Extracting information from a MAC OS X application

In short: Contact the developer of the application, but don't get your hopes up.

Unfortunately, in this day and age of protected memory and whatnot, we more or less have to be content with what the applications give us to work with.

However: You are not entirely without recourse. Using F-Script you might be able to attach to the process and cause some controller or other to emit notifications that you can capture and log.

Edit: If, as appears to be the case, it's a Carbon application, you are well and truly hosed:

F-script and similar is unlikely to be possible.
Even if it is, trying injection on a Carbon app, that is to say, a C++ app, is likely to be an exercise in futility and disappointment, if not completely impossible.
Seeing as how Carbon is deprecated (and how!), the application is unlikely to be updated with a proper API for that sort of thing.
All of the above.

Reedit: One tiny little aber; it is possible, although unlikely, that you can achieve something using Interface Scripting, but again; I wouldn't get my hopes up.

Or is accessible and can thereby be mined using the Accessibility API.

Peter Hosey 2010-09-16 21:10:04

@Peter: good point, although I'm not sure how many apps are likely to fall into this category.

Paul R 2010-09-17 13:17:38

Hello :-) Thanks for your answers. I have tried to use F-script and imlib to study and inject code but it turns out the application is not a cocoa application, is a carbon application. Any ideas? :) Thank you very very much.

flaab 2010-09-19 16:59:37

I will have a look into the accesibility API! What can it do for me? Thank you!

flaab 2010-09-19 17:00:44

Thanks for your answers. I have tried to use F-script and imlib to study and inject code but it turns out the application is not a cocoa application, is a carbon application. Any ideas? :) Thank you very very much.

flaab 2010-09-19 17:00:26

Yeah, see updated answer.

Williham Totland 2010-09-19 20:23:53

Hello :-) I've tried to replace some C functions useing LD_PRELOAD and dlsym library for dinamic linking. It worked well under linux for other applicattion but it does not seem to work for this app. Mac OS X uses another preload directive and GCC fails to compile it under mac. The code is here next:

flaab 2010-09-25 16:30:17

#define _GNU_SOURCE#include <stdint.h>#include <stdio.h>#include <string.h>#include <stdarg.h>#include <dlfcn.h>/** * Interponemos nuestra funcion open * * @param char* filename * @param int flags **/int open(char * filename, int flags){ static int (*real_open)(char*, int) = NULL; if (!real_open) real_open = dlsym(RTLD_NEXT, "open"); // Entero int p = real_open(filename, flags); fprintf(stderr, "Abrimos %s) = %i\n", filename, flags); // Devolvemos return p;}

flaab 2010-09-25 16:32:09

That worked under linux but gcc won't compile it under mac and preload does not work!

flaab 2010-09-25 16:33:50

ansaurus

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Extracting information from a MAC OS X application

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