Traversing windows with Cocoa

FROM : aldo kurnia
DATE : Mon Mar 03 22:10:24 2008

Hi everyone,
I'm relatively new to Mac development and would love to have any suggestion to the problem I'm facing. I've tried searching for a solution some weeks now, and still nothing really useful. Anyway, this is what I'm trying to do:

Given a window's TITLE, how do you create a reference to it, determine what kind of application the window is (the name of the application/executable)? and how do you move that window to the front?

For example, if I have a Safari window with the title "My Website", how do find the window, make a reference to it, check what kind of application this is (the answer is Safari) and then bring it to the front?

I tried using Carbon's Window Manager, but it wasn't able to see system-wide
windows. Applescript is also not very useful since the application I'm trying to support doesn't support some of the basic window scripts.

So, I looked at Accessiblity API and NSApplication looks somewhat promising because it can give out its NSWindow children reference and there are functions to activate them. One missing piece of the puzzle though, is that I couldn't find any way to get a list of system-wide processes and create a NSApplication reference to them. Does anyone has any idea about this?

Thank you!

     
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