CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphoneobjective-cxcodemacos
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Reputation: 8718

Find focus in OS X

Is it possible to create an app for the mac (and iphone afterwards) that does something when it detects that the focus is on a certain object in the screen?

Meaning, the program runs in the background, and when it detects that the focus (or cursor) is on an edit box, it will run something.

Hopefully I made myself clear! Thanks!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 98

Answers (2)

omz
omz

Reputation: 53561

On the iPhone, you can only detect focus within your own app, there's no way to observe other apps from the background.

On the Mac, as 0x90 noted, the closest you'll get are the Accessibility APIs. The UIElementInspector sample code may help you to get started.

Upvotes: 2

0x90
0x90

Reputation: 6279

You can do this on the mac by using the Accessibility Framework.

Note that users will have to manually enable assistive devices and you will not be able to distribute your app on the Mac App Store due to Apple's soon-to-be-implemented sandboxing restriction.

On iOS, you can detect focus to certain but not all elements using specialized delegate methods such as textViewDidBeginEditing:. That said, as users use taps to navigate iOS apps most of the time, simple tap handling seems like a much better approach.

Upvotes: 2

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