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copied!<p>I'm developing an commercial application that does exactly what you describe and I've been messing with different ways of doing this for over a year now. I'm a newbie developer, so I'm totally open to the idea that there may be a much better way of doing it than my way, but it seems to be stable and work.</p> <p><strong>I use Apple Script</strong></p> <p>I get the path of the active document every 3 seconds, but if the active application is the Finder, I get the path of the active window. I do this using Apple Script as described by the accepted answer.</p> <p><strong>Getting Window List using Carbon</strong></p> <p>To get the window list of all processes to get the window ID (something Apple Script can't do), I use CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo as detailed in this question:</p> <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/311956/getting-a-unique-id-for-a-window-of-another-application">Getting a unique ID for a window of another application</a></p> <p>This presents me an array with all the windows of all processes ordered by which is frontmost. So all I need to do is pluck the first entry from the array. This can also be used to get a screengrab of the front window, if that's helpful to you, as shown in the Son of Grab sample application, which has been invaluable to me as a working example.</p> <p><strong>Sending Apple Script from Cocoa</strong></p> <p>When it comes to Apple Script, I've experimented with all 3 that Jim suggests and my conclusion is that each has it's issues, both in terms of stability and flexibility.</p> <ol> <li><p>Apple Event Manager relies on you sending raw Apple Events. For me, this was too much like hard work and too low level.</p></li> <li><p>Using NSAppleScript I found to be slow and error prone. It's also pretty clumsy when you want to send a whole variety of Apple Script messages as I do.</p></li> <li><p>When reading about Scripting Bridge, I got very excited, only to try it out and be very disappointed. For the attributes of the windows I was trying to grab, it didn't even recognise them as existing. It seemed to me to be buggy and weird. I expect if the commands you're sending are supported by SB, it would be the best option.</p></li> </ol> <p><strong>A Fourth Option</strong></p> <p>I now rely on a fabulous Objective C wrapper around Apple Script called <a href="http://appscript.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow noreferrer">AppScript</a>. It's been around for many, many years, it's stable, the developer is great and most of all it just works. </p> <p>It has rock solid methods which allow you to send Apple Script and it'll even return errors for you neatly without a whole load of potentially buggy and messy code needing to check for them. </p> <p>I've been using it for a year now with no problems. If you have any other questions about how to do this, please don't hesitate to comment and I'll try my best to answer them.</p>

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