How to write a Finder plugin in Snow Leopard

Question

Wherever I look, I see that writing the Finder plugin in Snow Leopard is much easier than writing in Leopard. Can someone point me to some kind of tutorial or simple example code that I can download?

I am trying to write a right-click menu item to the client for the Finder.

Answer 1

There is no official or supported plugin system for Finder. Starting with OS X 10.6, you will need to enter the code into the Finder process and override the C object methods in the Finder process.

I did this for a proprietary project. I can tell you that the reason there are no examples or tutorials for this is because it is a complex and time-consuming development task. For this reason, there are many incentives for individuals or organizations that have achieved this in order to carefully monitor the specifics of their process.

If you can achieve your goal at all using the services API, do it. Writing the Finder plugin will take 1-2 solid months of painstaking development and a reasonable in-depth knowledge of the internal and internal components of Objective-C.

If you are still sure you want to do this, take mach_star . Good luck.

Answer 2

If by plug-in you mean the context menu, you can do this through the services API.

Hope this helps.

PC

Answer 3

Now Apple requires that you write Service instead of the Finder plugin. . Therefore, it is much more difficult for you now than before. In fact, plugin support in the context menu has been removed from 64-bit applications (by default, this is Finder by default). Even if the context menu plugin is 64-bit, the application will not load it. However, advanced services are displayed as context menu items, so this should allow you to implement the same set of functions that you are looking for.

See the answers to this question for more information on how to write services in Snow Leopard.

Answer 4

Dropbox and Safesync have a Finder plugin for displaying context menus and overlay icons. I'm not sure how Dropbox did, but for Safesync you can find the package located in / Library / Application Support / SIMBL / Plugins. Therefore SIMBL can help.

Answer 5

This question exists for a while, but I know that people are still looking here for a complete solution for the Finder icon badges and context menus in Lion and Mountain Lion using the swizzling method.

Liferay Nativity provides a set of scripts that will select the appropriate Finder methods and the Java client to customize the icons and context menus. It also includes equivalent projects for Windows and Linux.

I hope this saves you 1-2 solid months of painstaking development described by Anthony. :)

The project is open source under the LGPL, so feel free to make any corrections or improvements to the bugs!