How to gather some basic info (front-most app and title)

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Tim Bunce - 16 Nov 2006 22:32 GMT

Hello.

I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction to get me started...

I want to write a perl script that can gather the following simple info:

    Has the screen blanker blanked the screen?
    What's the front-most application?
    What's it's window title?

I've been using a mac for a couple of years now but never needed to do
any mac-specific development. Mac-Glue and Mac-Carbon distributions
look wonderful (thanks Chris!) but somewhat daunting to the OSX novice.

I'm sure it's trivial. Hopefully someone can show me just how trivial ;-)

Tim.

p.s. I'm planning to implement a little script that'll log the info at
regular intervals and, from time to time, dump it into a SQLite db.
Another script will extract and summarize the info - including
determining what 'project' was being worked on - and report summary info
aggregated in various ways.

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Tim Bunce - 21 Nov 2006 22:48 GMT

> Hello.
>
[quoted text clipped - 19 lines]
> determining what 'project' was being worked on - and report summary info
> aggregated in various ways.

FYI here's what I've put together so far from fragments of info gathered
from AppleScript docs and web:

    set win_name to ""
    tell application "System Events"
    set app_name to name of the first process whose frontmost is true
    -- is "ScreenSaverEngine" if screen saver is running
    -- is "SecurityAgent" if prompting for a password to unlock
    end tell

    try
    tell application app_name
        set win_count to count of windows
        if (win_count is greater than 0) then
        set win_name to name of window 1
        end if
    end tell
    end try

Tim.

Reply to this Message

Chris Nandor - 19 Jan 2007 03:08 GMT

Tim, sorry, I missed this post before. I don't read the list too often
(through an RSS reader, and I've been neglecting most of what's in there
lately!).

Here's some code that will do what your AppleScript does:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Mac::Glue ':all';

my $sysevt = new Mac::Glue 'System Events';
my $app_name = $sysevt->prop(
name => item => 1,
application_process => whose(frontmost => equals => 1)
)->get;

my $app_glue = new Mac::Glue $app_name;
my $window_name = $app_glue->prop(name => window => 1)->get;

As you can tell, that's basically what you were already doing.

There's actually a script I wrote called "happening" that was covered a bit
in an O'Reilly Mac OS X Hacks book. Unfortunately, the Mac::Glue version
will only work for getting the frontmost window for applications where
you've already created a glue for it (with `gluemac` on the command line).
The script runs in the background and sets my iChat status to my app and its
frontmost window, if I want it to. Does lots of other similar things too,
like looking at what I am listening to or watching.

http://dev.macperl.org/files/scripts/happening

Cheers,

--Chris

In article
<20061121224835.GA5239@ip-192-168-1-101.internal.terminal.newtec.be>,

> > Hello.
> >
[quoted text clipped - 40 lines]
>
> Tim.

Signature

Chris Nandor pudge@pobox.com http://pudge.net/
Open Source Technology Group pudge@ostg.com http://ostg.com/

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Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / January 2007

How to gather some basic info (front-most app and title)