Some experiments with PyObjC and the Mac OSX SyncServices engine
I haven’t developed any software that interacts with OSX before the last couple of days. I have to say the experience has been interesting. I’m really impressed with the usability of the interface builder as well as the power of the .NIB file. I hadn’t realized it was much more than just a description of the application layout.
The main reason I’ve never ventured into programming for OSX is Objective-c. Don’t know it, not sure if I want to know more than I’ve learned in the last couple of days. I had an idea of a project to leverage the SyncServices engine though - so I took the plunge. Into PyObjC that is. (I would have liked to use RubyCocoa but it doesn’t look nearly as fully baked).
Progress was slow at first; I had to at least learn to read Objective-C so that I could understand the docs and the example sync applications. Now that I’ve figured out some of the issues I’ve encountered I’m much more confident - if nothing else now I know what I don’t know. I have to say I’m really impressed with the power of PyObjc. It’s been really great for interactively groping my way through the SyncServices apis.
My first task was to get a feel for the apis by doing a read-only (pull) sync of the stickies saved in Apple’s Stickie’s Example. The code that does that is here. There’s currently no sample python code for the SyncServices module available, so I should hand this off to the pyobjc folks (If they’ll take my painfully un-idiomatic python) once I flesh it out some more.
October 30th, 2006 at 9:55 pm
[...] I’ve continued my earlier efforts to learn the SyncServices API and their use from Python using PyObjC and am pleased to share this example script. (I’ve also submitted it to the PyObjC project). The example code interacts with Apple’s Simple Stickies example. The script performs a full “truth” retrieval, registers an alert handler to join sync sessions, adds a new sticky, then waits to handle any sync events. [...]