harder to launch successfully.
Read registry settings. This is trickier. You need to know what state is required by the application, have your launcher record the old registry state, change it and run the application, then wait for application exit to restore the original state. This has to be bullet-proof to avoid corruption of the user's registry.
Ultimately you'll need to investigate, for each app you want to launch, just what it needs to run.
If the apps are commercial, then be careful that you are not breaking any licensing (EULA) terms by running them in this way.
Another alternative would be to set up a virtual PC image and simply execute that on the host PC so there is no need to worry about any special cases for each application. Depending on the VPC software you have available you may need to install software on the host PC to allow a virtual PC session to be run though, which may defeat the purpose/intent.
I think the system you describe is U3 (more info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3). It requires the application to follow the U3 protocol, but if the application does, then it can be run off of a U3 flash drive without any install or admin permissions required on the host machine.
It's a proprietary technology, and supported by only a few vendors that I've seen.
If you really want portability and power, consider VMWare Player, and carry and entire machine, customized to your needs, on the flash drive. Of course, your friend would probably have to allow you to install VMWare Player.