macos : list windows and detect new windows

Question

Hello,

I would like to have a list of windows which is quite simple but I need as well to :

• be notified when a new window appears

• be notified when an existing window dissapears

• detect when positon / size of windows change

Do you have any ideas for this?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The Son of Grab sample provides code to list windows.
You could poll CGWindowListCreate() timer based, but I suppose there are more elegant solutions.

Maybe you can use NSDistributedNotificationCenter to get global NSWindow Notifications. (Did not try that myself - just a starting point)

Answer 2

The answer in this post should be quite helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/853833/how-can-my-app-detect-a-change-to-another-apps-window

If you want to just get windows for your own application you can use

int pid = [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] processIdentifier];

Using this information, you could write a class that monitors this information and posts changes to a NSNotificationCenter or calls methods on its delegate.