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macoscocoaaccessibilityaxuielement

Get application names running in Mac OS using AXUIElement in cocoa app

I am using AXUIElement to find out all running application in Mac OS. Using it, when I move mouse I get all application names when mouse over any application.

But I want to filter out the applications which user has selected and have done any interaction in it. I am getting parameters such as AXFocused, AXEnabled, AXSelected, but those parameters don't return true every time the application get selected.

"\nAttributes:\n AXFocused (W): “0”\n AXLayoutCount: “24”\n AXTitle: “”\n AXPreventKeyboardDOMEventDispatch (W): “0”\n AXElementBusy: “0”\n AXPosition: “x=1260 y=219”\n AXLinkedUIElements: “”\n AXSelected: “0”\n AXLanguage: “”\n AXStartTextMarker: “{length = 40, bytes = 0x060000000000000048730e6205000000 ... 0100000000000000}”\n AXEnabled: “1”\n AXLoaded: “1”\n AXVisited: “0”\n AXDOMIdentifier: “”\n AXHelp: “”\n AXLinkUIElements: “”\n AXChildren: “”\n AXRole: “AXWebArea”\n AXParent: “”\n AXSelectedTextMarkerRange (W): “{startMarker:{length = 40, bytes = 0x1300000000000000a853046205000000 ... 0100000000000000} endMarker:{length = 40, bytes = 0x1300000000000000a853046205000000 ... 0100000000000000}}”\n AXTopLevelUIElement: “”\n AXDOMClassList: “”\n AXDescription: “MacRumors Newsletter”\n AXURL: “x-webdoc://21082B85-5712-4B41-9669-1BF2A39AA32D”\n AXCaretBrowsingEnabled (W): “0”\n AXValue: “”\n AXBlockQuoteLevel: “0”\n AXRoleDescription: “HTML content”\n AXSize: “w=785 h=3416”\n AXLoadingProgress: “1”\n AXWindow: “”\n AXEndTextMarker: “{length = 40, bytes = 0x35010000000000007042fe6505000000 ... 0100000000000000}”\n AXFrame: “x=1260 y=219 w=785 h=3416”\n\nActions:\n AXShowMenu - show menu\n AXScrollToVisible - AXScrollToVisible\n"

For example above is of, when I opened "Mail".

so my questions are : 1) is it possible to filter out application which user has selected not just mouse over it? 2) is there any other way I could find out which application user was interacting with before accessing my app?

Solution

  • Finally got the solution.

    We can get any other app running in Mac when that app gets active using NSWorkSpace.

    Check out this answer, which helped me in finding the solution. How to retrieve the OSX application that currently receives key events