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pedz

pedz

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I'm looking for suggestions on where to go for the nicest documentation on the internal workings for the Macintosh. I'm a Unix programmer of many years so I know about that area. The places I'm lost of things like how the Finder launches applications. What kind of goodies can be inside the application's directory to tell the Finder about which icons to use, which file suffixes the application knows about, etc.
 
Hi,

I've done that a while back. I need to go back and see what documenation is there. I was not sure (can't recall) if the documentation is available to the free developer members.

Thanks.

Any other suggestions would be most welcome.
 
Icons and file-associations on a Macintosh are controlled (largely) through the resource fork associated with that file.

OS X applications, as you probably know, are really just folders, and their Info.plist tells the OS what to set its icon to.

Not entirely sure on which daemons or whatever the Finder uses to launch things, but I would imagine it's System Events (based on the fact that it's the easiest way for an AppleScript to open a file or URL in the default program for that filetype or the internet).
 
Thanks guys.

I found two PDF's about the finder but I have not read them yet. I got distracted reading about dynamically loaded libraries. The "level" of the documentation seems nice. Not too verbose but still easy reading.
 
I thought I'd post this. It turns out that all the documentation is local. Look in

file:///Developer/ADC%20Reference%20Library/referencelibrary/index.html
 
You can open GUI programs from the CLI by using the "open -a path/to/program". You only have to point to the base folder (usually in /Applications), not the actual executable inside the bundle. If you do navigate directly to the executable file you can launch it like any other file "./executable". At least this is what I remember offhand. I'm on my Windows machine at work so I can't verify at the moment.
 
Yep. Little do people know you can have multiple instances of the same program open by launching via the Terminal the executable inside the Contents/MacOS directory.
 
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