<< shiftedbits

Leopard brings new APIs at the CoreGraphics layer to gather information about windows on the system. These functions let you find windows relative to a known window, find all windows on the system, including those offscreen, and obtain images of one or more windows as composited by the Window Server.

However, these API’s have an interesting peculiarity: when the documentation says “a CFArray of CGWindowID values” they mean a CFArray of uint32s, not CFNumbers as programmers familiar with CoreFoundation might expect. This holds true for the CGWindowListCreate(), CGWindowListCreateDescriptionFromArray(), and CGWindowListCreateImageFromArray functions, but the two functions that return window information (CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo() and CGWindowListCreateDescriptionFromArray()) wrap all numeric values in CFNumbers.

To create such an array, you’ll have to create it with CFArrayCreateMutable(), such as the following:

/* Make an array with no callbacks */
CFMutableArrayRef windows = CFArrayCreateMutable(kCFAllocatorDefault, 0, NULL);

/* myWindow is a NSWindow */
CFArrayAppendValue(windows, (void *)[myWindow windowNumber]);

To get the CGWindowID of a NSWindow, you’ll want to use -[NSWindow windowNumber]. Even though the documentation specifies that this isn’t the same number as assigned by the WindowServer, it turns out that it works fine with the CGWindow* APIs.

The Time Machine application, when in the dock, enables access to functions for showing Time Machine, backing up now, stopping an existing backup, browsing other Time Machine disks and showing Time Machine preferences. If you’re like me, you’d like access to these features without the app in the dock; unfortunately, you can’t — by default.

I’ve done a bit of digging and was able to implement all but one of these features in a menu extra. Download it and the source here.

And yes, the menu icon doesn’t scale nicely :)